Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Can you escape the padded cell? Will the old lady hit you with her knitting? How much longer will you have to wait for a 96B bus? These and many other questions will be answered in PYTHONESQUE.

— From the Winter 1982 Supersoft Catalog

Supersoft we’ve seen twice now before: Brian Cotton’s game Catacombs (for a while lost media, first of a series, we’ll get to the rest sometime) and more relevantly for today, their own version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The company received permission from Pan Books to publish Hitch Hiker’s but got in a legal tangle trying to re-publish the game (so re-named it); here, we have a game that started life as Pythonesque — as in the Monty Python comedy troupe — and later again surfaced for the C64 as Streets of London. There was no legal tangle to speak of but perhaps the company was a little nervous.

From Mobygames.

The authors (Allen Webb and Grant Privett) also have credits on The Cricklewood Incident and The Kilburn Encounter which allegedly just rework the elements of Pythonesque on different platforms. They look different enough I’ll keep them separate for now (meaning they’ll wait for a later year).

The game starts, oddly enough, with you choosing a difficulty level (1 to 5, I went with easy, usually a wise choice on old adventures where the interest is more in puzzle-solving). You then wake up in a padded cell and decide you need to go locate the Holy Grail.

This one absolutely spins the wheel on random, and draws items from famous Monty Python movies and sketches, like the Holy Hand Grenade. The structure is heavily surreal in a way we have yet to see in this blog.

Namely, the game is spread out amongst many small micro-chunks. You teleport (either via random chance, or using a magic word I’ll show off in a moment) and might be in a one-or-two-room area, and one of the directions will drop you right back in front of the padded cell again.

The magic word comes from a piece of toffee paper just outside the entrance: “OH YANGTZE”. It teleports you to completely at random to one of the micro-chunks I’ve been mentioning.

If you don’t recognize the words (I admit I’ve only seen a couple episodes in whole and the “greatest hits”) they’re from the skit asking the deep question “Why is it that so many of Britain’s top goalies feel moved to write about the Yangtze?”

I’m not sure everything is meant to be a reference, although in the same area where you find the toffee paper is one of the most famous ones, one of Hell’s Grannies.

In game form, she isn’t as threatening, or at least I have yet to have her try to hit me as illustrated at the front cover at the top of this post. As implied, there’s also a bus stop there, but the problem is not getting beaten at the bus stop, but rather lacking in money.

I’ve gone through various runs where my character’s finances go up, but I have no idea why or how they do. Money is important not just for the bus but for the fact some places require you to buy things rather than just letting you take them.

The hand grenade just lands with a thud if you try to throw it and doesn’t explode (you can’t PULL PIN). The machine gun I’ve managed to use on the old lady but that just nets you a dead old lady and no game progress.

If you do have money to ride the bus it works like the magic word — you get on, get off, and find yourself at some new random location. Also, sometimes you randomly just get swiped up for no apparent reason and sent to a new place.

I don’t have anything resembling a complete map yet — the random aspect (and fact some directions will teleport you to the start, and you can’t tell which ones until you try) make my efforts scattershot, and I have some puzzles sticking me in some locations besides. Let me give a far-out view first, just to show general patterns:

Blue marks “teleport back to the start” rooms. The tag in the corner marks possible landing points (sometimes you get more than one in a section). You’ll also notice some rooms are completely closed in, and I’ve gotten myself stuck before, because the only way out seems to be via magic word, and the magic word only has a limited number of uses.

Above is one of the larger contiguous sections. Going “up” at the vertical cliff requires gear, you get stopped by an “oaf” trying to go north at the tavern, and while you can get past the Nasty Knight Types in order to enter the Dark Forest (they want a shrubbery for heading south, but will let you go north), the Dark Forest consists of two rooms where you get stuck in an endless loop.

I know where the shrubbery is — it is for sale elsewhere, but on the run where I had this encounter I didn’t have the shrubbery in hand (again, the only movement is random, and you have a limited uses of the magic word).

I have a hard time encapsulating all of what’s going on. Some of it is fairly raunchy (that Galahad scene from Holy Grail is in, you end up in the hospital; fortunately the hospital just lets you teleport back to the start). Some of it is plain confusing:

If you take the hammer somehow the table comes off and the whippet runs away. Is this another reference?

I’m not sure yet whether to be positive or negative about the game, although the number of softlocks I’ve hit is starting to tilt to a thumbs-down. Maybe there’s a way to manage the movement I’m not seeing. It’s simply very hard to test objects on things to see if they form solutions when there is very little guarantee I’ll have item X at puzzle Y.

I also don’t think the comedy is hitting, really — it’s so far just been references rather than actually trying to tell jokes — but I’ll reserve judgment on that until I manage to solve some puzzles (or grab for the walkthrough once I get frustrated by the randomness).