Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I probably should have checked help sooner. Unusually for Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure Games, it discusses possible bugs in the hints themselves and even mentions a late action only working on two of the six playthroughs. I wasn’t able to get the ending to happen so while I came close, I can’t show the grand finale.

You may want to re-read from the beginning for story points before moving on.

Via eBay, with someone’s hand-labeled disk and hand-made map.

First off, I had something close to the right actions last time.

I had missed the fact in the room with the receipt at the hotel, the phone rings. I did have the sound on, but you need to pause in what appears to be real time; if you’re typing commands too fast it doesn’t turn up, and even after I knew about the phone potentially ringing, I wasn’t able to get anything to happen until a second attempt.

“It’s all set, Beau. She shoves off tomorrow.” They hang up.

Now, you’re supposed to follow the receipt to the red herrings, just as I did. When I did so I had nothing happen and left, but if you wait — by just WAIT or LOOK — eventually someone will spring a trap on you and trap you in a locker.

The locker has a ticket stub (needed for the cinema) so you need to get in here. To escape is the only real item based puzzle: the cigarette and lighter from the desk are needed. You stand on the desk and set off the smoke alarm.

To the game’s credit, I figured out the parser commands here fairly quickly. With ticket stub in hand we could visit the cinema, and there Beau (the fiancée) arrives (I think probably this would not have happened had we not caught the phone call).

However, when we go in, we find the man… dead!

We can take the invitation if we like; whatever happens, it seems to be scripted that if we arrive at the platform where our office is we’ll get a message that tells us to wait at a phone.

We can then follow that phone message over to the (previously not-useful) museum, and have an encounter which results in another dead body.

Now we get into serious bug territory. According to Kim Schuette, the body has a key (according to the source code) but no way to access it in the game. The key then works on a locker in the stadium which opens a duffle bag with barbells, but there seems to be no purpose in this anyway (since neither he in the past nor myself now were able to see any of this in-game).

This encounter is the last you can have before picking up the ransom money, as you were informed about way back at the penthouse; you were supposed to pick it up at 7 PM, then drop it off at the lockers at the bus station at 9 PM. This part of the game is a matter of typing WAIT a lot or just I since that’s a quicker command.

I dutifully rode the clunky subway system back to the bus station, did the drop off, waited nearby for the pickup (as Mr. Schuette explains in his book) … and had nothing happen. The person that is supposed to do the pickup is Livwell (that we learned about via bribery in my last post) but he never shows.

West & 21st St.: Wait and watch for Crowded Corridor. If no one comes by 10 PM (the courier is Livwell), he won’t come due to a bug in the program. (On six near-identically played games, he appeared only twice. Perhaps a flag wasn’t set by doing something which seemed to have no bearing on the game, like not getting the Hanky or going to the “wrong” bank.)

The ending at least sounds dramatic. You’re supposed to follow the man (Livwell) with the suitcase all the way back to the Sizemore building (??) and then sneak in the elevator and shoot him. Then, arriving at the roof for the drop off, you encounter J.J. (the basketball star) and Cartier (the allegedly kidnapped person), shoot the man, and “pull lever” (which I assume stops Cartier, who was in on the scheme all along).

Ugh. I won’t recount my time valiantly trying to play the game for real and getting nowhere. I think the authors had some interesting scenes mapped out, but didn’t have a good way of putting them together that made both narrative and ludic sense at the same time. There wasn’t any learning that happened from the man at the museum, nor with the death at the theater, and no sense of a gradually untangling mystery that requires thoughtful deduction. Simply a sequence of events happened which eventually led to what would be a conclusion (if the game wasn’t broken).

You’ll be glad to hear I am already part-way through my next post, so I hope it won’t be nearly as long a gap before you hear from me next time.

The map from The Book of Adventure Games.