Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are not dead. Read my prior posts on Avon before this one.

Via Acorn Electron World.

Last time I had left off in town, near the fringes of two mazes. First, though, I needed to visit a beach:

You are on a rocky beach at the estuary of some mighty river. A road leads to the northwest.

Rather like Zork III, you’re supposed to wait. There’s no cue or clue to this.

> wait
OK.
> wait
OK.
> wait
OK.
In the distance, there is drifting a large wooden chest.
> wait
OK.
There is a large wooden chest drifting a few yards offshore.
> wait
OK.
There is a large wooden chest bobbing about in the waves at your feet.
> open chest
What e’er it be, ’tis wondrous heavy, but you wrench it open straight. If the sea’s stomach be o’ercharged with gold, ’tis a good constraint of fortune it belches upon you.

O most potent gods! What’s here? A corse! Shrouded in cloth of state, balm’d and entreasur’d with spices.

She is alive, she moves. You manage to help pull her out before the chest is again pulled away from you by the waves.
Her name is Thamis, and she leaves you the spices in gratitude before departing to seek her lost family.
There is a large wooden chest drifting a few yards offshore.
You are on the beach.
There are exotic spices here!

That’s supposed to be Thaisa, daughter of King Simonides, who in the play Pericles is rescued by some fishermen and brought back to life.

From a 19th century illustration by Selous.

There’s not really great reason to wait here nor reason to expect something is coming, except for the severe lack of red herrings in Phoenix games. (Although remember that cloud? That is a red herring, and I think perhaps the first I’ve ever seen in one of these.)

This makes the puzzle painful but not impossible; however, there’s a moment that’s even worse. You can keep waiting for another effect.

OK.
A small wooden chest is washed up at your feet.
> get chest
OK.
> inv
You are holding:
A ten times barred-up chest.

The chest (via Richard II) will foil being opened, you have to deal with it later.

ROSALIND maze next:

You are in the forest of Arden. High on a nearby tree there is fixed a piece of paper bearing the name ROSALIND.

This doesn’t sound so bad when I describe it, but in practice it was hard to spot what’s going on. For the majority of the “gimmick” Phoenix mazes (all of them, in this game) I’m used to some sort of random generation aspect that resets upon exiting the maze. Here the maze is generated only once, so it is possible to leave and come back.

The gimmick is then that if you are in a room marked “ROSALIND” you are on the right track, otherwise you are off of it. If you meet ROSALIND again, you’re back to the first room of the appropriate path.

The next part is kind of arbitrary (…sort of a common attribute for this last leg of the game) but you find a sleeping man and can say MORTIMER to wake him, the word the starling has been saying in the cage. You don’t need the starling after this point and can go back and get the tame shrew.

Suddenly the starling croaks “Mortimer!”
You are in a clearing in the forest of Arden.
There is a sleeping man here.
> MORTIMER
The cry of MORTIMER! arouses the sleeping man; in the undergrowth you hear a disturbance and see a green and gilded snake, which was waiting to wreath itself about his neck, slip away with indented glides. The man is grateful to you for waking him in so timely a fashion and says “Should you ever be in the tavern, call for my friend Parolles!” He then loses himself in the forest.

The name is randomly generated but thankfully the game does not bust saves here.

After this comes the fog maze, which I’ve already talked about. I should mention that, structurally, entering here is a one-way trip, which means the whole business with the teleporting basket/treasures needs to be utilized before this point because otherwise you’ll hit your inventory limit. As you’ll see, you still need two of the treasures, and it is hard to predict which two.

You are in the middle of a drooping fog as black as Acheron (sic).
It is impossible even to see the ground.
> w
>From the gloom there comes a voice which you seemingly recognise as that of the poor tormented creature that lived in the hovel, although in the fog you see nothing. He leads you for a while and then stops at (he says) the very brim of a cliff whose high and bending head looks fearfully in the confined deep. You then hear him no more.
You are in the middle of a drooping fog as black as Acheron (sic).
It is impossible even to see the ground.
> jump
You fall forward, with your eyes shut. After a while you open them to see…

You are at the foot of a high cliff, at whose dread summit you can now see a creature above all strangeness. Methinks his eyes are two full moons; he has a thousand noses, horns whelk’d and wav’d like the enridged sea: it is some fiend. Therefore, thou happy father, think that the clearest gods, who make them honours of men’s impossibilities, have preserv’d thee.
The valley you are in leads down to the east towards a Brave New World.
There is a longbow here.

All this is incidentally a King Lear reference. This is the part where the Earl of Gloucester is depressed and wants to commit suicide, but Edgar (his oldest son) tricks him in disguise (as “Poor Tom”) by taking him to what he says is the top of a cliff, but is really the bottom. Gloucester faints, and Edgar (now in a different disguise) acts like Gloucester fell down the cliff and was saved by the gods, who didn’t want him to die yet.

From another 19th century engraving by Selous.

Then comes the house where I can shoot the arrow (this was correct)…

> shoot arrow
Let your disclaiming from a purposed evil free you so far in our most generous thoughts, for you have shot your arrow o’er the house and hurt a brother.

…and the constable, who is simply zeroing in on the fact you have a weapon (the longbow). You need to leave it behind to go in. Before showing that, a side trip:

You are at a dead end, the only exit being to the north.
There is a fretful porpentine here.

To get the pointy beast, we need to be carrying one of the treasures. I’ll give you the full list and see if you can figure it out.

There is a pair of yellow stockings here, made of silk and bearing the name Malvolio!
There is a diamond necklace here!
The Plantagenet crown is here!
There is a miniature portrait of the lady Portia here!
There is a gold ring here!
There is a sceptre here, which shows the force of temporal power!
A pearl is here, left by a base Indian, though richer than all his tribe!
There is a figured goblet here!
There are three thousand ducats here!
There is a scroll here.
There is a bracelet here!+
There is a ten times barred-up chest here.
There are exotic spices here!
There is a topaz here!
There is an antique viola here!
There is a signed copy of the Iliad here!
The Boar’s Head Drinking Trophy is here!
There is a furred robe here!
There is a valuable Touchstone here!
There is a piece of agate here, carved into the likeness of Queen Mab!

Some Shakespeare productions go all-out with Malvolio’s yellow stockings; they double as porcupine protection when used on the hands.

With the aid of Malvolio’s yellow stockings you succeed in grasping the porpentine. It then fastens itself to your shoulder.

Utah Shakespeare Festival, David Pichette in Twelfth Night.

Returning to the main track:

> e
You are in what appears to be a tavern, although it is quite deserted. There are various exits, apparently sealed off, but also a small archway to the west and a larger one to the east.

This is where you can use the word from the forest, and the ten-times barred chest gets resolved.

A man in courtly dress enters at your summoning, to whom you explain the nature of your Adventures in Arden. He sees that you are carrying a barred chest, which he opens for you. Inside there is a sapphire! The courtier hands you the jewel from the ten-times barred up chest, and goes.

Moving on, I found I had already defeated another obstacle (“a mighty Colossus lying here, evidently slain by a
poisoned arrow”) and was able to grab a “highly-inflated bladder which appears to have been used as a balloon at some Twelfth-Night party.”.

Trying to move on I was stopped by Lady Portia, and I expect everyone else playing this game was too:

You pass the lady Portia, who asks you what you did with the ring. If you had known the virtue of the ring, or half her worthiness that gave the ring, or your own honour to contain the ring, you would not then have parted with the ring. In fact you were best to cut your left hand off and swear that you lost the ring defending it.

At least it is a direct reference to the end of The Merchant of Venice! The gold ring is the other treasure you need to keep rather than send forward with the magic basket.

Reloading and returning with the gold ring in hand leads to the final two obstacles.

You pass the lady Portia, who notes approvingly that you still have her ring with you.
You are in a street. To the west lies the colossus, to the north there are some rather unexciting streets, and to the east lies a gorgeous palace, outside which there stands a watchman. He is thin, for watching breeds leanness, leanness is all gaunt. For some must watch, while some must sleep: so runs the world away.

I solved the watchman first, but that’s the actual end of the game, so let’s head north:

> n
You are in a network of streets: they lead NE, NW and S.
> ne
You are in a network of streets: they lead NW, SW and S.
> nw
A goldsmith passes you in the street and greets you as Arthur of Ephesus, and tells you that he has made a chain for you in accordance with your orders. Although you feel that you are part of some great comedy of errors, the goldsmith insists on leaving the chain with you.

(This is using the same name given earlier at entering Brave New World. The gold chain confusion happens in the play Comedy of Errors.)

If you then leave through the streets, the goldsmith realizes his error and gets his chain back. You are instead meant to explode the balloon to scare him away from his residence. This could have been absurd on the level of a bad Discworld puzzle, but we’re also down to the end of the game, and the balloon is the only unused object, so–

> explode bladder
You manage to rupture the bladder by striking it against the quills of the porpentine. It explodes with a loud

>> BANG <<

which makes the porpentine look even more fretful, and pieces fly in all directions.
There is a noise of general alarums and excursions, and the goldsmith rushes up, agitatedly muttering something along the lines of "Burglars! Gunpowder! Hoist with my own petard!"
He then runs into his shop to investigate, carefully re-locking the door behind him.

To get by the watchman, you just then hurl the poor porpentine.

You grab the porpentine, despite its prickliness, and hurl it at the watchman. The creature darts its quills fretfully at him, and he struggles to shake it off. You seize on the opportunity to dash past him, just evading a falling portcullis, and run down a passage to find that…

You have arrived at the palace. There is a formidable array of courtly characters here, some, such as Portia, King Richard and Thamis, known to you, and others, such as Coriolanus, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who are NOT dead) and Silvia (who is she?) previously unknown. They congratulate you on staying the course.

There is a diamond necklace here!
The Plantagenet crown is here!
There is a miniature portrait of the lady Portia here!
There is a sceptre here, which shows the force of temporal power!
A pearl is here, left by a base Indian, though richer than all his tribe!
There is a figured goblet here!
There are three thousand ducats here!
There is an Egyptian vase here!
There is a bracelet here!
There are exotic spices here!
There is a topaz here!
There is an antique viola here!
There is a signed copy of the Iliad here!
The Boar’s Head Drinking Trophy is here!
There is a furred robe here!
There is a valuable Touchstone here!
There is a piece of agate here, carved into the likeness of Queen Mab!
You are holding:
A sapphire.
A golden chain.
A laundry basket.
A gold ring.
A pair of yellow stockings.
A shrew in a cage.

You scored 425 points out of a maximum of 425.
You are entitled to the title King, aye, every inch a king!
You may now return to the twentieth century confident of your own prowess!

Of note: as far as I can tell, there is only one ending, no matter your point score. Arriving without having sent over any treasures, for instance:

You scored 255 points out of a maximum of 425.
This entitles you to the title Thane of Cawdor.

This means to beat the game you technically just need to get the shield via stabbing (the whole ghost scene in summer I believe you can skip), get the gold ring and stockings from Lady Portia (requiring solving the Spring variant of the puzzle with the frog toe and the knights), handle the man in the hovel (which requires getting the word from Ariel), and make it through the end sequence with the colossus and porpentine. Being able to skip treasures is not unusual — even Acheton allowed a few missing — but this is the first time I’ve seen the end text otherwise be unchanged.

Theoretically, this means the game can be approached a different angle in terms of fairness — if a puzzle is really tough to solve (I give the crown to finding the second chest at the beach) it can be discarded as merely optional to the whole enterprise. One could even think of the extra treasures as “post-game content” akin to the challenge levels of modern games.

To close things out, I’m going to clip some portions of reviews and comment on them.

Sinclair User, December 1989.

You don’t have to know much about Shakespeare to play the game, because although the situations come from the Bard of Avon’s well-known plays, the solutions are the usual adventure stuff; get newt’s eye, put in cauldron, pick up torch, and like that. To some extent this makes the whole thing pointless; it’s just a series of Shakespearian references splodged together, without actually testing your knowledge or appreciation of the works; a bit like someone reeling off lots of jokes but forgetting the punchlines.

This is from ’89 when the commercial version of the game came out, and makes a fascinating contrast with modern norms (and the spirited debate in the comments of these posts). The reviewer here was upset that Shakespeare trivia knowledge is not required. The “fax box” also says it is a game that it is a “Text only adventure that may help with your Shakespeare” which suggests the reviewer approached it sincerely as an educational game!

Modern norms have the dependence on outside knowledge in adventure games as an anathema (Graham Nelson in his Bill of Rights puts the concept at number 16, “Not to need to be American”.) There’s really two questions here: 1. just how dependent is the game on knowing Shakespeare, really? and 2. how bad is outside knowledge in the first place as a game design move?

For point 1, as I’ve already observed a few times, knowing Shakespeare at least helps with some aspects conceptually. Knowing that Cassandra is in reference to the gift of prophecy, for instance, can help realize she is warning you about deadly maze obstacles. (But again, it isn’t necessary, and I personally only found out about this particular reference after solving the puzzle.) I think what is more interesting (in a game-design-theoretic sense) is how familiarity with Shakespeare helps not so much solving a puzzle actively as much as parsing what is going on with the language. Consider the nourishing meat pie

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.
> get pie
OK.
> eat pie
Although the cheer be poor, ’twill fill your stomach. You eat of it with pleasure until a man dressed as a cook enters and reveals to you that two of the ingredients in the pie were named Chiron and Demetrius. ‘Tis true; witness his knife’s sharp point… I’m afraid he stabs you.

I immediately realized the reference to Pies Made of People, but imagine someone who was not familiar with Titus Andronicus. The text is not terribly explicit about what “Chiron and Demetrius” even refers to and the line after switches action in an almost abstract way. All this is simply a simplification of Titus’s lines in the original play:

Why, there they are, both bakèd in this pie,
Whereof their mother daintily hath fed,
Eating the flesh that she herself hath bred.
’Tis true, ’tis true! Witness my knife’s sharp point.

Later, at the cliff (the one at the fog where you jump), I admit I was somewhat overwhelmed by the language and had simply tried JUMP because it was the typical adventure-game thing to do at cliffs, but a less canny player with the same confusion might get stuck for longer. I haven’t seen King Lear, so I didn’t know the reference until I looked it up.

Regarding question 2 — how bad is having the references, really? — I’m not so sure they’re terrible in this context. This isn’t like a traditional fantasy that suddenly expects you to recognize the rules of cricket. The fact we’re being subjected to a blizzard of Shakespeare references is given up front, and I had genuine fun learning about characters I didn’t know and scenes I didn’t remember. I think the idea of a game being intentionally past its bounds is not intrinsically terrible as long as the “educational” part is telegraphed.

Now on to some modern takes! I’m referring to the reviews via the IFDB page.

In reference to the puzzles:

…the ones in the last of the three structural sections of the game appeared to overuse the “try a random object in a random situation and see what happens” kind of approach (at least, to me) but most of them were logical and elegant.

— Valentine Kopteltsev

I put “solve” between quotation marks because there are very few actual puzzles in Avon. There are many unannounced death-traps, a lot of riddles where you get only one chance and you must have found a clue beforehand (no lucky guesses!) and a few easy mazes.

— Rovarsson

Two very different takes, here. Logical and elegant, or “very few actual puzzles”?

Contrast with Murdac is useful here. In that game (for example), there was a moment where you revive a Frankenstein-type monster, use a plank to make a previously dangerous passage safe, then make sure to dive in an alcove out the way so it pushes forward until it busts through a physical wall that was previously a barrier. This involves holistic thinking about the entire map, the physical situation, and the items the player is carrying.

While I wouldn’t call Avon puzzles “self-contained” exactly, but in terms of physical space they tend to be isolated. The seasons makes for some continuity across time rather than space that needs to be accounted for; otherwise, they are structured via a web of references where you need to spot that, for example, a particular word causes a particular effect.

I think the latter part of the game (post-cliff) really does feel a bit like Just One Riddle After Another (although to be fair it made about 5% of my total gameplay). By contrast, the flipping between seasons was the wrinkle that really made me think of the game as an adventure game rather than just a sequence of puzzles, as I had to worry over (for instance) the fact that the toe of frog works to solve both a spring and a summer puzzle.

The approach is different; not worse, but different. For a player who likes to “inhabit” the worlds they are exploring — imagine they are physically lifting that lantern to read the words on the wall, and listen to the drip of water — I can understand why it might not come off so well. If you approach the text of the game a cavalcade of wordplay, it feels much more pleasant.

Or maybe I’m off–

The whole was a perfect exercise in mimetic immersion for me and I really felt I was in Shakespearean England when I played this.

— Canalboy

Not every game can and should have the same goals. Avon tried for something relatively unique (Graham Nelson did The Tempest, but that’s still a much different animal) and I feel like there’s some untapped corners of the game design possibility space coming out; essentially the classic “wordplay game” (like Counterfeit Monkey) being done by reference and allusion as much as by the simple fact one word anagrams into another.

Coming up: two short games, followed by a Dr. Who game that, oddly enough, does not originate from the UK.