Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

PAL Creations is another one of those early-80s companies I haven’t found much on about other than that they existed. They worked out of San Diego, and advertised in Tandy Color Computer magazines like The Rainbow, with games like SKI LODGE (“Manage a Vermont ski lodge”) and SCAVANGE HUNT (“Find the items on the list and return them lo Hickory Ridge to free your niece Rebecca from the hermit of Medicine Tree County”). To give you an idea of the obscurity-level, the ad above mentions 20 games; as of this writing, Mobygames only is aware of the existence of 5.

Our game today is ENO (“You inherited a million dollars. Just one catch – first you have to find it!”) which was given away as a “bonus game” option for buying one of their regular games. It also ended up being published by Dragon Data (the Welsh company I’ve written about here) in a two-pack, Eno paired with a prison-escape game called Stalag.

We’ll pass on Stalag for now and stick with Eno, which has the noteworthy attribute of being quite short. So far, if someone has wanted to write a short game for sale, they’ve generally landed in gamedisk or tapedisk format; see Space Gorn for an example. Eno’s publishing demonstrates two other options, being published as part of a “pack” or being given away in conjunction with another game.

It is weirdly both modern and ancient. Let me just narrate what happens straightforwardly and then explain after.

You are simply tasked with finding your wealthy deceased relative’s inheritance, and the “living room” clue is indicative of the full environment of the game. The entire game is in the living room, just it is divided into small sub-areas to make a 15 “room” map.

You start in the center (“Living Room”) and then can move around to each of the pieces of furniture in the room, the TV in the far east, and the fish tank to the northeast.

The verb list (past the usual directions and INVENTORY) is severely limited, but at least the game is good enough to list it in the instructions: PUSH, TAKE, LOOK, DROP, TEAR, TURN, READ, OPEN, HELP. You can, if you want, mechanically try all the verbs on everything in the room, although the game discourages this by having some items in the living room be deadly.

For example, TURN TV (in a valiant attempt to change the channel) results in electrocution.

Both end tables to the west have doors that can be opened. The southwest end table has some smelly nurse shoes; the northwest end table kills you.

The game wants you to type HELP here before moving on to the next screen.

The very important room happens to be to the north, where there is a picture of a black cat. You can move it to find a safe.

It will then prompt you for three numbers if you try to OPEN SAFE, and if you get one number wrong you get a game over.

Although not technically “death”, and even though the game restarts, the “world fiction” technically begins where you left off.

So the rest of the game is a matter of figuring out three numbers, and which order those numbers might go in. This acts a little bit like a Rhem puzzle where there’s a symbol somewhere that only marginally relates to what you’re looking for, but you’re supposed to make the connection anyway. While I only found it in the middle of my searching process, the first item related to the number sequence is hidden under a cushion to the southeast.

This gives you the order you are supposed to enter numbers into the safe, and the source of the numbers: the number of black cats the house is supposed to have, the number of fish the house is supposed to have, and the TV channel showing a space show.

You incidentally cannot find a black cat in the house despite the picture. If you move the rug in the opening room, however, you can find a dead cat under a loose board.

You can count up the fish at the tank to be 29, and as already seen in a previous screenshot, the TV is tuned to channel 11.

Unfortunately, 1-29-11 doesn’t quite work. You’re supposed to examine the cat further and notice it ate one of the fish.

That is, the live-cat count is supposed to be 1, and the live-fish count is supposed to be 30. 1-30-11 opens the safe.

While a modern reaction, I imagine that this brief review by Alastair from Computer Solution Archive captures what people from the 80s likely thought of the game.

No wonder Dragon Data bundled this with another adventure game, this effort is no more than magazine type-in quality.

I don’t actually disagree, but weirdly enough, I liked it? Notice how it

• somewhat fits the one-room adventure genre, which really didn’t start kicking until the late 90s
• fits the “reduced verbset” genre, which is spread through all adventure gaming but never got “respectable” until probably the 2000s with games like Midnight. Swordfight.
• has the clue-finding feel of a modern escape room
• tries to make the deaths participatory and comedic

Despite the lack of a save file system, the game being very very short means it doesn’t matter; it’s more polite than a Super Mario “troll” level anyway. In the very specific circumstances here of a reduced-verb short game (where you hand-wave over realism) it works, just in the context of the early 80s market there isn’t much it fits with. The only slightly comparable game I can think of is Mansion Adventure which had its difficulty in clue-interpretation rather than object manipulation.

We will be seeing more from Paul Austin and Leroy Smith (including the other half of this commercial package, Stalag) but next up we’re going to head over to Australia for some Dr. Who.