Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(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).