Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I have finished. While this took three entries just like Temple of Bast, this wasn’t nearly in the same class in terms of complexity and difficulty. I was stumped early by lacking a verb (I was using MAKE rather than BUILD) and here it was even simpler.

Last time I left off a chest I was unable to unlock.

I had discovered a clue I missed before. The coin (normally just treasure) also had writing on it.

I hence took a long sidetrack trying to get the chest on fire (even though there weren’t any “burn” verbs that worked) with no luck. There’s a piece of wood from elsewhere (with the potential for a portable fire) but it seems to have no method for setting it ablaze.

It turns out the solution was much, much, simpler than I was thinking. The hint is meant to refer to the bowl of fruit on the top of the hearth, and you are supposed to EAT it.

To be fair, I was a little hesitant on chowing down on things after the bottle of acid from the start of the game. I do think I’m a little hesitant about random consumption in general; I’m used to the food from an adventure being fed to someone else, which happens 85% of the time (including in Original Adventure). That 15% of the time still exists where you are intended to just try eating something with no provocation other than to see what happens. (See also: the strength-giving berries in Katakombs where it took me abnormally long to just try them out.)

The keys unlock the chest giving a *piece of paper* (money, it’s just a treasure) but also work on the keyhole in the fountain.

This unlocked the last section of the game. There’s a maze, a small section with a bridge, and another maze.

The location you land from the trapdoor is marked in green.

Before the first maze, there’s a treasure which is also a trap.

The sign indicates to beware going south, which drops you down a bottomless pit (I imagine most players would know by now to take warnings seriously, but again this seems to be about narrative flavor more than anything tricky). The gold on the other hand had me stumped for a while because the standard for such treasure-gathering games is that asterisks always means a treasure must be taken with you.

The gold is entirely a red herring, even with the asterisks. You get a full score without it, and you cannot take the gold without dying.

To the east there’s a circular study with a book containing half of a clue.

IT SAYS:
THE ANSWER TO THE SECOND LEVEL IS…

After the maze…

…comes a “large cavern” with a pentacle, a slab, and double doors to the north.

The slab has writing you can’t read, and a crack with a gold medallion hidden in it. The pentacle has writing to tell you to sit inside for protection, which is useful for opening the doors.

From where the minotaur came you can get another treasure (a gold candelabra).

Just past that to the west is an area with a stream and a bridge…

…and there’s a keypad with numbers, where the game says you can PUNCH (number) to input something. There’s a also a raft at a stream that is blocked by some ropes.

Making further progress requires turning south, to the other maze.

At least the authors here have the excuse they could re-use the art from the maze rooms. Everything else has unique drawings.

There’s a pistol with an ivory handle at a bed (another treasure)…

…but also the second half of that clue from the book, written on a random sign in the maze.

IT SAYS: … VERY GROSS.

Putting it all together

THE ANSWER TO THE SECOND LEVEL IS VERY GROSS.

This all lines up to indicate that the keypad needs the number 144 (a gross, that is, a dozen dozen).

The bridge appears once the keypad number has been entered. On the other side, there’s a PEAR (which when examined, is actually a PAIR of scissors) and a roll of tape.

This was the last thing I found while playing, but it’s just LOOK BRIDGE while on the opposite side.

The scissors can free the raft from the ropes, and the tape is needed to be at hand in order to patch a hole.

There’s one more death that can happen here, if you’ve been keeping the BAG OF SAND the whole game, which so far, never was useful (and in fact, only serves as a trap).

THE ENORMOUS WEIGHT OF THE BAG OF SAND CAUSES THE LIGHT-WEIGHT RAFT TO SINK TO THE BOTTOM OF THE STREAM. YOU DROWN.

I avoided this during my game just because, weirdly, I had been experimenting with the other trap (the gold you can’t pick up) and had already dumped my inventory (thinking maybe you just needed to be holding nothing and the gold was carryable). I never bothered to pick the sand back up, so I got saved from one trap by another trap.

In the end, this was pretty straightforward and pleasant. I think the difficulty spike at the beginning was a little rude, even though you could resolve the fork issue by typing LOOK FORK; at the very least, there’s a callout of Subterranean Adventure in a Family Computing article circa 1983 that complains quite specifically about that puzzle. The deathtraps, despite showing with some regularity, were all “polite” in that they had some kind of signal. With that tunnel with the poison darts, for instance…

…if you LOOK TUNNEL before going in, the game tells you about the trap.

YOU DISCOVER THAT THERE ARE POISONED DARTS HIDDEN IN THE WALLS.

There are some games where this would just indicate a puzzle to be solved; some of getting in the “flow” was realizing what kind of game this was.

(Design-philosophical aside: for gamebooks especially I tend to mentally sort them into how much they reward thoughtful choice-making. That is, a book may have a left and a right lever to pull, and there is no clue at all which to pull, and you just have to guess — see my compaint on Forest of Doom. Or, it may be, as here, there will always be a signal for what the right choice is, so you can role-play to an extent someone who can’t fall back on a saved game and try to do the right choice the first time. This is a little more pleasant. There can be use to the effect of a “blind choice” but I do find if a game starts using blind choices I make later choices much more at random, even if the author sometimes provides hints for what’s the best option; I’ve lost my feeling of trust that my time won’t be wasted.)

I wish the authors had a further chance to establish an identity and work on more games, and at least they planned it. On the piece of wood (the one that doesn’t set on fire) the whole point of it is to serve as an ad. It has writing and you can READ WOOD:

The follow-up game never surfaced.

One last comments on the graphics: I’m not sure how much fresh analysis I really can do (since you’ve been seeing them along with me) but they’ve been genuinely pleasant. Compare with Asylum, which was entirely graphical, yes, but always felt like some “programmer art”; that is, it was made functional, enough to give a visual sense of the world, but never had the sort of pixel art one might take seriously as a real style. Here, on the other hand, there was clear effort at style and texture. The perspectives and directions don’t always make sense, but the authors threw themselves into thinking what the TRS-80 was really capable of (like the stylized trees from the start of the game or the wood panel texture shown below).