(Continued from my previous post, please read that one first before this one.)
Two of my biggest weaknesses struck me since last time: magical effects that require testing in arbitrary locations, and missing room exits.
Ground floor, from Oldgamesitalia. Includes some new rooms which I’ll be talking about.
Before getting to that, let me talk about my waste of time. Specifically, I decided to try mapping the maze, which I last time described as absolutely classical, but no:
What are you going to do? DROP LUTE
Paths of a twisted gravity snake away in front and behind.
You are in the maze.
If you drop an item for mapping purposes, it goes away to the start of the maze. The start of the maze is the only room that has a unique room description. This means, for many purposes, the maze would be unmappable, but I decided to at least test the exits of all four directions from the start, just to see if there was an immediate route back that could be used to distinguish some of the maze rooms from each other. Here’s a map part-way through the process:
Notice I have two rooms marked in blue; those two were “indistinguishable” based on the information I had at that moment; going north in both cases leads back to the entrance, and I couldn’t tell if they were two separate rooms or both the same room. I also had a few “second step” rooms tossed in there; while I didn’t have a “return exit” for going west from the entrance, I knew going north and then east would return to the entrance, so I wanted to put that information in.
I might have eventually still given up, except I had a breakthrough later here:
I found that going east and then heading south from the room to the west of the entrance would return back to the entrance. It occurred to me the exact same effect could happen with a loop — that is, a room exit that just goes back to the room itself — so I tried assuming it was a loop, and testing the loop once, twice, three times, and four times; that mean that the probably (nothing here is guaranteed) that I was in fact simply looping back to the same room over and over.
The loops were enough for me to start telling the rooms apart, and filling in the rest of the maze, consolidating rooms I knew to be the same.
Now, the grand effect of this was to find a maze with nothing! So either I did something wrong or there’s a gimmick later; I think I’ve found the clue for the gimmick, and it is the sort of thing that doesn’t work until you know about it. I’ll come back to it later. That means this was all likely a “peek behind the programmer curtain” moment; we weren’t supposed to have been able to map this at all, and the maze without the gimmick wasn’t designed with a solution in mind. (Another related moment happened back when we were playing Ferret; we had used the bolt from a weapon dropping as a room marker for mapping purposes, and discovered there was only one “room”. This was a bug because the desert was supposed to swallow up everything dropped. The single room was simply a mechanic to allow a giant desert without having to implement one, so the system could re-use the same place and change the player’s “coordinate”.)
So, with the maze being useless, I plodded around back in the castle proper, and finally poked at some hints, as I was getting especially frustrated at the basement section, which seemed unresponsive to anything I tried.
You are in the castle dungeon, once called ‘The Tomb’. The floor is covered in skeletons.
I can see a hole on the wall.
Trying to EXAMINE SKELETONS gets “It is our common fate. But can’t you think of something happier?” and SEARCH SKELETONS gets “He who seeks finds.” (The latter seems to be standard for typing SEARCH anywhere.) So I assumed I was supposed to be bringing in an outside item, but no: you’re supposed to pick up a bone even though it isn’t described in the room. (The narrator promised it wouldn’t have any more undescribed objects! Naughty!)
With the bone in you can use it to push the button in the hole without having it slice your hand off.
What are you going to do? INSERT BONE
A blade comes down sharply, slicing the bone cleanly in two. Lucky it wasn’t your arm!
A crack slowly widens…..
This leads over to another room with a “studded bludgeon” and then an exit back to the ground floor of the castle. I have yet to put the bludgeon to any use.
While I was mid-way through typing this post out Matt W. managed to figure out the puzzle in the comments, and he had an extra comment worth highlighting:
I remember when Marco Innocenti submitted the first Andromeda game to the IFComp there was a bit of discussion about how the Italian IF scene tended more toward elaborate descriptions and intuitive leaps in the puzzles than the English-speaking parser scene, which led to some agita when some players got stuck early. The unmentioned parachute reminded me of that, though it’s very fairly clued by the try-and-die and doesn’t waste any of your time since it’s the first move.
After some more struggle (and let’s be honest, some loss of trust in the game after the bone puzzle) I decided to peek at what to do next. This was a little fairer, as I missed examining something:
What are you going to do? LOOK
You are in a long room with a high-arched ceiling supported by two rows of tall columns. The columns, though eroded by time, still bear the signs of patient workmanship by skilled masons. In the centre of the room, a shorter stone pillar rests on a low pedestal.
I had already tried to examine the columns with no luck, and mentally I thought that meant I covered the “shorter stone pillar”, but no, that thing is a PILLAR, not a COLUMN.
What are you going to do? EXAMINE PILLAR
On the capital of the pillar is an engraving, bearing, in silvery metallic letters, half of a powerful magical word: ‘ID’
Fair enough. The game being explicit about it being half a word means it immediately occurred to me the other half was the page from the library I had already discovered (“IOT”, making the word either “IOTID” or “IDIOT”). In case you’re curious, the same joke happens in Italian, as “idiota” is the word for “idiot” so the magic fragments are “id” and “iota”. Either way, you put them together backwards:
What are you going to do? IOTID
The sound of the magic word echoes among the ancient vaults…
An entire wall of shelves rotates on itself. I glimpse a large room.You’re in the library.
I can see a book on the lectern.
This opens up a throne room.
You’re in the ancient throne room, where the Laird used to administer justice and receive subjects. At the sides of the room are two rows of niches where the Laird’s personal guards stood. The imposing wooden throne is finely crafted, down to the smallest details. In front of the throne is a walled-up door, which must have once been the main entrance from the hallway.
The throne has an uncomfortable cushion, where you can discovered a wooden box underneath. You can find a scroll in a language you can’t read in the box, but take it back to the library and the book, which turns out to be a Gaelic dictionary, and TRANSLATE SCROLL WITH BOOK.
What are you going to do? READ BOOK
It’s a dictionary of ancient Gaelic.
What are you going to do? TRANSLATE SCROLL WITH BOOK
It says:
‘Only by the good use of sense will you find your way out from the labyrinth’
I had incidentally tried to do LISTEN while in the maze already (there’s a sound of chains, but it always comes off the same — at least prior to reading this clue). I still intend to go back there, but I haven’t made it yet as I got distracted by another magical word.
You are in the war room, where all the most serious and important decisions were made. In terms of furniture, there’s a round table surrounded by eight chairs.
What are you going to do? EXAMINE TABLE
A wise maxim is engraved on the edge of the table: ‘Not all swords wound with their blades’
(Not this bit — I don’t actually know what it goes to, but since it’s right next to the Throne Room I thought I’d mention it now.)
No, it turns out — again poking at hints — you can take the bagpipes from the music room over to the book with human skin, and play the bagpipes in order to open the book. I have no idea why you’d do this. (The Italian intuitive solution thing again, I guess?)
You are in the Alchemist’s cell. All around are crucibles, pestles, copper stills and bizarre glass containers of extremely contorted shapes. On the shelves are many heavy tomes of magic, alchemy and spells. In the centre of the room is a small table that rests on three legs shaped like the paws of some monstrous animal. On the table is a single heavy volume bound in black leather:
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”
What are you going to do? PLAY BAGPIPES
The volume opens to a page carrying a finely decorated bookmark.
The page gives us the magic word BIGMEOW.
You may recall I already found a cat (who I was able to pick up via the use of milk). BIGMEOW causes the cat to get huge and to eat us.
The ASCII art is also in the original.
So hungry cat needs a target, eh? Well, there’s one more place that I also extracted via hints. I had thought (after testing twice) that the spiral staircases leading to ramparts only led up — all four have the same room description, too — but the one in the southeast, and only in the southeast, also goes down.
What are you going to do? D
You are in a room with a spiral staircase.
What are you going to do? D
You’re in a room with a spiral staircase, and a narrow passageway to the north.
What are you going to do? N
You’re walking along a large tunnel carved into the rock that forms the
foundations of the castle.
I can see a ferocious ogre with sharp fangs.What are you going to do? BIGMEOW
The cat grows until it becomes huge………….
It watches you carefully………….
observe the ogre carefully……….
The cat devours the ogre and dies of indigestion.
Again, not terribly fair, but I’m still taking this moment to do a “reset” since I’m a little more than halfway through the game (based on the score) and try to avoid hints for a bit longer. Some of the issue is simply vibing with the unwritten rules (like how the “pillar” is part of the main room description paragraph but still important, or the bone can be there and not mentioned even when you try to look, or the extra-down-exit trick, or the arbitrary bagpipe location) so perhaps the back end of this will go a little smoother than the front half.
No guarantees, though!
Renga in Blue 
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