Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(This is a direct continuation of my prior posts on this game.)

In addition to Norell having a port of Adventure to DOS, as mentioned in the thread here, Chuck Crayne also made an entirely different CP/M port of Adventure under the label California Digital Engineering. It’s a regular port with 350 points.

Based on investigation in that thread there’s no obvious hints that parts of the code were re-used for the original Crayne games, but it’s useful to see yet another connection. Even if the DOS engine was made “from scratch” deep familiarity with the original engine surely had some influence.

From a California Digital Engineering ad.

Weirdly, it is possible The Phantom’s Revenge is also making yet another Adventure-port reference, this time to Gordon Letwin’s port (originally Heathkit, and eventually the TRS-80 game Microsoft Adventure) but I’ll be getting to that.

My progress didn’t feel like “solving puzzles” technically even though I marked some of the puzzles off my previous list. Nobody thinks of the keys in original DOOM as being “puzzles” — there’s a blue door, you find a blue key, now you can open it. Similarly, here there were items I found that defeated obstacles where the use was 100% clear, the hard part was finding the item in the first place. The gating was by geographic-discovery as opposed to ratiocinating about a puzzle-dilemma.

My gameplay loop hence has felt different than my standard adventure playthrough. As illustration, here’s part of my map as I left off last time:

This is at the prison area (the YNGVI room is up on top) and some of the rooms have already been marked; this mark means I have checked north, south, east, west, northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest, up, and down, and made sure I haven’t missed any exits. The room descriptions have mostly been nice about listing all exits, but since my last session I’ve discovered one quite intentional deviation — and sometimes I just misread stuff — so this kind of care is necessary for play.

The “Dungeon” for example, I poked in and out of quite quickly on my last pass, but I had not marked it yet so I knew it still needed checking.

A sense of horror fills you as you realize you are in an old torture chamber. There is a rack, with tongs and braziers. One doorway leads west, and a dark opening is to the south.

The door of the iron maiden is open, showing a dark path that leads north.

S

You are wandering through the rat-infested dungeon.

The dungeon doesn’t say anything about exits, and in fact all exits work: this is another small maze.

This is the dungeon.

E

This is the dungeon.

S

You are wandering through the rat-infested dungeon.

The whole area is full of dust and cobwebs.

OK, this is technically a puzzle, but it is heavily telegraphed: I was carrying around a whiskbroom with nothing to show for it yet, and one of the dungeon rooms quite specifically talks about dust and cobwebs.

Your efforts raise a thick cloud of … achoo! … dust, and dislodge a trapdoor that swings open to show a dark opening in the … achoo! ACHOO! … floor.

D

You have found your way into an ancient crypt. The stones under your feet are worn, as if by the footsteps of people long dead, and the whole area seems old beyond belief. A narrow flight of stone steps leads up to a dark opening in the ceiling, and there is an equally dark arched doorway to the east.

Again, in a general gameplay sense, while this was a new discovery in the sense of a “wanderer explorer”, it didn’t feel like I had resolved some tricky gate. I think a good comparison is an RPG where you’re finding some new path in a dungeon, but not doing any work to get there other than look carefully. It still can be satisfying gameplay but it doesn’t happen as much with modern game density (and the implicit idea that a puzzle that isn’t really a puzzle is a bad thing).

Here’s another snapshot of map creation in progress. I tested every exit from the Crypt and marked it as “done”; then I moved on the room to the east, some Catacombs (“You are in a vast and silent catacomb, lined with the tombs of un-named, ancient dead.”) and found it was another maze, so I dropped an item (my trusty spoon, used at the start of the game for digging a whole and now my opening maze placeholder). So far on the image above I’ve tested west, southwest, and south, finding it to be looping.

Continuing my way around, I found every exit to be looping. In such a case I’ve also been testing my various magic words: FANTOME, HAM, and YNGVI. I’m not expecting any of them to work as they already have their locations, but I want to be careful about false assumptions. I’ve also found, by accident, that CHRISTINE is another transport-word, but I don’t know where it goes (“You can’t go in that direction, sorry” — like FANTOM and so forth do in the wrong place).

I don’t know yet if this means if the Catacombs is a puzzle that needs resolving, or just a softlock we’re supposed to avoid. I’ve also been stalled such in a Magic Forest quite near the Phantom’s “coffin” residence for similar reasons, although going north or south causes a unique effect:

There are thousands of strange twisted trees all around you, and oddly dressed people are running back and forth among them. The forest is there wherever you look, endless, frightening.
There is a tattered page of sheetmusic lying here.

D

You are in the Magic Forest.

There are thousands of strange twisted trees all around you, and oddly dressed people are running back and forth among them. The forest is there wherever you look, endless, frightening.
There is a tattered page of sheetmusic lying here.

N

With a sickening “THUD!” you hit your head against the cold, hard surface of a Magic Forest tree.
You are in the Magic Forest.

There are thousands of strange twisted trees all around you, and oddly dressed people are running back and forth among them. The forest is there wherever you look, endless, frightening.
There is a tattered page of sheetmusic lying here.

It could be that the Magic Forest is a puzzle and the Catacombs is a softlock, or they’re both softlocked, or they’re both intended as puzzles. I don’t know yet. It was time to move on (via a saved game) and explore more rooms, though.

The Warden’s Office have exits listed to the north and east, but I hadn’t tested them yet to a guard dog. (“A large dog with a spiked collar is sitting here. He looks like he might bite if you annoyed him.”) Incidentally, trying to attach the leash the dog says “there isn’t any switch on it” so either I’m going up the wrong tree or I am genuinely missing an item. It turns out only north is blocked by the dog, and east leads to a whole new area, so I kept mapping:

This is mostly of a “warden’s house”. You’ll notice not all rooms are marked; this means I haven’t done the thorough-exit check yet. In the Antechamber, I hit gold and hadn’t bothered to loop back yet:

This is a large rectangular room that was used as an office by the prison warden. Obvious exits lead east and north.

A large dog with a spiked collar is sitting here. He looks like he might bite if you annoyed him.

E

You are in a small antechamber of some sort. It is simply, but attractively, decorated with nooses and pictures of famous condemned criminals. Passages lead east and west, and there is a doorway in the north wall.

SE

You have found a secret passage that twists around through the prison walls. There are dark, forbidding openings to the east and northwest.

The game quite explicitly left the exit to the southeast unmentioned. This means my test-all-exits has not been in vain but it also means, since there’s at least one, I have to keep going. From an author’s perspective, sometimes it is tempting to violate some gameplay norm once for effect, with the knowledge that it only happens once; from the player’s perspective, they don’t know if the gameplay norm will be violated in the future, so they have to imagine it can occur an infinite number of times!

this is a nice comfortable study. There is a fireplace, some comfortable chairs, and the walls are lined with books. There are some rather plain doorways to the north and east.

There is a beautifully carved jade horse here.

E

You are in the warden’s bedroom. It is rather plain, and the only doorway leads west.

There is a document lying on the floor marked “ONE ONLY”

This document solves another puzzle, the guarded gate. It technically is slightly ambiguous (so requires a little thought process) but in practice I knew immediately where it had to go, so the effect was more like finding the blue DOOM key.

The warden house area incidentally has a newspaper clipping which help get through yet another door:

This is the east end of the prison exercise yard. There are high stone walls all around you.

There is a yellowed newspaper clipping lying here.

GET CLIPPING

Okay.

READ CLIPPING

“Operatic soprano Mille. Christine Daae has the perfect combination for a star: a magnificent voice coupled with a perfect face and figure. The beautious Mlle. Daae, born 112371, shines like a diamond on the stage of the Paris Opera.”

The oddly-given date suggested I should use the number at the vault in the office, and indeed it works (you just type the number like it was a magic word), although the only item in the vault is another treasure (a “lovely pink diamond”).

I shouldn’t be quite so blasé about the puzzles because there were two “obvious” puzzles I didn’t recognize right away. In one case I mentioned both parts in my last post: a card that said “Joe sent me” and a “dive” that wouldn’t let me in the back. By writing my post and reading it over I realized they had to go together.

This is obviously a low dive. Big burly men in black shirts, fallen women, and computer freaks of all sorts line the dirty bar. A crazed young man is frantically pushing buttons on a big machine with bright blinking lights. There is a small, inconspicuous door in the east wall.

E

This is a well-concealed backroom, filled with strange sounds. The air is heavy with odorous smoke. Cheap chairs line the walls, and people of all sexes lean back listlessly with sheets of paper in their hands and odd dark-screened devices in front of them. Some are muttering to themselves, others laughing.

There’s a very expensive Persian rug on the floor.

There’s no acknowledgement the item even does the solving, someone might run into the Parallel Universe Problem and solve it by accident. Also, that second room is described as a HACKER’S DEN in the title description, which strongly suggests to me another room specifically in Microsoft Adventure:

YOU ARE IN A STRANGE ROOM WHOSE ENTRANCE WAS HIDDEN BEHIND THE CURTAINS. THE FLOOR IS CARPETED, THE WALLS ARE RUBBER, THE ROOM IS STREWN WITH PAPERS, LISTINGS, BOOKS, AND HALF-EMPTY DR. PEPPER BOTTLES. THE DOOR IN THE SOUTH WALL IS ALMOST COVERED BY A LARGE COLOUR POSTER OF A NUDE CRAY-1 SUPERCOMPUTER.

A SIGN ON THE WALL SAYS, “SOFTWARE DEN.”

THE SOFTWARE WIZARD IS NOWHERE TO BE SEEN.

THERE ARE MANY COMPUTERS HERE, MICROS, MINIS, AND MAXIS.

This might just be coincidence; there is no scene similar to the Microsoft game where taking a computer causes you to get punished.

The second “obvious” puzzle I missed was involving the “big round black thing, with a hole in it”, and to be fair that description is vague. However, if you grab it and take INVENTORY you find it is actually a “LARGE BLACK INNER TUBE” — in other words, it lets you travel along the river. I had already traveled along the river but didn’t realize it was helping! I did have one other river location I had missed earlier (before I had the tube) leading me to a new area:

There seems to be no end to the river. Your eyes rest in fascination on the debris that floats along beside you. There is a narrow dark niche cut into the east bank here.

E

This is a dark niche in the east bank of the river. An ominous vaulted opening leads off to the east, and the river rushes by on the west.

E

You are moving along the watery path of an ancient Roman aquaduct. A dark vaulted opening leads west, and there is a rather ornate mosaic-covered archway to the south.

S

You are standing in the vast hall of an ancient Roman Bath. Everywhere you turn your lamp you see fabulous mosaics of sea creatures and lovely naked nymphs on the walls. There is a large arched opening in the north wall, and a hole in the floor where the tiles caved in. If you go down, you won’t be able to come back up.

There’s a piece of rare coral here, carved into a mermaid.

Still, even with this moment of realization this still felt more like expanding the map in an RPG (without puzzle-blockers) than in an adventure. I did technically solve two other things: I played music at an organ and found a new treasure…

There is a magnificent pipe organ against the south wall. Its gleaming pipes, pedals, and manuals seem to fill the room.

PLAY ORGAN

The organ swings slowly out from the wall, revealing a dark opening in the south wall.

…and I tried digging at the beach and found a pearl necklace…

There is a small patch of sand here, and the seawater laps gently back and forth just south of you.

DIG

Your digging uncovers a lovely pearl necklace!

…but really, I am only just now filling in the last pieces of the jigsaw puzzle’s borders before starting on the hard work of the “stumpers” of the game. My updated obstacle list:

obstacles: single large rat, multiple rats, guard dog, going west at starting prison cell, the magic forest “maze”, the catacombs “maze”, figuring out where CHRISTINE gets used

(Oh, I was able to get to the prison cell from the other side but I still get stopped by a guard, and there’s clearly a room there I need to see. So it’s the same puzzle, now just I have two ways to get to the same place.)