Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(First post on this game here. I realize you may need to jog your memory.)

Sorry for the delay, everyone! Had a combination of life-things, work-things, and in the end, the actual game I was playing (the MSX version of Mystery House II). I will say it was definitely a slog and I completely understand the author I quoted last time being grouchy about Arrowsoft’s port. Since the earlier versions are much different than the MSX version, I’ll mention right now sometime in the future I will try the NEC PC version (there’s enough changed that it might be akin to The Prisoner versus The Prisoner 2).

I essentially enjoyed the first game, but despite some open aspect it felt fairly linear. Here, the game tries for a bit more non-linear and the fact the player is dealing with slightly ambiguous visual scenes really starts to be a problem. (And weirdly, the puzzles are in a way simpler but worse; I’ll get to that.) The “narrow window” view (where you can’t see anything to your left and right) is also similarly grating; there’s a lot of turning in directions that either having nothing or unimportant as you’re exploring the house.

Also, the two-item limit was not in the first game, and here it means you’re taking circuitous routes just to get the right item in the right place.

Cover of one of the earlier versions, via Giant Bomb.

For example, fairly early on there’s a window in a random room. It would never occur to me just looking that it would be the type of window I’d want to / be able to open, and it especially never occurred to me to get the dinner knife from the cabinet two rooms to the right and USE KNIFE.

In one direction you can find a RACK with a LADDER. In another direction you can find a candle in a RACK (don’t take it, you can’t use it yet) and a secret door in a fireplace. The secret door leads to a safe with an MSX cartridge.

The GREENKEY is off a random table somewhere.

In the same room you can also find a chair if you face south which has the information “door opens at 3’oclock” which is useful later.

Going back to the ladder, it can be taken to a hole at the start of the game. This is another one of those “confusing visual” spots — it wasn’t clear to me I was dealing with a hole you could climb up through when I first saw it, so the ladder was not the immediate thing that occurred to me (I was originally thinking outside). After the fact, it made sense, but beforehand I wasn’t sure what noun even would apply to what I was looking at.

Upstairs there’s a bedroom and a bathroom. The bathroom has toilet paper with secret information. Would your immediately inclination be to TAKE PAPER in this scene?

The code there is for a bookcase.

This is for the safe in the basement.

Also upstairs we can apply the “3 o’clock” hint from earlier…

…and eventually find a secret MSX machine that can be used to run the cartridge. The only thing that happens is the message Break the north wall!

Easy-but-annoying: you get the hammer from outside to bust the wall in the same room. Of course I didn’t have the hammer so had to route all the way there and back.

I found the diamond already in this run. I’ll talk about getting it in a second.

My notes are honestly a bit of a jumble from here (sorry, long play time!) Inside there’s a REDKEY that can be used to get at a secret door in a different fireplace to get a PINKKEY, which can then be used to get a WHITEKEY from yet another safe and then bust outside, but that still doesn’t help with the diamond. For the diamond, you go back to the bedroom and grab some matches, then get the candle I mentioned quite a while ago (your inventory is now maxed) and then grab a shovel from …. oh wait, your inventory is maxed. Ignore the candle, grab the shovel first, then go outside, then dig:

Then get that candle, head down to the basement to find a safe, and use that R-3 L-3 code from the bookcase.

Now with the WHITEKEY I mentioned earlier you can make your way to escape (somehow you can’t just leave the way you came in).

It’s curious how much drudgery this felt like compared to the original. It really does have mostly the same elements, like moving things and finding a whole sequence of keys. But: it lacks

a.) using oil on a cabinet to discover a secret stairway inside

b.) finding a ladder that kills you by bonking your head if you climb, so you need to move it and bust the wall behind

c.) getting a secret code by lighting a fireplace

d.) putting the code in reverse to open the final safe, where the game ends upon getting the treasure and doesn’t have a weird sequence of keys for an escape

These all seem like small moments, but they were collected together in a way that built geographic suspense: what will you find when you get higher? The gameplay in Mystery House II (MSX edition) involved bouncing around the map many, many times in order to juggle the inventory, and in the end all the clues and keys felt randomly scattered and boring.

Or maybe it’s the graphics making me grumpy. There was a thread in my last post discussing the virtue or lack thereof of graphics. Y’all have read me enough to know I like a very wide array of things and am just as happy to play with cutting edge graphics or without, just like I’m fine with both books and film. But graphics can serve as a UI impedance if used badly; the original Mystery House (Roberta Williams, I mean) had some items where I had to guess what they were to pick them up; here, while I didn’t have the same guesswork, I had a lot of trouble getting into the “frame world” of the game. The need to check all directions especially got tiresome.

I’ve still got some hope for redemption from the NEC PC version, but I’m going to take a rest before taking it on.

Either way, I’m happy to be past here for the moment to get into something more traditional. I’ve got something from the Tough Britgame library lined up next. Text only! And probably puns that must be taken literally to solve puzzles! Those wacky British.