Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

The Doctor: I’ve got a pistol.
Sarah: But you’d never use it.
The Doctor: True. But they don’t know that, do they?

I have finished the game. My prior posts are needed to understand this one.

I should mention on top that if you want to play, use Jim Gerrie’s most recent distribution, which fixes the bug I talked about last time.

From a Star Trek – Dr. Who crossover comic.

I essentially had four obstacles to overcome:

1.) figuring out, of the items I already found, which were part of the Key of Time

2.) finding the item on Peladon

3.) resolving the spider on Mutos

4.) finding the item on Mutos

For the first part, I brute forced things by making a beeline to a single object, picking it up, and quitting the game. That gave me a score.

As the above screenshot implies, the “Dr. Who specific” items (the jelly bears, the scarf, the sonic screwdriver) do not give any points and so are not part of the Key. The bananas from the slime world, the ray-gun from Skaro, the white crystal (not blue crystal) from the fog planet, and the large rock from the Moon all gave varying numbers of points.

This doesn’t mean all the other items are useless. If nothing else, you can give the jelly bears to the Time Lord at the very end who will eat it, just for a little role-playing. Some of the uses turn out to be very abstruse.

For example, I found out (rather too late to help) that typing READ RENTICULATOR will give a number, and that number matches the currently held number of key objects.

The main issue here is that the only information given is the item name; there’s no clue or concept of what the item looks like and it would even make some kind of sense to read the thing.

Moving on to the item on Peladon: I was very, very, close to resolving this one, even though it is a spectacularly unfair. I got lucky (?). Remember I had said sometimes the Peladonians are friendly, and sometimes they are not? They are friendly only right here:

By having this happen, in this location you can now go EAST (the only way to spot this is to LOOK or to return to the room).

I just happened to be lucky enough to hit the right moment to TALK but failed to capitalize on my luck, argh. Anyway: one sionated cumquat. Moving on to Mutos, where I need a walkthrough for both these parts…

…actually, let me back up a bit first and talk about beating the game as a whole. It turns out nearly every location can be handled without taking items from other places; that is, PELADON, SKARO, DIETHYLAMIDE, HIDAOUS, and DARK SIDE OF THE MOON can be visited in any order. You might think hitting Skaro (with the ray gun) is better to go to first, because of the ray gun, which blasts nearly anything into powder. However, you can just evade any creatures that appear without fighting, talking, or doing anything (except the Peladonians, as just mentioned).

If you get 40 TARDIS resets — as the Jim Gerrie version of this game gives you — it means you usually can beat the game in time. I ran a Monte Carlo simulation which failed essentially only once every 100 times. (That means you kept trying to reset making it to GALAFRY at the end and landed on SKARO repeatedly, or something like that.) If you go to the minimum the game’s source gave, 21 visits, you have more like a 25% chance of failure for no fault of your own. And that’s not accounting for the fact this probability is for someone who already has the game solved!

Ok, back to the main narrative. Finishing MUTOS is dependent on items from PELADON and DIETHYLAMIDE. The ray gun does not work on the blue spider; if you recall from last time, that’s where I was getting softlocked on Mutos. It turns out — more or less arbitrarily — that you need a blue crystal, and you need to GIVE SPIDER. I tried, on a different run, giving the crystal, and it didn’t work because I was using the wrong parser syntax.

There is no special item hidden here, and the blue spider is not blocking anything. It turns out the game needed another leap, and in another context I’d call this a clever puzzle, but here it was just infuriating.

Specifically, the “dig here” location lets you use the PICK from back on Peladon, and it digs a different route into the sewers than using the grate. However, there is another identical-looking room which is not marked as such, but digging also works here. Assuming you’ve already defeated the blue spider, you’ll find it here.

The dead blue spider is the last part of the Key.

The game presented what is generally pure exploration (with the weird meta-puzzle of finding key objects) but somehow felt the need to toss in two painful object-related puzzles at the end. Perhaps it is for the best.

As I’ve observed before, fan fiction can hit above its weight class in this era, given the space limitations on text; you don’t actually have to spend the time describing what a Dalek looks like. Unfortunately, I really had trouble feeling like I was ever “in the world” due to all the problems I’ve outlined so this will not satisfy a player who is mainly wanting to pretend they’re hopping around the Dr. Who universe. This is even more a pity in that Dr. Who seems wildly appropriate for adventure games (odd, convoluted solutions to things that don’t really involve violence); fortunately, there will be plenty of more such games to come in the future, including a licensed one in 1984.

But for now, we’re going to return back to the United States, for one piece of unfinished business, followed by a well-regarded Apple II game: The Mask of the Sun.