Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(My prior posts on Adventure Quest are needed for this one to make sense.)

Since last time I solved three major puzzles, although I’m going to list them in reverse order, as that will proceed from least to most complicated. And by “most complicated” I mean it is the kind where I was completely boggled, in the same ballpark as realizing the final purpose of the train in Ferret or leveraging the “time travel” in Quondam.

My last solve (but the first one I’m going to talk about) came from a simple misreading.

I had interpreted this scene as the snowman was “on the loose” and something still needed to be done. However, it struck me (upon retrying this scene) that the way the bear worked in Crowther/Woods Adventure still required you to GET BEAR even after it had been pacified, so maybe I was just lacking that. And indeed, you can just GET SNOWMAN and have him walk around with you in his inventory.

Further down the mountain are some large rocks. Earlier I had tried to PUSH ROCKS (being on a mountain, thinking they’d roll down and maybe hit the giant) but I was told they were too heavy. The Snowman seemed like he’d be strong, and indeed:

This gets rid of the orcs at the tower and you can go in and encounter the rope and the shape-with-tentacles at your leisure. You can also walk around the giant, suggesting maybe the giant doesn’t get defeated at all.

The big catch to all this is that the mountain path past the giant occurs near the very end of your long teleport-route. If there’s some reason the orcs need to be scared off earlier (maybe the orcs on the mountain are the same as the ones in the cave ambush?) then there’s still an issue.

For my second solve, I was still fiddling around with the sandworm in the desert. Remember I had done WAVE TALISMAN and it caused the rumbling of the worm to decrease. I realized (because of the brutal inventory limit incentivizing me to test) that I could WAVE KEYS or any other item and it would work equally well.

I later realized — rather more later than I should have — that in fact WAVE was simply passing time, and any action that wasn’t walking would work, even just WAIT. That is, the sandworm was tracking when you move, but could not hear you if you were standing still!

My updated, now-accurate desert map.

I also got to thinking about the sphinx, and it seemed rather suspicious that the worm was swallowing up “everything” when it surfaced. I had also found — by moving south out of the desert just at the right moment when I was experimenting with the worm in the first place — that you can just barely evade the worm and have it surface anyway.

Combining the two facts together, I messed with my timing so that the worm was just about to appear while I was right next to the sphinx. Then I ran east to the “Rock Outcrop” on my map:

The fact you can see the sphinx from here was another hint this might work.

While it isn’t explicit from the text above, the sphinx is now gone: it has been swallowed. You can freely go to the snakes at the sun temple, charm them away with the pipes, then meet the priestess who tasks you with finding a sun dial.

Just as a reminder. One very long shot is a place to the west of the oasis with many large rocks, kind of like the ones at the mountain. Maybe the Snowman is meant to go down here first and help move these rocks before taking out the other ones? But that would mean I’d definitely need to take out the giant first. Which I feel like the sling has to be meant for (see: David and Goliath) but I still don’t have a small stone to launch.

So yes, those were the easy puzzles. Now we get on to the monster.

This kicked off with an observation, while messing around in the underwater church, that a jellyfish that I thought was scenery was probably meant to be a thing you could take.

Mentally I parsed “A luminous” with the sentence before that as a single paragraph, but on second glance the “A” would clearly have come on the prior line if it was in the same paragraph. Being in the same paragraph would mean I couldn’t pick the jellyfish up, but since it is on a new line, it is takable.

After finding out I could refer to a JELLY-FISH (just FISH breaks the parser here) I decided the nearby fish net had to be used here. With some fussing about I was able to CATCH FISH JELLY-FISH but died immediately afterwards being out of breath.

Let me go back to my updated map of the lake, as the positioning is very important for the puzzle. Note the blue locations are teleport landing spots.

You have exactly six actions you can take underwater before you die.

So you can walk from the Gravel Beach (taking a deep breath) down to the Inside Drowned Church, but die immediately upon catching the fish.

1.) down to Quiet Pool
2.) north to Beside Clam
3.) west to Lake Bed
4.) west to Graveyard
5.) west to Church
6.) catch fish
(dead)

Additionally, if you teleport to an underwater place, while teleportation resets your breath-o-meter (that is, you can teleport from underwater to underwater on turn six and still live), your arrival to a new underwater place counts as an action for the purposes of the fresh set of turns.

For example, you could teleport to the Mass of Weed, fairly close to the church. As already mentioned starting underwater causes you to immediately give up a turn, but this still gives you enough turns overall to catch the fish and teleport out:

1.) arrival via teleport
2.) step west to graveyard
3.) step west to church
4.) catch the fish
5.) rub the lamp
6.) rub the lamp again (remember you rub it twice to teleport)

Unfortunately, this kills the fish! Let’s go back to that teleport sequence from last time.

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)

Being at the underwater weed is step 7. So when you teleport, you go to step 8, the trackless desert. Guess what happens to a jellyfish in a desert?

So despite it being close enough for the full sequence, the teleport start at the weeds is out for catching the jellyfish. What to do?

One thing to keep in mind here is the ultimate destination. The jellyfish provides light, so we want to not only get the jellyfish but bring it somewhere dark; in the lake this means the underwater trench, which conveniently is one of the teleport landing spots. Working backwards, here are the previous two spots:

10: lake bed (south of trench)
11: south of oasis at trident
12: underwater (dark), lake

All three are underwater, good! Jumping between these will not kill the jellyfish. However, the teleport spot is exactly one room to the east of the weeds, meaning you need not six but seven moves to make the jellyfish heist; what to do?

If you go to the Shallow Water (far northwest) and go up, you get on land and can breath air. So if you use that as a starting point…

…it looks like you still don’t have enough moves, because that takes four moves, and you need one move to catch the fish and two to rub the lamp and teleport out. 4 + 1 + 2 = 7.

HOWEVER!

The two rubbings of the lamp do not need to happen one after the other. This is irrelevant to a path that starts and ends underwater, but if you can start on land, and rub the lamp once before entering the water, then you only need to rub the lamp one more time before a teleport. That is, the sequence is, starting from just above the shallow water:

RUB LAMP. DOWN. EAST. SOUTH. WEST. CATCH JELLY-FISH. RUB LAMP.

This is exactly six steps and it teleports you to water (south of the Oasis, inside the pool itself). You can then teleport again to land at the dark trench and light it up.

Dropping an item here sucks it down a hole (the small gap). I don’t know if this is useful.

Just to the east there’s more trench and an entrance to a cave.

Then inside, an octopus. Which kills me instantly. Of course.

Reaching for your “treasure” happens even if you are carrying nothing. I also tried bringing in the trident and I had no way of using it in time.

Still, that was exceedingly elaborate and required keeping far closer track of teleport destinations than I thought it was going to need. The situation is still even a bit worse, because even given my experimentation I’m still not sure what’s fully going on with the lamp.

You see, sometimes it skips destinations. For example, even though you have two steps from the jelly-fish (10) before the dark trench (12), I’ve sometimes had the game skip from 10 to 12 and I don’t know why. The order still always seems to be the same otherwise (it won’t ever go back to a location the teleporter already skipped) but given how complicated the jellyfish puzzle was, I’m sure mastering what’s happening with skipped destinations is important for winning the game. Maybe there’s still more teleports past the fatal one (18?)