Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(My prior posts on Avon are needed for this one to make sense. Start reading here.)

If you were to quit, you would score 374 points out of a maximum of 425.

So I am definitely closer to the end than expected. It turns out putting treasures in the basket gets them to somewhere Good as the score increases. That doesn’t mean they all should go in the basket, though!

Some of the insights that follow came on my own, some came from hints provided by Morningstar in my last post (thanks much) and some came from a walkthrough (mainly when I was worried I was softlocking something due to saved game shenanigans again, although I looked up some other things while I was at it).

Rather than insight-sequence (where I explain the order I solved things, and where I got them from), I’ll do the puzzles in narrative sequence, starting with the farmer.

You are at the remains of a chicken farm. A fox has clearly visited this place and killed half the stock. The only way the farmhands will let you go is back to the west.
A farmer is standing here bemoaning the loss of his livestock.

“What! all my pretty chickens and their dam, at one fell swoop?” he mutters. “I asked my keeper, Puck, to get the fox’s earth seen to, but he went away saying that he’d put a hurdle round the earth in forty minutes (and that was hours ago.)”

I mentioned I had trouble even conceiving what to do here, and that was really the core of my problem. Was I supposed to find more chickens? Find Puck? Find a fox? Scare off the farmer and farmhands so I can get by? Do some funky magic word that causes the farmer to turn into a hat?

The answer is none of these, although the last question above was the closest. I need to warp back to the moment of entering the town with the drug squad:

A rather dull-looking constable appears, cries “HAVOC”, and lets slip the dogs of war. In fact, a small chihuahua appears and stands barking at you.
“Drug squad,” says the constable. “I must search you for certain substances.”
In fact he finds nothing prohibited and he and the dog slope off.

This keeps you from taking the season-warping potion to the north part of the map. I theorized maybe it was possible to slip the drug by, but what I should have been paying attention to was the summoning of the chihuahua. Specifically, it is done by the constable crying HAVOC. Back to the farmer:

> havoc
A small chihuahua appears, barking wildly. “Of course!” says the farmer, “that’s just what I wanted. I don’t think a hurdle would have kept the fox in anyway. A dog’s a much better idea. But I must reward you – take this touchstone – they say that it’s of great value to alchemists.”

So the basic question I should have been asking was: how do I get a replacement animal for guarding the remaining chickens? I likely would have happened upon the solution faster. I can see how that kind of makes sense with the text, but the Shakespeare layer was befuddling me.

This moment was fascinating in an abstract puzzle-solving-philosophy sense, but let’s move on: it turns out I was entirely done with Winter after this encounter (I know this with certainty from peeking at the walkthrough). I was also done, as I suspected, with Spring, so I could jump to Summer:

You are in a walled graveyard. For those making a return journey, the way out is to the west, as the eastern exit is blocked by impenetrable grass. However there is more graveyard to the north.

This puzzle was about the grass. Here I was stymied by the grass and any verbs I attempted were rebuffed to the extent I suspected this puzzle needed to be solved “from the other side”, so to speak, but no, I had already had the means to solve this, and it was totally reasonable. I needed to make a stop here when I was being an ass:

Feeling a bit of an ass, you munch your way through the barrier of long grass and succeed in clearing a path through it. You are outside a disused chapel (to your east). There is newly-made track back to the west.

This just yields a treasure (a pearl), but still counts as progress.

Lady Portia and the caskets, 1892 engraving.

Then I prodded more at the puzzle where you get warm and melt after Lady Portia’s final gift. Morningstar’s hint led me to think the toe of frog (which allows swimming) helps with cooling off, and indeed it does: swimming will cool you off. But the problem is, the toe of frog only works on one season, and I needed it to survive the knights (from Spring). So was I solving the knights problem wrong?

After laborious testing I finally buckled to the walkthrough (in fact, this is the puzzle I wondered about softlocks so it caused me to break open the walkthrough in the first place) and found out, you could go to the river and —

> wash
You wash your face and feel much cooler as a result.

This is my nomination for worst puzzle in the game. Note that only WASH, alone, by itself works, or WASH FACE. However, there’s no reason to suspect that a face wash does the trick, since you just “feel warm” as you are dying. So really the only reasonable thing is to somehow type WASH alone, because … ???

I don’t know. Through all of the Phoenix games I’ve felt like while I have had to occasionally guess the verb (see Hezarin and shouting) I’ve never had to worry about phrasing in general; the parser has generally been well-behaved. This violation stung rather like the dagger being plunged into King Duncan.

As far as I can tell the puzzle doesn’t even make a good Shakespeare reference! Yes, the line about “melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew” is from Hamlet, but it doesn’t constitute a strong enough connection to really justify the puzzle existing in the first place. Why does finding the third treasure cause us to start melting? I still don’t know, and that’s after reading the walkthrough on the section (which was provided by the company Topologika itself to people reviewing the game).

With that taken care of, and another peek at the walkthrough to be sure, I had essentially everything prior to the capitol (with Cleopatra, the shrew, the Rosalind maze, etc.) resolved. I’ve gotten a smidge farther there as well but I think the narrative will be best all in one go, after I’ve finished the game, which I predict will be with my next post.