Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I am finished, and you should read my previous posts about this game before getting to this one.

Old printed walkthrough that comes with a copy of Transylvania on eBay.

I almost managed the feat of being able to say Transylvania pulled off not having any jank puzzles, but alas, I ended up looking up how to deal with the moose head.

Before doing that, though, I realized I could RIDE BROOM. This results in a colorful description of flying through the air before crashing in a tree.

This is only a hint for the cabin insofar as indicating it is important. This would have been a perfect opportunity for a little more detail, to avoid having the player refer to a second-order object on the moose head itself, and PULL ANTLERS.

I suspect the original text version was just fine, but the author got tempted by not only having the head only be rendered visually but making the player refer to the antlers as an entirely separate object.

Searching the cloak finds a lock pick. I took that over to the door at the cave (which I suspected might stay closed, but I guess not) and popped it open to find a cave with a crystal ball.

The crystal ball can’t be taken, just looked at. It reveals a figure wearing a wizard’s cloak (check) and a shiny gold ring (check) and waving the ring at the statue. In other words, waving the ring (which I had tried many places) does work, I just needed to be wearing the wizard cloak too (which I had just found) in order for it to activate.

This reveals an alien creature who says he is “deeply indebted” to you and then crushes your ring.

It is possible to get a little stuck from here because now you just need to wait for time to pass. Eventually you see a “shooting star”.

After doing so you can head back to the place with the statue and find a new encounter, a flying saucer.

This scene leaves you with a mysterious black box with a button. But this is exactly what you need to win, as the button serves to open the sarcophagus with the princess.

Now winning is just a matter of following the directions from the book: wave elixir, pour elixir, and clap hands.

Before getting to the end, a digression.

I’ve come across many people for whom Transylvania is one of their core childhood memories; Jimmy Maher makes it one of the rare early graphical adventures on his Hall of Fame list. So people certainly remember this one fondly, and…

…actually, I was just fine with it, antlers notwithstanding. This clearly was intended as a romp, and one that had appeal to children (attested by many childhood recollections I’ve read) so I’m not going to ding too much on the simplistic writing.

The game design was curiously open and mostly attempted to be “easy”, but that’s far better than the games we’ve seen (ahem The Mask of the Sun) that try to add very hard elements.

Speaking of The Mask of the Sun, I’d like to go double-meta for a moment, as I found this thread while searching around for reviews at the intfiction forum. It’s about Apple II graphical adventures as a whole.

I couldn’t believe I saw them again. They were all terrible adventure games. The writing is especially awful. The art was mind blowing at the time, especially because I understood the advances in Apple II programming that were producing the art in these games…

I really remembered Mask of the Sun, and I was excited to watch it be played on YouTube, and then, it was really terrible IF. It starts with a story, and then it’s a lot of maze, of roads. Solve maze, go inside, new maze. Almost at random, you get to put a thing from one place to another place.

Especial reward, an animation that was not possible on Apple II. Oh, that’s why I remember it.

— J. Robinson Wheeler

There is the general implication (not just this quote, but elsewhere) that these games are only good for nostalgia. Mask of the Sun indeed had some design issues which I went into, but it’s certainly not true that every game is bad in the same way.

When I write these things, I want to distinguish between things in a old style that you have to grant to move forward, and things that are genuinely bad regardless of style. An inventory limit is an example of the former: there’s nothing technically inherently wrong with one, and not having one means you miss out on puzzles like Magic Mirror or Adventure Quest had. Eventually games started to get so much inventory that they started to obtain a “rucksack” style object, but this is not just good or bad, but a tradeoff.

On the other hand, something like the antlers being separate is a bad design choice overall, even compared to other games of the time (which did not necessarily do such a thing).

One of the ways paradigm shifts in gaming happen is to revive one of the previously “bad” elements with a twist. If I told you about a game that is timed and you have to keep starting from the beginning to win, you might think I meant an NES game, but I also mean the multi-award-winning Outer Wilds. Part of what Dark Souls did was simply restore the idea that the difficulty of a game can push back, and the “troll level” in Mario Maker came from a similar re-think of the rules of game design. We shouldn’t think of our current state of game design as perfected and older design as regressive: there are different expectations and design goals that can be met.

Referring back to Transylvania, the time limit and inventory limit (onerous to modern players) clearly are meant to have a particular effect, and it was on hour 4 that I finally went to triumph with the princess, which made it satisfying in a way that would otherwise be hard to duplicate.

There is a sequel, although it goes in a different direction: the hero from this game, Princess Sabrina, and Prince Erik find a vampire lord has killed King John the Good. You can switch characters while playing. That doesn’t seem to match the ending here, so maybe alternate universe? In any case, we’ll need to wait a while before arriving at The Crimson Crown.