Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Prior posts here.)

The line between “tight, difficult puzzle box” and “impossible puzzles” is fine enough that making a good difficult adventure is one of the tightest of high-wire acts in all of game design. Every puzzle — in the standard formulation at least — is bespoke and potentially a disaster. Combine that with the general lack of beta-testing in the early ’80s and a gem that remains super difficult is rare indeed.

So when Masquerade fell down hard near the end, well, at least I had sympathy. There were still some clever moments, though–

Map from the FM-77 version, via Mobygames.

–so to kick off the pain right away, let’s return to the popcorn I received by spending a dollar, and fed to the bird.

From this point I had softlocked. Now, it wasn’t the mere existence of softlocks that was a problem — I had ample forewarning and it is an intentional style — but rather, the popcorn had something concealed in it, which you can find if you SEARCH POPCORN.

I had mostly given up on SEARCH as a verb, as it only worked on the body beforehand, but also wouldn’t the bird leave the badge behind? Or at least it would be very obvious something went horribly wrong upon eating the large piece of metal?

With the badge I could breathe a bit easier, as I could a.) go in and out of the zoo freely and b.) get into the office, where as predicted, I could turn off the switch to the electric fence.

Inside the electric fence area I found a grate near some grass (more on that in a second)…

and a construction area.

There was a helmet back in the theater that served as protection (never mind it’s a safari helmet, not a construction one) and hence I was able to retrieve a hammer and some dynamite.

I also discovered by trying to juggle inventory in this area — and it will become important later — is that if you drop off some items, they will disappear as you see something furry run by.

The hammer does not pass through the electric fence, though (too big to carry) meaning it had more immediate use. Specifically, you can use it to smash open the grate.

(The magic button works too, but you need to keep one of the uses. Just as a reminder, it was used once to get in the trapdoor, but it hasn’t been used since; I used it to open a gorilla cage but that was speculative.)

This leads back down to the tunnels, which was interesting since I didn’t have anything in particular I needed to do down there.

The reason for a second visit (there’s going to be a third!) is to apply the hint from the note:

IF YOU’RE REALLY SHARP, YOU’LL TAKE A SHORT CUT AROUND THE BLOCK!

Specifically, now that the theater is open, the player has access to a RAZOR. And the razor can be taken back to the balsa block of wood in order to cut it.

I don’t think this is a terrible puzzle — the note is explicit about what to do — but it does mean from this point the elements of the game are best not thought of “realistically” (why would we get a note from the bad guys on how to defeat the bad guys)?

Moving on, what use does a toothpick have?

Picking a lock, with a wooden toothpick? Suuuuuuuure. (It’s easy after the fact to say “well just don’t think of it realistically, but coming up with the puzzle solution is required before doing it!)

I still had the weird mystery of the cage to work out. I did find out a new way to kill the gorilla by accident. I was messing around with the slot at Mr. Topp’s (to look for other potential objects that might cause a reaction) when I found out the bra had a curious message:

Some more experimentation revealed the message didn’t have to do with the slot at all, but rather having the rock also being held. With both rock and bra in hand either INSERT ROCK or INSERT BRA forms a makeshift sling, so SLING GORILLA because an alternate method of doing away with the animal.

…yet, I still didn’t know why I was doing this? And here I was truly and completely stuck and needed to check hints.

First off, I needed the bird for some other purpose other than scaring off; furthermore, I needed the snake for something so scaring it off was bad besides. What I had missed was SEARCH WEED or SEARCH GRASS or SEARCH FIELD north of the electric fence. No, that’s no explicitly a noun mentioned in the main text, unlike every other puzzle in the game, it’s a noun from the title of the room.

grrrrr

With the glove you can safely grab the rock and the snake.

With the bird in hand, you can then: go in the cage and get trapped, drop the bird who will fly out, get a match, and come back…

…and then drop the dynamite and light it causing a hole to appear.

This could have yielded to a “structural solving” moment insofar as there is nothing to do in the cage, therefore there must be something to do, so might as well try seeing if the bird will do something special that happens nowhere else. Mostly I was just grouchy. The puzzle after is kind of interesting but pulls yet another absurdity:

Specifically, there’s a rat with an earring, and an elevator just past. To deal with the rat, you drop off the snake…

…but the elevator is a little trickier. Assuming you picked the lock rather than used the magic button, there should be a magic button use left, but for some strange reason it “drains” if you walk by a generator. It is unclear that this is happening and I’ve never deciphered why.

The draining doesn’t even happen in this room, it is the room right after with the rat in it.

However, the upshot is that you are stuck if you’ve carried the button down here. Do you remember the furry stealing thing? That’s the rat. You’re supposed to drop the button off at the construction zone, and then somehow the rat can take it safely to the elevator without it being drained, and that means there will be a use left over that you can use on the elevator.

Believe it or not, we’re essentially at the end of the game. There are no new lingering threads. Everything from the zoo is taken care of, but what do we have that works on Mr. Topp? This is one of the puzzles I’m sure someone got by accident but I don’t know how you’d do it intentionally. You have to wear every wearable item in the game, all of them at once. This reaches your max inventory limit.

Then you go in to see Mr. Topp.

I’d definitely say the game vaulted over “difficult” into “just nonsense”. I always try to be careful using words like “moon logic”, which I think get over-used in the adventure community; it really is useful and helpful to distinguish between nonsense and just plain hard. I’m fine with something esoteric like the balsa wood toothpick, and at least there was a sort of halfway-sense to picking a lock with a toothpick. The endgame here was a case where the player is prompting to do something with no clues whatsoever. Just to be clear, with one item missing, all you see is the “imposter” message. There is no indication or comment on your clothing or the amount you’re wearing.

Before leaving here, some historical clarifications, thanks to A2Can:

Both the copies of the text game and the prototype-graphical game (which I have now) are from the founder of Phoenix Software himself, Ron Unrath. Despite my getting stuck on the text game (I still think there’s a way to get a key…) it might be “done”; the graphical version definitely is not. It isn’t “programmer art” then, it is sincerely intended as “temp art”.

Interestingly enough, the object art is in already, and seems to be identical to the final game. That means the pictures of objects are by Dale Johnson, not by Rick Incrocci!

If I had to rank the games so far, I’d put Palace in Thunderland on top, a genuinely solvable game that just happens to be enormously hard, followed by this game, with Mad Venture below. I certainly thought the atmosphere in Masquerade was fantastic, but having a couple nonsense puzzles was enough to ruin sticking the landing. While I’m describing things quickly, each moment of stuck-ness represents a long time of me struggling in the wrong direction.

We’ve got one Dale Johnson game left to go, although this one has him teamed up with yet another person, Dav Holle, and allegedly lightens up heavily on the difficulty. Sometimes an experienced author can produce their best work when they try to write something “easy” (at least, it baselines down to what a more modern game would be like, with less softlocking) so I’m definitely looking forward to that! But first we have another visit across the pond with a publisher we haven’t visited yet (which later published one of the most famous ZX Spectrum games ever made), followed by a return to Japan.