Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

One of my readers, LanHawk, managed to sleuth out a different copy of the game sans typos, which I have archived here. I also managed to finish, and my previous posts on this game are needed to understand this one.

CPC Magazine, #7, pages 56 and 57.

So, returning to the moment of busting open a padlock, which crashed the game last time, I somehow didn’t notice there was also a passage to the east that opened.

However, I ignored that in favor of being able to take the lamp, which I wasn’t able to get last time. If you turn on the lamp and walk by the large gate at the exit with the guard, the guard spots you in the night.

So you want to wait until passing the guard safely into a corridor, where previously nothing was visible, but if you turn on the lamp, you see a previously missed door.

“Trap door” suggests this goes up, but once you cut the chains (the cutting pliers from the truck work) the exit that opens up is north.

Heading north, you can then find a small paper with a combination on it. This is the combination that works back on the safe (the one that previously sounded an alarm). Opening the safe yields a master key.

The entire map. Light blue are the rooms I hadn’t seen last time.

This was the end of the road for the moment. It turns out I needed to do one more thing and I could technically escape, but I hadn’t fulfilled the quest yet anyway, which was still to find the prisoner who had the code to blow up the rockets.

Now it was time to go in the new eastern route, the one unlocked by breaking the padlock…

…and die by falling in the dark on a staircase, oops! (“You had a deadly fall on the dark staircase.”) The lamp needed to be on, allowing visiting the final section of the game, an area of 5 rooms.

Stables just north of the staircase. There’s some rings attached to the wall, a portcullis blocking on our way back south, and a …trough, I think?

The small area has a room with some wood (not useful) a church with a candle and a rope (really not useful, especially the rope which rings a bell alerting guards), an office (useful, there’s a message about RING 1)…

…and the prisoner. The prisoner is thirsty. You can use the can from the start area and fill it with water in the fountain to take care of the thirst. (You’re not softlocked if you haven’t done this before entering the trapped area, since you can get out via means I’ll show in a moment.)

The prisoner — O’Donnel from the intro — says he knows “le code secret”. I had demander as a verb, so the next step was:

Blithely blowing past thinking about which article I should use in the French.

Now we just need to get out! The hint about the ring gets applied back in the stable, where you can turn the correct ring. (I think this is randomly generated, by the way, on each new game.) This opens a secret passage back to the Inner Courtyard.

Escape now requires getting past the guard at the gate. Frustratingly, the “bonk with an iron bar” trick doesn’t work again. The game is unclear why one guard differs from the other in this respect.

I got very stuck and had to check the walkthrough. It turns out I missed, back where there was a “bureau metallique”, the proper way to open it. It isn’t done by referring to the object, but by referring to a drawer. While I’ve seen this before even in English for me this is kind of tough, you’re referring to a noun that is essentially implied by the text.

This reveals a dagger that can be used to murder the front gate guard. (If you “kill” the earlier guard, the game talks about you being silly and nonsense; if you “knock out” the other guard, the game also talks about you being silly and nonsense. The parser needed some lighter messages for turning down actions.)

With the guard dead you can bust your way out of the gate (using the master key) to freedom.

You have done proud service to the Allies obtaining the secret code of the Luftwaffe. You will be decorated upon return to London. Congratulations!

With the exception of the drawer issue and the guard inconsistency, this was genuinely a straightforward game, one that I’d more or less put at par at the Scott/Alexis Adams game Pirate Adventure in terms of difficulty. It’s dark, turn on a lamp. The guard spots you with the lamp on, turn it off. A safe combination goes to a safe a few rooms away; a secret passage opens following a message in the same area. I’m genuinely curious about the reaction of the people the author tested the game on. I think, really, it’s a matter of this being the only French text adventure at the time other than Bilingual Adventure. There just wasn’t enough example set for how to present this sort of thing, and the sheer conceptual load of needing to cut, take, turn on, turn off, read, etc. has always needed a bit of nurturing.

The parser is impressive but wobbly. It’s fine to not understand something the player types, but it needs to be transparent to them what happened; it is easy to get thrown for a loop by doing something that seems normal (opening a desk, as opposed to referring to the drawer) and then get blown off by the parser with a response like “Vous trouvez ca drole?” (“do you think this is funny?”)

Still, the parser managed quite well given there wasn’t really precedent in the language, but unfortunately the audience reaction caused the author to stop writing adventure games. This is his only one.

From CPC Magazine.

One more note, just to maybe brighten (?) things up. For some reason French games allow swearing as a very standard mechanic. Colditz starts this grand tradition early.

Aren’t you ashamed at being so rude?