Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts on this game.)

I remember playing this for hours when I was younger. With every move toward a new screen the eerie scratching of the Apple disc drive would scuff along making a sound that added to the suspense!

It had to as the game had no sound effects and no music. This somehow made it even spookier. Every screen rendering (slowly) before your eyes as if some creepy phantasm was programming it just for you.

— Via the Retroist, 2015

So my “waterfall” prediction of an easy chain of puzzles was essentially correct. I was misunderstanding a message in one of the rooms.

You can see this coffin by doing EXAMINE on the cart, but because the coffin did not respond to any of my actions (OPEN, MOVE, GET, etc.) I thought perhaps it was just scenery. Since I was out of things to try I gave it another go, and then it finally occurred to me that maybe the wagon was considered a location, and I could ENTER WAGON.

Grr. This likely wasn’t even intended as a puzzle.

Opening the coffin reveals a corpse, some hungry mice, and a silver bullet. You can placate the rats with bread and carry them around.

The silver bullet was what I had been waiting for with the werewolf. LOAD PISTOL and then SHOOT WEREWOLF:

Comparing the two deaths (werewolf and vampire) I still would say the werewolf is slightly more difficult to wrangle, since you only need one item (the cross) for the vampire, and showing crosses to fend off vampires has about as much mythological heft as shooting werewolves with silver bullets does.

Getting back into the game, the mice in hand meant I knew where to take them next. The cat will chase after the mice if you drop them down:

Fortunately, the witch never shows up. I think.

The broom I’ve found no use for (even when attempting to SWEEP every room in the game) but I was able to test my theory about the weak acid revealing the stump’s message.

The knocking teleports you in a cave, I assume the cave previously blocked by rocks. (I think this means the door is never unblocked, although you see it in this picture.)

Again following the waterfall, I could get the flies with the flypaper. Before taking them over to the next logical place (the bullfrog) I tried reading the book.

Trying to take the book teleports you out of the cave. It just a couple steps then to feeding a bullfrog some flies:

Again quite direct, even telling us where to go next. Is this game about to fall? Heading to the goblin and saying the magic word causes the goblin to drop the key and run screaming.

I was then able to take the key over to the locked grate and open it, finding an elixir underneath.

And there the waterfall finally ends. The book suggests the sequence SHAKE ELIXIR, POUR ELIXIR, CLAP HANDS, and all three actions work but get NOTHING HAPPENS in the place I’ve tried it — the statue and the sealed sarcophagus. My guess is we need an open sarcophagus and then it will work?

I’m close to out of options though. Other than the elixir I still have yet to use the shiny ring from the castle, and the broom from the witch hut. I tried every verb on my list on both the sarcophagus and statue to no effect, and I’ve tried everything I can think of with the ring. I did make one other discovery, in a log cabin that I previously could get nothing to happen…

…but I haven’t gotten anything more than this to happen. (The head is incidentally not in the text description.) I suspect I’m just looking for one more waterfall and then I’ll be at the end of the game, but it is of course possible there will be a last surprise.

PC-98 Japanese version as sold by Starcraft, via Mobygames.