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.