Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Prior posts here.)

I was correct on my guess last time that I just needed to bring the oil and keys over to the locked door in order to get by; the oil works on the rust.

I should be careful saying “just” because, as mentioned in a prior post, the inventory limit here is brutal. Teleporting around requires holding the lamp in hand, leaving three slots; this puts the keys and the bottle (for holding water to get through the desert, then oil for the door) in the remaining places. I also was needing a fourth space (maybe) to grab a trident. The sequence on teleportation goes:

1.) teleport to inside the oasis — this happens trying to enter it and seems to just introduce the mechanic

2.) you can then go south and pick up a trident that, when thrown, generates water bubbles (you can re-fill the bottle with water)

3.) the getting teleported (either by trying to go back in the oasis, or rubbing the lamp directly) sends you underwater by the clam

4.) swim over to the door

From 3 you have a second choice. You can go south a little to pick up a fishing net. You can’t then swim to the door; it is too many moves and you’ll run out of breath.

It is possible the best move is to ignore the trident, get the net first, and then keep teleporting (you’ll eventually land close to the door again) but all this requires major inventory shuffling. As all this is implying, despite it coming off as purely random the teleportation does happen in a fixed order, specifically:

1: inside the oasis
2: at the clam, lake
3: path through forest
4: north of oasis
5: rapids
6: inside guardroom, tower
7: at underwater weed, lake
8: trackless desert
9: tight spiral staircase inside tower
10: lake bed (south of trench)
11: south of oasis at trident
12: underwater (dark), lake
13: road north of building
14: desert south of canyon
15: top of pyramid
16: track up mountain past giant
17: mountain at giant
18: rapids (DEATH)

The last line means the 18th use of teleportation via Djinn will kill you.

This is all a little hard to get a handle of, so I made a meta-map which has numbering on the regions showing the sequence.

This suggests there might need to be some seriously complicated resource juggling and also some constraints. For example, the “top of pyramid” is by the temple where you were asked to find a sundial in a cave; if the cave in question is the one that’s up the mountain and the sphinx can only be bypassed via teleport, then the giant needs to be bypassed before teleporting to the temple. Or maybe the sphinx doesn’t require teleportation hitting the temple early is just a “sneak preview”.

Also, as you can tell from the meta-map, I have not been able to connect up the lake area or the area past the locked door to the main map as of yet. It is faintly possible they don’t connect at all and teleportation is the only way to reach that section, so you’ve softlocked if you need to back there but have already rotated your teleportations too far. (That is, by the time the teleport reaches the second visit to the forest, stop 13, there are no more teleports to the lake.)

Enough stalling, though, as I’m sure you want to see what it looks like past the locked door:

Sadly I had to drop the trident off for now (the “ARMED INTRUDER” thing). There’s a puzzle I found quite quickly where the trident would have been useful.

To the northwest there’s a dragon, and the game implies this is a rematch of sort with dragonkind as we defeated our last one with fisticuffs. This one does not fall as easily.

The water trident would surely work? The dragon blocks off two exits with fire; I have no other ideas what to do.

The east side there’s two areas where arrows get randomly shot at you by orcs, and if you hang out too long you die. Fortunately “too long” seems to be a decent span, I essentially had to get hit intentionally:

You can climb a web to get to a spider, and the earth stone, one of the four doodads we’re collecting so we can have our final showdown with the demon.

The spider only kills you if you try to take the stone.

To the north there’s an elf statue with a missing eye that suggests a gem or the like that fills in the gap.

There’s two other obstacles; one is an exit blocked by giant rocks, which may match with a spot on the mountain on the other side. Maybe this is the way of getting the trident through.

There’s also an orc who spots you and runs off, and if you try to proceed further you get ambushed.

This also happens if you try to do this sequence in the dark.

Noteworthy is that the arrow-shooting area stops being a threat if you let yourself get spotted by the orc but don’t proceed further. Presumably all the arrow-shooting orcs have now moved to new ambush spot. This suggests maybe the orcs can be distracted or blinded first where the arrows originally happen, or maybe stopping the steady drop of arrows in the east part of the cave is more useful than I realize.

Given the widely-spread out puzzles, inventory limit, and messy transportation it gets hard to just “test everything on everything” but that may be what I need to do next. For the record, my open puzzles are:

figuring out the white/black dot system (everywhere, the only black dot so far is at the locked door)
anything with the chapel or graveyard? (lake)
statue, dragon, spider, large rocks, orcs (cave north of locked door)
sphinx (desert)
giant, abominable snowman, other side of large rocks? (mountain)
blocking orcs?, dark shape with tentacles (tower)

Regarding the snowman, I did use the keys to unchain it (just like the bear in Crowther/Woods) and it doesn’t attack, but it doesn’t follow me around either. I feel like I need something else for friendship and then he can move some rocks or tear up a giant or something.

My items are (deep breath) a bottle, keys, lamp, fishing net, trident, Talisman of Life, silver ball, sling, fruit, an “onion” (really garlic), and pan pipes.

This doesn’t strike me as a lot to work with. I do want to test the silver ball out at the statue with the missing eye, but otherwise nothing obvious is occurring to me. (The sling, by the way, says, “Wave it to violently propel stones” but when I try to WAVE SLING it says I don’t have a sling stone.)

I still feel like I’m making regular progress, so no hints yet!