Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Previous posts here.)

Well. I never thought I’d say this about what is in some senses a bare-bones Adventure spin-off where the only real verbs are LOCK, UNLOCK, DROP, TAKE, DIG, and THROW, but the ending sequence of this is completely badass.

In fact, I’ve got a soundtrack to play while reading once we hit the appropriate moment.

From Stardot.

Let’s tackle the pyramid first. Part of my issue was a misunderstanding of the game’s (admittedly sparse) feedback system. I got the impression the “you are thirsty” messages in the desert started a little later if you had water with you, so the water was being drunk automatically. This is not the case.

I’ll tell you right now this is enough to get up to and inside the pyramid, but you’ll die on the way out unless you take a quick trip to a “dry water hole” that’s also near. The spade comes in handy:

With some extra refreshment for the walk back, we can plunge into the pyramid itself.

No trick here, just don’t go southeast.

After two straightforward levels clearly meaning to match the geography of the pyramid, you get into a room with panels you need to push.

Remember those symbols from the torn paper? This is where they come into play.

I confess I solved the puzzle, and then back-solved the clue’s relation. The game needs a five letter sequence. I got lucky and picked A as my first letter, then quickly found by just doing brute force that B needed to be the second letter and D the third. Giving it some thought I assumed sequence going on (1, 2, 4, 7, 11, etc.) with +1, +2, +3, +4 and so forth so I put G and then K as the letters and got through.

What happened is that the symbols are Zodiac signs, and they correspond to the first, second, fourth, and seventh months of the typical sequence (in letters, A, B, D, G). You’re still supposed to spot the sequence for the 5th letter so I guess I didn’t bypass the intended solution by too much.

The rest of the pyramid is a maze, and then a seal by a sleeping guard. I assume there is some thing that will cause the guard to wake up and kill you (the bird?) but I just grabbed the seal safely and left. The big trick is the water on the way back, and like the diamonds, this time you don’t get a chase from stealing the treasure.

Having resolved the pyramid I was able to deal with the dogs (as from my last post) using the side-route in the forest to evade them.

Then came the mace, which despite my glib dismissal last time, turned out — for purposes of escape — to be the most interesting treasure of all.

Now is when to cue the music.

So you can safely go into the mace-maze and grab the mace without trouble. However, as soon as you step out of the maze, the guard you stole from is awake.

If you try to make a run for it you won’t make it. The guard gets you at the exit to the coal mine. However, keep in mind we had deactivated the dangerous-gas-cleaning mechanism by removing a wrench. There’s nothing stopping us from throwing the wrench back in.

Now, when we leave the mine, the whole thing blows up, including the guard chasing us, and we snatch our sunglasses mid-air and walk slowly away.

We still have the room of many guards to deal with, but our pyromaniac journey has not ended. Our jug is now empty of drinking water and we can go fill up with brandy, then return to the vent above the room. The room is described as having many lamps, and, well:

This results in absolute chaos and a lot of ways to die.

The main thing to observe here — which you can see from the screenshot above — is that the main office has keyholes, on both sides. Before you even start the fire going you lock the west side. Then you still have time to go into the east side and grab a treasure from there.

But if you just try to run away then, the guards catch you, so you also lock that door upon leaving too, leaving the guards completely trapped and crispy.

This gives you all the treasures: gold, diamonds, ring, seal, and mace. The mace is oversized (I think the rest can be hidden in our clothes, but not the mace), so that guard in the tower I was worried about spots it.

Now we’re on the run (if you hang out at the tower, the guard straight kills you). So you make a beeline to the west, but as you reach the wooden bridge there are guards right behind you.

The … wooden bridge … can you guess what’s going to happen next?

Fortunately this doesn’t destroy the lamp and we can pick it up again and still use it as a life source. Still making a run for it, there’s no troll visible on the east side of the bridge so we go across to the west side and die.

Oops! This turned out to be pretty hard and I had to check for hints. The problem here is that the troll spots your mace if you have it, and decides to just kill you and take it rather than deal with asking for a paltry offering. So you cannot take the mace across the bridge. What to do?

Back near the very beginning, we found the jug at a “narrow dry canyon” that was blocked by rubble. It turns out on the east side of the canyon you can find the matching room that goes with above the same room!

Now after crossing the bridge we can just retrieve the mace from the other side. But the troll still wants a treasure.

That jug we’ve been carrying around smashes if we try to drop it. Now we want to drop it, because it makes crystals that the troll likes (fortunately for my momentum in the game, I had figured this out before this moment, the troll killing us because of the mace was the hard part).

With all five treasures we can finally arrive back home in victory.

OK you can stop the music if you want.

Yeah. Phew. That was some elaborate sequencing. The author really took the idea of “easy to get in, tough to get out” and managed to run with it. I find this game violated most of my general rules for complex puzzles. Namely, that without timer daemons or player status effects, they tend to require either hard-to-find verbs or things hidden in obscure ways. This game had neither, but rather had complex location effects.

That is, consider the moment where the guards are chasing at the wooden bridge. There’s technically no timer running. When you try to move on, the game checks if you’ve burned the bridge, and if not, it kills you. This almost plays a little bit like “drama time” (a game like Colonel’s Bequest where some events wait for you to be physically present before they happen) because the verb list is so short there isn’t strong motivation to hang around in a particular location, so it feels natural to have time move forward along with movement.

In the desert, where you’re thirsty, you can do as many commands within an individual room as you like without getting thirstier; it is only moving to another desert room that increases the thirst. (Other than the digging, it isn’t like the time is proportional. If you think about it, a lot of text adventures that have effect X trigger in five turns can be a little nonsensical, as running down a long hall is considered the same amount of time as examining five things.)

One other game design wrinkle is the use of a technique which is not recommended at all for a modern game, but nonetheless gets a unique effect. (See: the text version of Cranston Manor compared with the graphical one, where the maze-like town opening led to a much greater sense of place, but it was still an awful maze.) Here, there’s some “hidden effects” where the game is willing to silently check if you have a particular item. For example, the guard at the diamonds wakes up if you have the bird. The game doesn’t even tell you why the guard woke up, so it leads to a strong paranoia where you are thinking not only about what items you should be carrying but what items you should not be carrying. This adds a second combinatorial level of puzzle complexity, but — well, it really is also genuinely unfair.

The mace/troll puzzle at the end particularly hit this hard. The behavior of the troll changing was non-obvious enough I was concerned I had hit a genuine bug. On the other hand, it is a.) logical the troll would change behavior if they see you with the massive treasure and b.) logical they would just spring up on you unawares. Working this out the “normal” way requires a lateral leap that isn’t really achievable any other way. Yet, I would personally never include the puzzle as-is in a modern game design. (It also isn’t 100% clear from the geography that the canyon edge you throw the mace at is the same canyon on the other side, it would have been a better puzzle had the geography been rigorous enough — that is, where distances are clear and exact — to allow seeing this naturally.)

Despite all that (and the endless mazes) this ended up being one of my highlights of 1982, if nothing else for the technical high-wire act. The author C.J. Coombs was clearly running up against the edge of what was possible (with only enough space, for example, to casually describe a room of guards being set on fire in a few words) so I had extra anticipation seeing just how complex he could take things with such simple foundations.

Coming up next: Il est un peu plus de 21 heures, la nuit est noire … BONNE CHANCE!