Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I have finished the game, and as usual, it helps to have read my previous posts.

Via eBay.

So I had a slightly wrong presumption from last time; the ruins I had marked 1, 2, and 3 were out of order. You actually do “ruin 2” last and the other two in whichever order you like, or even skip them.

And yes, the “skip them” implies that what you get from them is technically speaking optional. I’ll explain when I get there. Let’s get back to the action:

Not to the skeletons, but to the phantom where you could just wait out before getting a gold bowl. You were in fact supposed to try to talking to it.

Yes, I looked that up. This hint is sufficient to realize the cursed amulet we’ve been toting around is somehow usable on the skeletons (even though USE AMULET and WAVE AMULET and so forth I tried were useless). You’re supposed to get rather more violent and HIT SKELETON WITH AMULET. Thus I could get away with the silver bowl.

Let’s now go to Ruin 3:

Again, I looked this one up.

I had not bothered to SEARCH the various doors (just looking won’t work) so I missed the golden key as shown. Even on a SEARCH frenzy I wouldn’t have thought to apply it to the door. The golden key lets you enter the central area (only one of the doors is needed).

Down the stairs you can run across a slight bit of maze before encountering a pool. LOOK POOL gives you an image, and that’s the only thing you need from the ruin.

It didn’t register to me to pay close attention to the image — I thought this was indicating some kind of blessing / curse was laid down that would trigger (in a useful way) later.

With that taken care of, it was time to try to figure out the fog room past the corpse, where I kept dying and dying. Taking the bowls and putting them into the order mentioned by the corpse, here’s the pictures you get by examining them.

Maybe they’re meant to represents maps?

Remember, the way this game works is: outdoors you go compass directions, indoors you go forward, left, right, or back. Compass directions aren’t understood at all indoors.

Unless… you’re in this one room, and then you can go southwest.

Oh, and we lose our sidekick.

This fails both at the level of being a breach of game-interface trust (by having an exception indoors for a compass direction) and for making any sense (why would we know what direction southwest is)? I checked walkthroughs and none of them explain the connection of the bowls. Perhaps my trusty readers have an idea.

I’m guessing Ultrasoft extrapolated the puzzle from Crowther/Woods Adventure. That game had a much better use of the idea in the “maze of rooms all alike”. You are explicitly told by a pirate (as they steal your treasure) that they’re going to hide it in the maze, so you know there is supposed to be something there. While every exit in that particular maze is N/S/E/W, leading to a pattern, there is never the implication that the interface has really changed, and there’s another maze (All Different) which does include the diagonal directions. Combining those together makes it satisfying to find the one odd exit, northwest to find a chest:

That is, pure use of direction nevertheless built up a puzzle by making the player form an implicit rule that was not not really a rule, and realizing that facade causes a breakthrough. This differs greatly from the case in Mask, where by all appearances (for absolutely everything else in the game, including the moments after) being indoors shuts down the ability to navigate by compass directions for reasons that could not possibly change.

Ugh. Oh, by the way, we’re now on a timed puzzle, just like you’d expect from a later Sierra On-Line game.

It’s unique for this time, for sure. With the game on “authentic” timing it went too fast for me to react and I just had to guess until I got lucky. Getting past, there are faces on the wall:

They demand the word that marks us as an initiate of the sun. And here I have missed something, and it is kind of the fault of the parser, but more the fault of the way the world universe describes itself. We need to go back outside to the idol with the detached head. (Well, not on this save game. This save game is soft-locked. I mean restart with a fresh file and imagine we fast forward.)

Typing LOOK STATUE before repairing it gets “The idol is broken, but it looks like a stylized jaguar.”

If you GET OUT OF JEEP and then LOOK STATUE again, something different happens.

It was not clear to me at all anything was mechanically different here; there’s no visual indicator you’re in or out of the jeep. This isn’t quite as unfair as the fog puzzle — SEARCH STATUE gets the reply it “doesn’t work here” obliquely implying you aren’t close enough — but it still is the case that repairing the statue now causes the clue to be lost forever.

So, fast-forward back to the faces, with the new magic word in hand:

Searching the altar reveals a place you can drop the amulet.

I chipperly grabbed the mask and went on my way, and found myself sealed off. The game even suggests checking the altar for secrets, but it already was sealed off.

You have enough information that you may be able to figure out what happened. I don’t think it’s a good puzzle — this is a softlock moment, here — but it’s an interesting puzzle. Take a moment to think.

Via eBay, for spoiler space.

Back where the image was at the pool, the skull-person was holding two masks, one that had black eyes and one that had blue eyes. What this is meant to imply is there is a second mask, and we have the fake mask. We need to search again after finding the first one.

This is the True Mask. Once you wear it your disease is cured.

All the world colors go funky and it lets you see a secret passage to escape from the altar room.

The rest of the game is mostly straightforward except tedious. You need to wander through the ruin until you escape. There’s one direction that goes to a maze which is entirely useless to bother with. To make any progress you have to first answer a riddle.

Then there’s some wrong directions and more maze rooms and a maze which you don’t have to even map (according to Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure games) because if you take 52 steps eventually you’ll run across your rival, the one who set off all this curse business in the first place.

He demands the mask. Give it to him.

I hope you got the flute at the very start of the game!

I very much appreciated the “outsider” design, which led to having two major sections that were solely devoted to dispensing clues rather than items. This idea of information as an item isn’t exactly novel for 1982 but making entire sections devoted to just information definitely is. With a single author I’d call they were “enthusiastic and promising” and look forward to what they were doing next. With a whole company, who knows if they can learn from their mistakes, but at least there’s another Ultracode title we’ll eventually make it to.

As far as what we can learn from their “company” model, I did want to give one more quote from that Softline article:

“We do have a number of interlocking teams that generate these products, and we want to give credit where credit is due,” he [Larry Franks] says. “When a single author in a software firm is credited with a product, I really suspect that a lot of essential support is being ignored.” There were five authors listed for Mask of the Sun and seven for Serpent’s Star. “We’ll be sticking to that. The names will change some, as the original core management has gotten out of the production end and into just the tool-designing and business management end.”

In this era we had enough “bedroom coder” types that there often really was only one person involved; I think this quote applies better as prophecy more than ruminating about the years before. However, as games start to get more elaborate with coding and animation, we need to be careful about crediting everything to one person.