Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post here.)

There’s a confusing meta-feeling playing one of these ultra-minimalist games (where all that gets conveyed to indicate a single place is a word, like “LOCATION: SLOPE”). In book form, this would be atrocious. Somehow, the act of gameplay boosts the significance, like receiving a writing prompt and filling in the blanks, but rather than “writing” the spaces are colored in with the mental effort of playing. This is true even when there’s a lot of flailing at nothing. But what gets colored in isn’t plot, exactly (I’m not imagining my avatar try to lick, kiss, poke, and kick every single thing) but just tension. Feelings. Unrealized ideas for puzzle solutions.

To pick up from last time, I had a door with a doorbell that caused electrocution. Poking through my inventory with LOOK doesn’t reveal anything, but I eyeballed the verb list (reproduced above) and occurred to me the OLD BOOT I had might respond well to SHAKE. It did, having a key fall out, so I was able to unlock the door and go in.

This led to another item dump; a golden goblet that says MELT ME (referring to the crystal ball vision, no doubt), a sword, and a lamp.

The kitchen had a PANEL and it took me a lot of struggle with verbs like PUSH, OPEN, SLIDE, and so forth before I hit upon LIFT, which I am fairly sure is the only verb that works. It didn’t feel like solving something as much as–

–okay, here’s an analogy. Sometimes the old Fighting Fantasy books, with numbered sections, had a bit that asked a riddle. Since you can’t “type in” a word you are supposed to convert it to a number, so if you get the one correct riddle answer, you can move on, but because you’re staring at a static book it isn’t going to react otherwise.

Solving “puzzles” like “what verb to open a panel with” is like fighting the right section to jump to in a Fighting Fantasy book; no responsiveness until you’ve done the task, and the whole process can feel arbitrary.

Back to the action: going down further led to a SPIDER, a DEMON, and a PIT.

This sounds like it might be exciting! Engage the demon in combat, realize just the sword isn’t cutting, and enhance it by solving another puzzle before engaging again, or something like that. No, this is how the demon scene ran:

The spider was similarly pacifist:

No responsiveness to anything (including the obvious KILL and KICK), nor do they try to kill me back. At least you can jump down the pit and die, but that’s a little like “I hurt myself in order to feel alive”.

In normal circumstances I would have reached for hints already, but I want to re-iterate that this game was a massive pain to get emulated correctly. I have sunk investment.

However, at this point, I am totally happy to get hints from you, the readers, either in:

a.) speculation [again] what to do in normal text form

b.) hints telling me exactly what to do in ROT13 form, and feel free to plunder the BASIC code although there’s a walkthrough up at CASA so you might as well use that

One quick side note: the tree you can climb at the start to get a WALNUT you can also chop down. The chopping seems to serve no purpose.

I tried every single verb on my chart with no response. Maybe it is meant as a red herring.