Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

In a deserted city on a far away planet, there is legend of a hidden treasure guarded by force fields, hallucinatory gases and alien life forms. Do you have the courage to set forth and seek the treasure?

The city lies at the edge of a vast primeval forest, near shimmering lakes, and will offer the unsuspecting visitor choices of silver spoons, blue liquids, metal discs and possible death. You will see however, that if the going gets tough, you can always stop for a Coke!!

We’ve played so far one game by Vince Apps, Devil’s Island as published by his company Apex Trading. It was mostly memorable for the opening puzzle requiring waiting in a cell in real-time (!) for a guard to show up; past that point was an extremely open map (with very little walled off) but a lot of instant-death, enough that I felt it proper to color code some rooms in red.

Forbidden City doesn’t have a real-time puzzle, and it is much more linear than Devil’s Island (so far) but the instant-death is still in. This time our goal, rather than escape, is to Discover the Aliens hidden treasure.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

The game was originally from Dragon 32, just like Devil’s Island, with a TI-99 version and Spectrum versions appearing as well, and I haven’t been able to find any of those versions. Rather, I played the C64 version, which showed up as a type in via The Commodore 64 Program Book. (It is through this book we even know the name Vince Apps, otherwise everything would have to be credited to Apex Trading.)

From The Internet Archive.

He also has the Texas Program Book (as in Texas Instruments computers), the Oric 1 Program Book, and a 40 Educational Games for the Commodore 64. The last gives some more biographical info:

Vince Apps is a regular contributor to journals such as Popular Computing Weekly and Home Computing Weekly. He is a graduate of Sussex University in Computer Science and has his own successful software company.

We still have three more games to go from the author so there’s still time to dig up a little more; for now let’s get into the game itself and enter an alien city.

Alien cities have generally fared pretty well here. The enforced text-adventure minimalism works better with exploring techno-halls than with nature, authors can go freeform with button-pressing effects (and they’re a lot less tempted to be arbitrary like they are with fantasy games), and language barriers mean NPCs don’t have to be conversational.

To make a more concrete comparison, the modern-realistic Crime Stopper which was just featured here fell short due to character interaction being extremely limited and some massive simplifications in terms of city layout. With an alien city, it is more reasonable to have a slightly esoteric subway/train/monorail system, as the other Forbidden City (William Demas) does.

I got stuck fairly quickly, because one of the commands is unconventional.

Specifically, there’s nothing to do here if you OPEN GATE or UNLOCK GATE or SCREAM or a variety of other things. The usual I and INVENTORY got me nothing. Finally I went to HELP (assuming maybe it was like Fortress at Times-End where it was necessary and not just a last-resort) and was told TAKE INVENTORY was a command.

So you start with a key but can only refer to the thing that does the unlocking, the key, not the thing being unlocked, the gate.

The game, as already mentioned is fairly linear; the red rooms are deathtraps, with a deep pit, crushing walls, and a laser testing chamber.

You can find a device with a button in a dark room to turn off a force field. Then there’s a “silver spoon” (which I haven’t used yet, might be a red herring) and a “small metal disk” in a cupboard…

…and you can take the disk over to a nearby device, drop it in, and get a rusty metal rod. Then you can go to a “flat wall” with a hole, insert the rod, and reveal a doorway.

This is followed by everyone’s favorite, a maze.

In the middle there’s a room with four levers, and one of them kills you, and of course you just need to test them out in order to find out which lever does which.

The maze only has cardinal directions, and it is the kind with a “path” where the wrong direction consistently drops the player back in the first few rooms.

Moving past the maze…

…the vast majority of the “obstacles” are still instant death traps. There’s two lever rooms (four levers each) where some of the levers do useful things and some eject you into space, and again, then only way to find out which is which is to test.

Two of the levers spawn a notebook (the same notebook). That’s just a code where you shift the letters forward by one to get “go twice to succeed”. I haven’t found anywhere to use it yet.

One of the levers randomly takes you to a “lab” area with a tin (see above, I haven’t worked out the number’s meaning yet), another deathtrap room, a potion that kills you if you drink it, and a steel locker that explodes if you open it.

Another lever goes to a forest area with a “pod” containing an “amulet”. The amulet has no description if you look at it and you can’t WEAR it.

Finally the only thing I seem to be “stuck” on is a locked door. I can’t refer to it in any way and the KEY I had at the start of the game doesn’t work.

This is one of those games where there aren’t really “puzzles” to struggle on as much as trying anything to get the game to recognize an interaction. For the record, I’ve got

a plastic cube (with a cryptogram that turns into “rubik got here too”)
a helmet (with several small lights)
an amulet
a flash of luminous blue liquid (that makes you heavy and kills you)
a key (from the start of the game)
a silver spoon
a tin (with the number hint)
a notebook (with the “go twice” hint)
a black metal rod (that was used to open the hidden doorway)

I trust either the next steps will be very simple or impossible; either way, based on the length of the author’s other game, I expect my finale here to be in my next post.