Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I was indeed close. I just had one puzzle remaining.

Before I get to that…

…I wanted to share a discovery made by eientei on Discord. Vince Apps wrote other books in addition to the ones I mentioned last time, porting essentially the same programs over; one for Electron, one for Amstrad, and one for MSX. The MSX book was translated into Finnish.

Via The Internet Archive.

This translation includes Forbidden City, or rather Kielletty Kaupunki, and yes, all the text is in Finnish.

This represents the first Finnish translation we’ve hit on this blog, meaning we just need some Danish and Icelandic to complete our Team Nordic trading cards (Ringen was originally in Norwegian, and Stuga was in Swedish).

So the puzzle I was missing was simply applying the “go twice to succeed” hint from the notebook. Absolutely everything else (the amulet, the helmet, the locked door, etc.) can be ignored. I hadn’t checked hints yet but I did look at a map (in case I did my usual facepalm of missing a room), and I found something curious:

The “Energy Field” represents me getting teleported back to the maze. Since other exits also similarly lead back to previous places I thought that was that, but the map at CASA Solution Archive was telling me there was a room there.

This suggested perhaps the west exit is what needed to be done twice. So I took the exit, wandered back from the maze all the way back over to the same exit, and then took it again:

No special message or anything, now just going west leads to a short corridor. Moving forward is then victory:

There wasn’t any good reason for the behavior. I commented last time on alien cities working fairly well for the early text adventure medium, but this game tried hard to abuse the latitude: lots of items that are meaningless, a map with some truly random twists and turns that suggest the author wasn’t creating geography as much as making a stream of consciousness, and an ending puzzle where neither the arrival of the hint itself (via notebook summoned by pulling a lever) nor the actual action really made sense even in a future-universe with inexplicable alien things.

Still, someone cared about the game enough to translate it!

Next: I’ve got one more short game coming up which is likely also death-trap reliant (but very different in character to Forbidden City) followed by a return to the mathematicians of Cambridge and the game Avon.