Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I feel like I am both closing in on victory and getting farther away from it, insofar as the last remaining puzzles seem to be stumpers indeed.

Not quite succumbing to hints yet but probably next time if I can’t push any farther.

From a Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Tempest, where Ariel and Prospero discuss Ariel previously being trapped in a pine.

First, a fairly straightforward bit of progress, applying the dagger (previously used to stab a king):

You are in the enchanted forest.
There is a pine tree here, from which a continuous melancholy howling emanates.
> cut tree
You hack at the pine tree, which splits. A spirit flies out, apparently imprisoned here a dozen years ago by the foul witch Sycorax. In return for its freedom it tells you that it has some power over the many other spirits around here and recites “Full fathom five thy father lies” to you. This, it says, may ward you against other powers. It then goes hence with diligence (after all, it needs pine no longer!)

I wasn’t thinking of The Tempest specifically (although certainly knowing something is “trapped within” would help) but rather just running through ye olde verb list again. I usually don’t associate a dagger with tree-cutting so the action did not occur to me normally.

I tested each of the words said by Ariel and found that “fathom” was recognized as a magic word (even though it did nothing in particular). Testing around in various places I found it was useful in springtime, at the hovel:

> s
You are on a moor. The ground is black here, as though scorched.
The only path leads to the north, but there is a hovel to the southeast.
There is a nourishing meat pie here.

> se
You attempt to enter the hovel, which is gloomy and sinister-looking, but you run out in terror when you hear maniacal laughter and the words “Fathom and half, fathom and half! Poor Tom!”
> fathom
A poor demented being rushes from the hovel, gibbering:

Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still, Fie, foh and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.

           and then vanishes over the moor.

This left a “figured goblet” (a treasure) available in the hovel for me to take.

I also had some progress with Cleopatra.

You are on the barge. Various attendants are busily rushing hither and thither (and back again). There are steps down to the hold and to the north are the docks.
The Queen of Egypt is here. On a burnish’d throne she sits. Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.

Nearby in a shop was an Egyptian vase, and it seemed like the two went together, but a snake came out and caused Death before I could tote one to the other:

Disturbed by the motion, an asp emerges from the vase you are carrying. I wish you all joy of the worm. Poor venomous fool, it is angry, and dispatches you.

The snake doesn’t wiggle out right away, and you can take a little bit of action still before it activates. So I ended up just dropping the vase after moving one room, then picking it up again, and repeating the process until I made it to Cleopatra. This was an odd puzzle in a physical-reality sense — it seems like dropping the vase would make the snake more likely to come out rather than toting it to its destination all in one go — but I realized the programming underneath seemed to be cued to simply consecutive turns held, hence the solution.

> THROW VASE
An asp tumbles out of the vase. It fastens itself to the queen’s breast and with its sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate of life at once unties.

> LOOK
You are on the barge. Various attendants are busily rushing hither and thither (and back again). There are steps down to the hold and to the north are the docks.
There is an asp squirming here.
There is an Egyptian vase here!
The Queen of Egypt lies here, dead, but she looks like sleep as she would catch another Antony. On her breast there is a vent of blood, and something blown; the like is on her arm. It is an aspic’s trail.
> D
You are in the hold of Cleopatra’s barge. It is damp and you can hear the creaking of timbers and the scurrying noises made by rodents.
There is an exceptionally tame shrew sitting here looking lost.

You can’t just take the tame shrew along without some help, but nearby there’s a cage with a starling.

You are at the end of a wharf. The only way out is to the northeast.
There is a cage here, containing a starling.

Sometimes the starling croaks “Mortimer”. That’s a reference to a character from one of the historical plays (Henry IV, Part 1), who is in prison at the time of the story. This suggests you should let the bird out. The bird actually stays in place, suggesting there is a useful place to deposit the creature, but I haven’t found where that is yet.

With the cage in hand we can pick up the shrew. We can let the shrew out anywhere we like and pick it up again, but I haven’t found a use yet for the shrew either.

While I was hanging out at the wharf I tried CLEAN HANDS (I still had bloody hands, recall you get them in summer if you kill the king in the winter) and it worked. I happened to be carrying the dog’s tongue which works (the game says you clean yourself off with the tongue).

This is needed because I also found the scene where bloody hands are a hinderance. If you go back to the mansion with the caskets, there’s one room, a dining hall, which is empty in winter and spring, but filled in summer.

You are in a palatial dining hall, which is set as for some great banquet. All the seats are taken except for the one at the head of the table. There are archways to the east, southeast and south.

You are unable to sit down with bloody hands. (Too self-conscious.) With them cleaned via being in an area with water + holding the dog’s tongue, you can get one of the most colorful scenes of the game (so far).

> sit
You sit down to the feast. To your horror a ghastly vision appears and shakes its gory locks at you. It is the ghost of the Scotsman you have so foully slain! You stand and address this shadow, this unreal mockery, which only you can see. This displaces the mirth of the guests, who stand not upon the order of their going, but go at once. The ghost then avaunts and quits your sight, melting into the wall to your northeast.

Now the Wood comes into play.

> ne
You find yourself able to pass through the northeastern wall as though yourself a ghost.
You are in Birnham wood. There are paths in various directions but the whole wood seems to be moving about.

At the milestone from before, if you want a little an opening appears to the southwest. At a later wooden post the same thing happens.

Suddenly the trees part to reveal a path to the southwest.
You are in Birnham wood. There are paths in various directions but the whole wood seems to be moving about.
There is an old milestone here.
> sw
The trees move and the path to your northeast is blocked once more. You are in Birnham wood. There are paths in various directions but the whole wood seems to be moving about.

Go into the woods deep enough and you find a building with a mysterious scepter.

You are at the centre of the wood. To the south is a cottage which probably belongs to a retired criminal, for it bears the name Dunsinnin.
> s
You are on the ground floor of Dunsinnin. There is an exit to the north and some steps up.
There is a sceptre here, which shows the force of temporal power!

Also, you can go to the balcony and jump off and die. For reasons.

> u
You are on the first floor of Dunsinnin. There is a balcony to the south
(Soft! what light through yonder window breaks?) and some steps down.
> s
You are on the balcony of Dunsinnin, which looks out over Birnham wood.
The only (apparent) way to go now is back to the north.
> jump
You throw yourself off the balcony and methinks I see thee, now thou art so slow, as one dead in the bottom of a tomb.

With that resolved (mostly) I turned my attention back to the weird circumstance with the caskets. Last time I had found two clues: a “password” delivered by a jester and a name written on a letter. The syllables GO (for gold) SI (for silver) and LE (for lead) were mixed amongst the names, and even though I tried what I thought was the most logical thing (taking the first two syllables and using them as a guide for which caskets to open) it didn’t work.

I was foiled by two things. One is that if you save your game after receiving the password/name but before opening the caskets, the pattern no longer works, and you have softlocked the game. There’s a clue to this but I only realized in retrospect (it will still be important later):

> save
How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds done!
Game saved.

(Yes, you’re supposed to realize that “the sight of means to do ill deeds” is the “you lost” message.)

I also had one time I did the sequence where I did not save and I still had the issue (I was thinking of Hezarin which intentionally corrupts your save file in similar circumstances). After enough prodding (including some testing from people in my comments) I tried the combination again and it worked. With a password of Goselida:

> open gold
The casket is empty. Shielded from your view, the Lady Portia performs a rearrangement of the contents of the caskets and invites you to open a second casket.
Choose again. Which casket will ye open now?
silver
You open the second casket, which contains a miniature portrait.
The lady Portia picks up her caskets and leaves, murmuring “Sweet, adieu.”
A maid then enters, invites you to try your luck again later and withdraws again.
You are in the lady’s boudoir.
There is a miniature portrait of the lady Portia here!

Bah. Maybe I had some sort of autosave on? Or an interpreter bug? Either way, relying on the meta-interface here is extraordinarily dangerous and bound to run into issues that have nothing to do with the player’s thought processes.

I racked up the second treasure (a gold ring) through similar circumstances but I was stumped after. Deciding to test something else, I went from a save file at the forest, moved myself over past the Capitol to where the Egypt area is, and saved my game.

Upon saving my game, I got the “sight of means to do ill deeds” message. Uh oh!

Somehow, between one save game and the other, I had run across a clue. It wasn’t that many rooms, so checking step by step, I realized I should have been paying more attention at the Capitol:

You are in the Capitol, a large building filled with people in white togas, who are listening to the famous orator Legosinius. For the less patient, there are exits to the west and southeast.
There is a scroll here.

Legosinius (groan). Making a beeline to the caskets and then trying LEAD and GOLD worked, yielding some of Malvolio’s socks (?). However, after this happened (if I took or left behind the socks) I started to die:

You feel very warm.
You are on a long east-west track.
> e
You feel very warm.
I’m afraid that your too too solid flesh has just started to melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

You should have died hereafter.
You scored 131 points out of a maximum of 425.
Once more into the breach, dear friend?

In addition to that baffler, the farmer with missing chickens, and three mazes (Undiscovered Country, Rosalind, and the fog), I’ve also got the odd bit here and there which might be meaningful, like a cloud which changes between a weasel, camel, and whale (no idea, no verb I’ve tried has worked). And of course instead of searching for puzzles I might simply try using my unused items everywhere (like bat wool, the last witch ingredient, and the tame shrew). Still, I’m not even technically halfway in terms of points, so I suspect there’s a whole new chunk of game yet to be prodded at.