Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Prior posts on this game here.)

From Mobygames. This feels like a “grab from public domain” cover like the one from my last post. It is weird to have two versions like that in a row (usually, there’s a “public domain” version, then the company has the money to pay an artist for a reprinting). I’m not sure if this is the game’s 2nd or 3rd cover.

One of the more remarkable items in the mainframe game Warp is a portable hole.

The hole, being the absence of anything, is impossible to inspect.

You can place it down anywhere and it will randomly warp you to nearly any room in the game. The actual teleportation isn’t the remarkable part (that’s happened ever since XYZZY) but rather the total chaos of letting you teleport essentially anywhere, including in places with unsolved “blocking puzzles”. Some of these represent puzzles that you have to solve anyway, but at least in one case (because I did it) you can bypass a puzzle — I skipped a pyramid puzzle involving rotating rings that was one of the biggest pains of the game. The only catch is that the teleportation is random rather than controlled so it requires a lot of false moves.

I admire the willingness to push against caution, though; most adventure games try to make very, very sure you don’t skip any puzzles, and here comes a game that cheerfully gives what is almost a cheat code (I’m guessing for most players fairly late in their gameplay, but still).

With Adventure Quest I left off last time on a Djinn that teleported me. I didn’t realize at the time the extent of the teleportation. You can pick up the “lamp” at the oasis and then rub it at any time (twice) in order to get an angry Djinn to do another teleportation, and it really comes off as arbitrary indeed:

You can get by what are clearly puzzles; for example, you can teleport to the pyramid that’s past the sphinx, and use the pan pipes (from back in the “relics” grove) to charm some snakes to get in.

(You can’t get out again, though, because there’s still a sphinx! You have to keep teleporting.)

There’s also a mountain path (just opposite of the canyon) where you can walk your way up and get blocked by a giant, or you can teleport to land just past where the giant is.

If you do this, even though you’re entering from the “wrong end”, you are not able to go back up again.

If instead of going down to the giant you rather go up, you run across an abominable snowman (chained to a mountain)…

…followed by a cave (with a white dot, see those come up again!)

Weirdly, you can take the rope (seen from a post-teleportation screenshot earlier) and climb down here, but that just lands you in the raging river (seen from another screenshot) which seems to serve no purpose, since you eventually die in the rapids in a way that doesn’t seem possible to prevent.

Incidentally, that rope is in a tower surrounded by orcs, and seems to be the tower, that is, the Black Tower that is our quest! We may even be able to have an early confrontation with the demon, although it’s hard to tell if this is really the demon or a sub-monster on the way to meeting him:

You don’t teleport directly here, you just walk from the room with the rope.

Another possible teleport stop is in a lake, where there’s several places to land. I have something approaching a partial map; it took me a while to realize how everything linked up.

The whole section is especially tricky because it is underwater, and you only have a limited number of moves before dying, although two bits (the south and north ends of the lake) let you get out and breath.

On the north side there’s a rusted door, too rusted for the keys from way back at the starting building to work. Intriguingly, there’s also an exit with a black dot (not white) and if you walk in, you get teleported back to the starting building with a white dot. I don’t know if all black dots have matching white dots, or if this is a “rotating” scheme much like rubbing the lamp is.

I do know a place with some oil which might allow the keys to work, but testing anything (given the inventory limit and teleportation requiring multiple jumps) requires a lot of juggling so I haven’t gotten to it yet.

While the teleportation feels random and bypasses some puzzles, after sufficient testing I can say it always goes through the same sequence of places, eventually reaching instant death. Rather than dropping in rapids where you have time to teleport out, it drops you at the end of the line:

This means the teleportation is both terrifyingly open and potentially restrictive at the same time. It may be that you need to make the best of visits to particular places because teleporting is the only way to reach them at first, and you need to have exactly the right items in exactly the right order. This means the teleportation really may not be chaotic in the end but rather presenting an quite demanding puzzle. The end result for now is for me having to fill in a lot of map, though.

A very zoomed-out view of what I’ve mapped so far. I have no doubt this will change over the game.

I will say, as a general pattern, the game is trying very hard to frustrate mapping. The mountain has been the only “safe” region, and that’s just been going up or down for the most part; you can get blocked by the giant or run across that Black Tower from “the other side” but there’s no confusing exits or time limits.

Going higher is death, but you can reach the same room from the other side (via the room with the rope).

I’ll try to collect everything together and solve some puzzles next time. (Other than getting trapped in a temple and going down a rope to nothing in a cave! Incidentally I thought that cave was going to be the one with the sundial, but I saw nothing to indicate a hidden area. Not wanting hints yet, I’m still making progress.)