Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Since last time I got unstuck by figuring out I was missing something on the interface, only to get stuck again quite soon afterwards. Voltgloss helped in the comments and I was able to make a micro-piece more of progress. Just plunging through that hint sheet is starting to look tempting, but maybe pausing to write will help break things through.

So it had always occurred to me that it might be possible to look in alternate directions, but I checked the manual carefully and this is all it had to say about movement. N/S/E/W as well as F/B/L/R work as I describe — you only can move with them, and if you run into a wall or a closed door the game just says you can’t go that way.

However, if you TURN NORTH or TURN SOUTH you actually change your facing. This is not in the documentation. (It turns out the arrow keys, which the manual indicates are equivalent to F/B/L/R, do allow for turning, if being used while holding the shift key.)

The storage room has a book you can see facing south which contains a “credit card” where one side says “Mine 1A”. The north side has a chest (as shown) with a lantern.

The furnace room has a message on the north side…

…and if you face the door leading back to the hall to the west, you can see a button. I do not do what the button does.

I should add it isn’t 100% obvious you should check the door facing the hall — that is, looking back the way you came — but the view of the message on the wall shows the button to the left. This let me know I was supposed to turn more. This differs from Mystery House II (MSX version) where all views were narrowly only of the environment directly in front.

Having done all that, I was still stuck.

I had to plunge all the way down the hints Voltgloss gave to find the command SHOW CARD. I don’t think that square is supposed to be a camera, I think it is supposed to be the cardboard with the message, and the camera is just hidden (this is because there’s another spot later where the card works, and no square).

I still don’t have access to much, but I also don’t think (due to the graphics and needing to have graphics for multiple views) this is a large game.

I haven’t gotten into the “Offices” yet but the doors are marked with what is inside.

To the north there’s a snack machine and another distinctly unfair moment.

First off, if there’s any way to push one of the particular three green buttons (as opposed to just PUSH GREEN) then I don’t know if I’m doing it right or not. Both PUSH GREEN 1 and PUSH GREEN BUTTON 1 give a click sound, but the game also accepts commands like READ BOOK 1 indicating it is just ignoring the later stuff in a command.

Shaking the machine reveals a sound, but I was heavily stumped until, via instinct, the game’s picture, and experience in Graham Nelson games, I tried LOOK UNDER MACHINE, revealing a hidden coin.

I checked later, and SEARCH doesn’t work — it has to be LOOK UNDER. The manual once mentions LOOK INSIDE but no clue that LOOK UNDER works, and I can assure you this is a very rare command to cause a unique effect in this era.

You can insert the coin in the machine but none of the green buttons do anything. I still strongly suspect this might be where I’m stuck on forward progress, as I’m pretty much empty on things to do elsewhere.

For example, there’s a locked file cabinet to the east. There doesn’t seem to be any potential shenanigans possible without a key. There’s also a guard post with a window next to a keyhole, but again no key.

You can also step out to a platform to the west, turn around, and SHOW CARD while facing the door, which causes it to work like an elevator.

The lower floor just consists of two locked rooms, and the SHOW CARD trick doesn’t work on either.

I would guess this is where the shutoff lever is hiding.

It is faintly possible the author is being too clever with the parser. The manual gives “CAREFULLY EXAMINE THE BOMB” as a possible command and LOOK UNDER is parsed as its own command. Maybe there’s some sensible syntax to press a green button but it only works ordered as a very particular sentence; most games of this era would let you PRESS 2 or the like.

I’m still happy to take ROT13 hints on anything at the moment.