Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and you can read all my posts in sequence starting here.

A map made by a fan that eventually was packaged with the game, via Stardot.

So from last time, I really had one key puzzle that caused nearly all the rest of the puzzles to fall down easily — we’re talking puzzles like, “bring cheese to a mouse” followed by “use the mouse to scare away an elephant”. Most of what remained was … well, I wouldn’t say “busywork”, exactly, but there was a lot of shuttling things back and forth, and there was one large maze left I that I just threw the towel in on and looked it up (see the upper right corner of the map above; it’s a very long desert maze leading to the Sphinx of the game). I do say “most” as there was one more obnoxious “hidden puzzle” and the final puzzle was genuinely interesting.

(And before I go on, “hidden puzzle”: a puzzle where it is unknown on surface glance to the player there even is a puzzle, and they have to try some act which reveals a secret exit or item or something of that sort.)

The lamp light issue turned out to be relatively straightforward to resolve once I decided that yes, most definitely there is no way to get through the game fast enough, and that there’s no “vending machine” equivalent. I went back to study my verb list, not terribly long…

KNEEL is still important.

… and found you’re just supposed to RUB LAMP, and only after your lamp starts to lose strength.

Out of the issues I listed last time, I had

a.) getting the hydraulic jack at the rocks

b.) getting the mouse at the castle

c.) doing something at the fairy grotto, maybe?

d.) doing something with a “friendly rabbit” that follows you around the safe area, you can feed it a carrot but that’s a treasure, and it otherwise seems useless

e.) getting out of the monster at the lake

and let me add f.) the collapsing bridge at the glacier, which I forgot to list even though I had a screenshot of it in the post.

d turned out to be, as I suspected, a red herring — just don’t go into the room with the rabbit, use the carrot as a treasure, and move on with life.

Out of a, b, c, d, and f, I needed to solve c (fairy grotto) first, which was required to solve all the remaining issues.

Yes, just waving the wand did it, the same one that created the bridges. The game is establishing a general pattern here of magical items doing more than one thing, and the ring is no different. You can rub it to teleport (you go back to the Sorcerer’s Room near the lake) or, rather more mysteriously, it lets you walk over the bridge at the glacier.

There’s no good logic to the “physics” here; you’re just supposed to find out it happens.

While I had the fairy area on my to-solve list, having a hidden puzzle be so crucial is a dangerous move in game design. You often will have players see puzzles B, C, and D, and no others, and try hopping between them in an attempt to break through; yet all the time there was puzzle A they didn’t even know about that was the crucial hook. This sort of secret observation can be enjoyable for those who find it and intense frustration for those who don’t.

Wrapping up the other puzzles on my list, the teleportation feature of the rings means it is easy to escape after picking up the hydraulic jack, and it does indeed work on the clam to get a treasure inside.

b (mouse) and d (lake monster) required exploring the area past the glacier bridge, where there’s a “Hall of the Mountain King” (of course).

(The teeth came from killing the dragon. Having powers manifest by throwing the teeth is a fantasy trope that I already had in my head but I’m not remembering from where. Did Ray Harryhausen do something along those lines?)

Other than that hall there are some gnome halls, where I found some cheese, which I could re-direct back to the mouse at the castle (trudge trudge trudge, at least I didn’t have to worry about lamp light any more)…

Via a different hand-drawn map of Sphinx Adventure, from a post on Medium by Mark Burgess.

…and then the mouse I could take back to the Mountain King area (trudging, but with a teleport making the path slightly shorter) where there was also an elephant.

This opened a path to some matches, that I immediately realized (from the bad smell, also the fact this puzzle appeared in Brand X) that they were the solution to the sea monster puzzle.

This leads to a very small area and the annoying hidden puzzle I was mentioning. So the wand has two totally different uses; the ring has two totally different uses; the word diaxos (previously used to open a vault) has two different uses.

Well, not completely different: you’re still opening something. But diaxos elsewhere causes the creaking sound of the safe opening, so I made the perfectly natural assumption that’s exactly the place it affects. I was even prepared to praise the puzzle as having a normal and solvable “physics” to the magic (unlike the ring + glacier bridge) but apparently diaxos is just a general opening spell. If I squint slightly I can see how that works, but I admit I didn’t solve the puzzle myself; I got indirect help from Anthony Hope who wrote a walkthrough. (He hasn’t even commented yet, so I’ll wave and say hi. You may remember him from the video walkthrough of Xanadu Adventure.)

Oh well. There was a bit of mop-up work otherwise but fairly straightforward, like using the keys from way back at the start to unlock a chest with treasure.

I assume this is where you rescue any treasures stolen by the pirate. The funny thing is you don’t have to even meet the pirate; he is in a room that can be stepped around, and he doesn’t “activate” and start doing random stealing until you’ve met him once.

Most of what remained was toting a large pile of treasures over to the sphinx, and this is where I hit my Maze Limit: it’s a long, boring desert. I just looked up the solution.

From Stardot. Yes, it takes that many steps. Yes, there’s a wrong exit near the end that sends you to the start.

I keep in mind with such moments that this was designed one step removed from Adventure, so it isn’t like the author experienced the many wonderful, wonderful games that dispensed with the idea of mazes altogether. Alas. (And in seriousness, it does feel like the author was trying to “recreate the experience” while still being different; the mazes loom large enough in the original game I could see their absence being felt in a tribute.)

And now we are at the final puzzle. There was a message earlier in the game, at the jar of spices, to

be humble in the eyes of the sphinx and use your brains

and I already had kept the verb list in mind, so I tried the long-awaited KNEEL:

You are kneeling down.

And … nothing. One more action!

Re-using the magic wand yet again for a new purpose. Fair enough!

Sphinx Adventure wasn’t exactly hard as much as slow; I’m eliding over “and then I had to make another trip” and my backtracking to optimize a little because it turned out to be less annoying than remembering where everything was scattered.

For its purpose — to introduce some people to adventures for what I believe is the first time, based on reactions — I think it worked. The game never tried to use its simple parser for anything too heavy, avoiding a common trap for early adventure writers. Also, while the “bring every treasure to the sphinx at the very end rather than the building at the start” seems like a minor tweak, it does make for a genuine one: having toted everything across the map felt like an epic journey, so the small change in mechanics affected the narrative significantly.

Coming up next: U heeft on langs ver nomen dat Uw exentrieke oom Wout overleden is. Het gerucht gaat dat deze oude zonderling het landhuis Korenvliet heeft nagelaten aan degene die zijn testament weet te vinden.

(Previous posts on this game in chronological order here.)

Via eBay.

So despite a few more simple puzzles, this one’s been fighting back a bit. Part of the issue is logistical: the lamp timer is very, very, tight, so tight (given the conditions of where I need to go) that I have a feeling there has to be a way to revive the lamp’s battery. I can’t even find a way to turn the lamp off to conserve power when needed (the usual suspects EXTINGUISH, OFF, TURNOFF, and UNLIGHT don’t work).

Both CROSS and KNEEL immediately stand out as rare. I’ll get into them later.

The other issue — common for these games with lamp-light timers — is logistics. Some places are far away from each other, and my last lingering puzzles are fairly spread out in a way that it is hard to do an immediate test — it may be that item X across the map is needed for puzzle Y, but it takes a while to check the possibility and it may require re-routing my entire sequence (again, given the lamp light timer is tight).

A meta-map showing connectivity, directions are not accurate. I found a method of travel across the lake but I get stuck right away so I don’t know where that goes; it requires an item from the Castle, so that’s at least one big back-and-forth.

If the inventory limit was absolutely unlimited — and it initially appeared that way — it still wouldn’t be much a problem, but there is a limit, and since one of the main gimmicks is that the treasure-destination (the Sphinx) is hard to find I’ve been having to tote all the treasures around. If it turns out, for example, the Sphinx is on the other side of the lake and it is a one-way trip, I need to be carrying every point-valuable object in the game while doing so, which is tricky because even some non-treasure-like items count for points (like the bottle).

Continuing the action from last time, I had retrieved some items in an area past a crocodile. I had the fairy grotto which may or may not have just been atmosphere; KNEEL doesn’t give any special response other than “You are kneeling down.”

Going off in another direction is an area past the troll:

A bit to the west there’s a friendly bear that just starts following (unlike the one in Crowther/Woods, you don’t need to feed it). There’s also a puzzle that I’ve yet to solve, where you tumble down some rocks and get trapped. You need to do this because there’s a hydraulic jack I am 99.999% sure is used to open a clam later (again from Crowther/Woods, in that game you used a trident to open the clam).

To the east there’s an ogre you can take down with a sword, and still the weird interface which asks if you want to use your bare hands first.

This is followed by an orc the bear takes care of (the bear the disappears); as an aside there’s a glacier which the wand works on to make a bridge, but the bridge always collapses when you try to cross, even if you have no inventory items.

Then there’s a dragon where (unlike everyone else) you say YES when it comes to using your bare hands.

This leaves behind some dragon teeth.

It’s a curious “fix” to the puzzle; certainly there’s no need to mysteriously assume the game will understand YES, but on the other hand, but having it be part of a progression of monsters, it’s confusing that a dragon would be easier to beat in fisticuffs than an ogre.

Moving on further (ignoring the fact the jack is unobtained for now) there’s a maze. Despite it being “fair” (no connections are one-way, diagonals aren’t included, it is technically drawable on paper) it pulls off a mean trick.

Specifically, it appears at first — especially with some “color” rooms — that no special effort is needed to map, and just the names of the rooms are sufficient. However, right away the game gives a “red room” that looks close to what turns out to be a totally different “red room”.

If you look closely the exits are different, but I got myself befuddled by assuming after a sequence of four moves that I landed back in the same red room I started at, when I was in an entirely different red room.

Once I realized the trick I just started dropping items as normal to map the maze. Then it just becomes the usual tedium.

Have any of the direct-imitation-of-Adventure variants we’ve seen — that is, games where the author is only one step removed — dropped having a maze? I don’t recall any.

All this leads to a castle:

Not much of interest here, other than there’s a vampire that requires using a wooden stake found back at the Everglades, so that’s another bit of forced travel sequence (you can try to not open the casket, but upon returning to the courtyard the vampire has opened the casket themselves).

The castle also contains a mouse (runs away so I can’t take it, but I assume there’s a trick) and a wooden boat that you can carry along with everything else. (The item limit is 17, so the visual is kind of hilarious. But you need more than 17 items to keep everything!)

The wooden boat can get toted back to the lake. I was stuck for a while on verbs (just THROW BOAT, GO BOAT didn’t work) until I tried CROSS LAKE, referring to the lake noun rather than the boat itself.

…and here I am stuck. To summarize, I haven’t solved

a.) getting the hydraulic jack at the rocks

b.) getting the mouse at the castle

c.) doing something at the fairy grotto, maybe?

d.) doing something with a “friendly rabbit” that follows you around the safe area, you can feed it a carrot but that’s a treasure, and it otherwise seems useless

e.) getting out of the monster at the lake

All of these might have simple answers but even given a very generous item limit I’m now having to juggle, and even making a very direct beeline for all the items possible I start running out of lamp light around the castle. This still doesn’t feel the same as being stuck on Hezarin, but being unable to make progress looks roughly the same from one game to the other, so it doesn’t matter if the underlying system is much simpler (and by necessity, any puzzle solve will have to be straightforward).

From The Retro Cavern.

(Continued directly from my previous post.)

In the past I’ve tried my best to point out how the various text games I’ve played (despite a very common set of elements) nevertheless have strong fingerprints which distinguish them. This game is no different, and I want to do some compare-and-contrast with two sections. This is useful from both a history-of-games standpoint and a theory-of-games standpoint.

Picking up the action from the obligatory troll’s toll bridge, I tried paying the troll and exploring a bit farther.

I was given the word “diaxos” in one of the rooms (it gets whispered like “Y2” does in Crowther/Woods). The word “diaxos” give a “very loud creaking sound” no matter where it is used, and the trick is to realize that this is the sound of the safe (back on the other side of the troll bridge, by the library) being opened.

By default there’s a bar of platinum but if you hand something over to the troll beforehand, it also ends up in the safe. So that problem’s resolved: you give up a treasure and you just get it back later.

I also had encounters with an ogre, orc, and dragon in that order, but I want to save that for what will hopefully be a final or close to final post, and focus on the Everglades area. I was getting chomped by a crocodile who just needed some food (although the exact sequence of what happens is a bit unexpected).

The upshot of the sequence above is that the trip here is one-time-only. You can safely go back in the Everglades, but the still-hungry crocodile will still chomp you if you try to go by again. Fortunately, there’s no real need for a second trip, because the whole area has no puzzles: just locations with treasures lying around.

Treasure rooms marked with color.

In a sense, this means the game reverts to the type from some early games like Explore or Chaffee’s Quest: just movement and treasures. (Probably. There is one possible secret.) Furthermore, it has the random-placement style of those games; there’s a “yellow brick road” in one spot, some quicksand in another, a treasury, and a fairy grotto.

However, despite just being rooms, there’s some semblance of environmental narrative going on. The quicksand has a plank left by a previous adventurer.

Also, you can safely go “down”, but just end up at a dead-end: “Oh dear you seem to have struggled through that quicksand for nothing”.

Similarly, the yellow brick road was only previously yellow:

And it is possible to make it to the end of the line where the road stopped being built:

The effect is really light and vignette-based. I did mention one possible secret; the fairy grotto has no treasure and it is highly tempting to think a magic word or something like that goes here. On my “best progress save” I am saving nabbing all the treasures in this area because of the fairy grotto, although it could easily be more environmental storytelling.

One other subtlety I want to point out — and this is true of every area, not just this self-contained one — is how the structure of the text is part of the user interface. If we go back to original Adventure (the only reference for this game) there is one major standard established right away:

YOU ARE INSIDE A BUILDING, A WELL HOUSE FOR A LARGE SPRING.
THERE ARE SOME KEYS ON THE GROUND HERE.
THERE IS A SHINY BRASS LAMP NEARBY.
THERE IS FOOD HERE.
THERE IS A BOTTLE OF WATER HERE.

Namely, that objects that you can pick up are separated from the main text. There is, of course, an easy technical reason for this (it is a lot harder to modify the body text than it is to concatenate a bunch of object-in-room messages) but it also serves to make the player have an easier time. By contrast, consider the ICL game Quest:

You are in a small log cabin in the mountains. There is a door to the north and a trapdoor in the floor. Looking upwards into the cobwebbed gloom, you perceive an air-conditioning duct. Lying in one corner there is a short black rod with a gold star on one end. Hanging crookedly above the fireplace is a picture of Whistler’s mother, with the following inscription underneath: ‘If death strikes and all is lost – I shall put you straight’.

The short black rod which you can pick up is placed in the middle of the text, and furthermore doesn’t have the line-skip to separate it. Despite both cases dealing just with prose, the first example more easily highlights the things a player can interact with, and so the text structure itself provides a UI.

Now consider Sphinx Adventure:

The format is

You are in a music room. [Statement of room name] Beautiful melodies echo all around. [Description of environment]
[Break to next line]
There are exits to the north, south, and west. [Listed description of exits.]

Notice how this easily gets across: the room as a short name (for ease of mapping), and the break between description and interactable parts (in this case the exits). When an object is included there is a further break.

You are at yet another dead end. [Room name, no description.]
[Break to next line]
There is another exit east. [Listed description of exits]
[Break to next line]
[Another line break, meaning the break here is different than the break between room name and exits.]
There is a cluster of opals here.

This conveys quite quickly the one direction you can go and what you can take, and the two kinds of breaks subtlety adds another bit of help in reading what the player needs.

This seems like a small and obvious thing (and it was at least started off in Adventure) but certainly not everyone followed the system so cleanly. (Having windows like the French Colditz game I played recently is another approach, but one with different issues.) One major gameplay consideration is if there’s any important objects sequestered in the “room description” portion. This game the answer seems to be no; you can’t refer to the plank at the quicksand, for example. Many a time I’ve been stuck has been when a game seems to establish this “sequestered room description” setup but then violates it. The biggest thing to remember in UI design is consistency, lest your UI gets mocked like like this chart of all the different ways to go left and right in Starfield. (I especially like how in one case it’s the letters Q and E and in another the letters Q and T and yet another the letters Z and C … why?)

This is the only game of Paul Fellows, published by Acornsoft for the Electron and BBC Micro.

Closeup from the front cover, via Everygamegoing.

Paul was working on a graduate degree at Cambridge when he had a friend (Steve Barlow) who was working on building an Acorn Atom. This intrigued him enough to get the computer bug, and he managed to get a BBC Micro early and started writing software (while, according to this video interview, he “should have been studying for his degree, really”). His first set of publications through Acornsoft was a trio of chemistry software (Chemical Analysis, Chemical Simulations, Chemical Structures) which he followed up with Sphinx Adventure.

He had encountered Crowther/Woods Adventure secreted away at a mainframe at the radio observatory server at Cambridge and was blown away, finding that “the idea that the computer could understand English text and react appropriately just seemed awesome.” He wanted to write his own in an attempt to understand how parsing syntax worked.

Note this is slightly different to some of our other origin stories. Rather than falling for the idea of a world in the computer, our author here was particularly fascinated with the parser. When he later joined Acornsoft right out of college and his projects included the compiler S-Pascal, where supposedly he re-purposed the same parser code (presumably in a conceptual sense and not using the literal code).

There’s a cassette version from 1982 and a disk version from a year later but I couldn’t find any compelling reason not just to play the initial cassette release.

Being that Mr. Fellows went straight from Crowther/Woods Adventure to this game, it is unsurprisingly another treasure crawl: in this case we need to bring the treasures to the titular Sphinx. The main gimmick — Adventure kind of did this too, but not many ran with it — is that the game (according to the instructions) keeps careful track of score “penalties” for “errors”.

Original Adventure had point deductions for using hints and resurrection, so this seems to be the logical extension of the idea.

The building is an “old blacksmith’s forge” with a lamp and a set of keys. The bottle is instead just right to the south of the start location. No food or water for the bottle, but don’t worry Adventure superfans, you’ll see them soon enough.

The wilderness level has more or less than same conceptual geography as original Adventure also, as various directions lead to a Forest location which more or less serves to randomly loop back to the main map. I didn’t even put the Forest on my own map:

Rather than unlocking a grate to go inside the “cave environs” you just need to go down at the valley of doom.

You may have noticed so far no “diagonal” directions (ne/se/nw/sw). The game doesn’t understand any of those abbreviations so I do think (unusually for a heavily-inspired-by-Adventure game) they have been dropped entirely.

The small opening map mostly serves to dish out some items to the player: a carrot, a sword, a wand, some food, and a lake where the long-anticipated water can be found.

There’s a pirate hanging out at a “Cross-Roads” that will steal stuff as you walk by (just one item in particular, and not necessarily a treasure). You can instead attack, and the game does a strange riff on killing-a-dragon prompt from the original:

The dwarves are incidentally in; the first one throws an axe you can keep, and when they re-appear they still throw axes (just the axes now disappear). They do not seem to be restricted to any particular area and I even met one while wandering outside.

The very top of that screenshot also demonstrates me solving what is more or less the first puzzle of the game, in a “fiery passage” where you can’t go down one passage because it is too hot, but you can throw the water from the bottle in order to cool it down. This leads to another area which is slightly messier:

There’s our first treasure (a silver bar, no exclamation mark, you have to check if your score goes up) as well as a “deep crack” that is “too wide to jump” to start. Still keeping with cribbing off Adventure, you just need to wave the wand:

I might sound snarky at the re-use, I appreciate not having to do this everywhere. (I think. Maybe the wand has more uses.)

Then there’s an “oriental room” with a rug, a “straw room” with a friendly rabbit who will eat your carrot if you’re up for handing it over…

It will instead follow you if you don’t do this, so I suspect this is the wrong moment for using the carrot.

…a safe that has “no obvious handle”…

The books mentioned are from an “old library”; the hint suggests that the lake earlier (that we got the bottle water from) can be crossed.

…and a very typical troll with a toll bridge. Of course.

I’ve tried crossing by using the silver bar (which I’m sure is wrong) and there’s a friendly bear that follows the player around without even having to feed it, but I’ll save discussing the area past the troll bridge for next time.

Also, for some reason, there’s the Everglades.

This is unabashedly old-school and in the way that doesn’t bother to add realism to geography (on the other hand, only using cardinal directions makes things easier to map!) The author may have simply been going for ease of play: the inventory limit is also much more generous than normal (if there even is one?) This gives an overall atmosphere less aggressive than normal (despite deadly dwarves as usual) and tries to convey a light jaunt so far.

Mind you, maybe there’s a very tight lamp limit or some murderously-hard puzzles later. At the moment this feels out of place compared to other British games.