Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post.)

From Launchbox.

In a stark reminder of how different two experiences of an adventure game can be, Will Moczarski reports he finished this game in a handful of hours. I have put significant effort in with no real progress. This may be a matter of the Atari version of the game being more obscure, or me missing one single verb or object in the right place causing a cascade, or just bad luck.

I have found things in the rooms I’ve already mentioned but none of them have allowed me to pass my two main obstacles, the quicksand…

…and the arrow.

To be absolutely thorough, I made sure to LOOK in every room using every plausible noun as well as LISTEN and SMELL. The first useful LOOK was in the very first room of the dying land, where I did LOOK PLANT on the supposed plant-life and found an IVY VINE I could take.

Although the game is finicky and requires you type IVY VINE in full, not IVY or VINE, otherwise you get the weird sensation of typing TAKE VINE and having the game tell you it isn’t visible despite it being listed as visible.

The vine is described as “long and slender” and I assume will be a rope at some point. The next room over I found — again in the plant-life — a fallen-over tree with termites. However, I could not get anything else to happen with either TREE or TERMITES, and that’s after forming my standard verb-list and testing everything.

A quick aside on the testing-list: while it certainly is useful to instantly have at hand the game lets you TURN, PUSH, and MOVE things, forming this kind of list also helps get a sense of what the parser responses will be like beforehand, which can prevent chasing phantoms. For example, just typing PUSH by itself gives

OK..OOMPH..SO WHAT?

which is detailed enough it might be a cue in some games that the action is right, just you need some assistance, like the truss in Pythonesque. Since this is clearly a generic not-even-type-an-object message, its appearance should not be marked as remarkable at all. Similarly, THROW with no verb says

IT BOUNCES BACK AND OUCH!

which means you aren’t supposed to be improving your aim: you’re just barking up the wrong tree.

Returning to the game, the tree gave me no joy, and moving on to the very next room yielded a pillar.

I think from the description the pillar is supposed to be adjacent to the entrance to the quicksand to the east, or at the quicksand itself somewhere? Either way I cannot refer to it (again I ran down my verb list).

In the quicksand itself you get one extra message about how “you’re either shrinking or sinking” before you die. This indicates there should be an opportunity for extrication, but the way the parser works is odd: it intercepts basically everything I’ve tried to type except for dropping items. This includes some logical self-rescue attempts like THROW IVY VINE.

Moving south, to a misty haze, I technically found two things. One, by using LISTEN, was the voice of Abe Lincoln.

The other, just by typing LOOK, was finding an ancient door in the ground. The door is unfortunately locked.

To the east is a truly odd location: a field of soft earth where DIG (which normally fails to work) will “succeed” but with no result in the room as a consequence.

I tried DIG ten times just in case it was one of those cumulative dig puzzles (although so far games have gone that route have had an item you can find on turn 1, but a second item you can find on turn 2). My guess is I will be told in the future somehow I should dig here and that’s when digging will become useful.

Climbing up to where Demon Trivia was, I found nothing useful, so I started trying at the arrow room some more. Again, the weird “dropping takes no time” element of the parser game up…

…but otherwise, any other parser action at all resulted in death. (Including making a typo and putting in DRP HELMET trying to get the screenshot above.)

I feel like I’m missing something simple and fundamental like an exit. The diagonal directions do work but none of them have revealed a “new” direction, they’ve just duplicated the cardinal directions, so I have declined to map them.

Please no hints for now, unless you don’t know the answer and just want to speculate. I’ve seen this game described as “outtakes from Lucifer’s Realm” so it genuinely might be short, but that’s only true if you’re making forward progress!

BONUS ADDENDUM: While reviewing this post for typos, I thought to drop the wood box with no seams at the tree with the termites. The termites swarmed the wood box, but then I was unable to open or take it; LOOK WOOD BOX gets YOU CAN’T SEE IT WELL. So I’m doing something right here but I need to tweak my implementation somewhat.