I’ve finished the game, and my prior posts are needed for this one to make sense.
It’s pretty clear, reaching the end of the game, that Jyym Pearson was just goofing around. All of the remaining puzzles were absurd in some way. I almost feel like he was trying to channel William Denman (of Med Systems who published this, and made the Asylum games) but Asylum did it better somehow. Also, Denman makes a actual cameo.
From 80 Micro, 1983 Special Edition. “Winston Churchill, Abe Lincoln, and Groucho Marx guide you to ways to remedy your mistakes and save Paradise.”
Continuing directly from last time, I had killed a demon who had left behind a hand.
If this was a “closed room” puzzle it wouldn’t be too terrible; the problem is I wasn’t sure if I was missing an item from previous rooms (I was, but it doesn’t affect this puzzle). With a hand and the objects being held the only one that goes together with it is the gold ring. PUT GOLD RING ON HAND:
Arbitrary un-clued magic for the win! Buckle in everyone, it’s only going to get weirder from here.
This screenshot shows all my items shuffled over.
I didn’t have much to work with other than a door with a plate. Nothing seemed to help from my item stock, so I went on another trip trying to look / listen / smell all the rooms to see if something new came up. I don’t think this was a new thing; rather I missed it because the placement is so utterly absurd:
This is just a random hallway room right before the Nazi hall with the timber. This captures the spirit of bombing every single direction in every single room in Zelda 1 just in case you missed something.
I get what’s going on, here: the author is trying to squeeze nearly every single room into having something of interest, and out of the “opening area” this is the only one that was “just a hall”. This still is, in a narrative sense, absolutely silly — we’re supposed to be getting help to save Heaven, yet this particular help can only be received by listening in a very particular room. This is decidedly crossword winning over narrative (except the crossword isn’t really a crossword but rather a puzzle requiring random-search).
PUT MAGNET ON PLATE:
A few more steps leads to a crevice where you can use the board again, and a steel door the requires the tiny key that previously worked on the desk. (Again, any manner of narrative is just being pitched, since the tiny key previously worked on the door Eichmann was sitting at.)
Inside the development room are a bunch of programmers chained to computers and William Denman, who leads you back out.
The steel door then can no longer be opened, and this is the end of the line.
I was quite stumped but I went for the structural solving juke: there had to be a reason for this section. Doing yet another pass through all the previous rooms yielded no new things, so there was still a secret to be found. Back at the crevice, which I hadn’t bothered doing a LOOK at (given it is a repeat) there’s the message that SOMETHING’S HERE. You need to CLIMB CREVICE (not the board).
Doing this action kills you on the other crevices. This is a “repeated element” fakeout puzzle where an author looks like they repeat an element but there is a subtle difference.
This puzzle wasn’t terrible, even in the confines of the parser, but it gets followed by something absolutely as off-the-wall as humanly possible.
ABE’S VOICE CRIES,Did you listen
to Marx, he knows the clue.
I spent some time hanging out a the opening (where Groucho Marx is one of the crowd of people in the conference room) thinking I had missed some interaction or clue. No, the game railroads you into typing LISTEN to get any effect.
What the statue looks like, from Lucifer’s Realm.
I guess the mindset to be here is like original Adventure (where I genuinely liked the PLOVER puzzle); in that game, though it set you up with magic words to begin with making it possible to have a lateral connection. Here, this is the only magic word in the game. Just type on its own, without applying the verb SAY to it: GROUCHO.
Yes, that’s genuinely the ending. You then get sent back to the bearded man at the podium.
Things gets rather meta.
“God” continues:
Nothing that has happened to you since your death has been real… It’s been a test !
There are no heavens or hells here
Every man makes his own,in his own mind….
You’ve passed your own test…
Congratulations…
HE TAKES YOUR ARM, LEADS YOU TO A DOOR AND SAYS,
I’ve many marvelous things to show you,come.
Congrats! Now buy our other games!
Now, I admit The Prisoner had a similar ending and I wasn’t grouchy about that one, but this is a game with a universe that started with a promising and unique atmosphere (Lucifer’s Realm) and even Paradise Threat had some promising moments going in, but it started to get more and more arbitrary before falling in a pile of bits and bytes. Asylum had a consistent tone going for it where “you’ve escaped the game” or “you just met the programmer in the Asylum” both seemed to fit; The Institute had a similar angle going but again themed everything appropriately. So I don’t think a meta commentary on “you’re just playing a game, ha ha” is inherently a bad thing it came off here more as an anticlimax than anything real.
Pearson has one more game to go (The Farvar Legacy) where we battle the undead. Maybe this time he’ll stick the landing.
NEXT: A short game supposedly set in a real location, followed by Sirius Software.
Renga in Blue 
Did you actually talk to Groucho or just divine that his name was a magic word from listening to Abe? I found the clue sufficient when talking to Groucho in the beginning although I don’t really care for the “easy to miss detail in the intro vital for solving the final puzzle” vibe.
I never found any syntax that allowed me to talk to Groucho at the beginning. Kept getting told to wait for Lincoln or to just listen.
Interesting. “talk groucho” worked just fine in the TRS-80 version, prompting him to say “The secret word is me.”
aha! works with GROUCHO but not MARX
(even though CHURCHILL works but not WINSTON…)
I wonder if there’s a second layer of hell I can send the parser deeper into
I wonder if this game is just that much more awkward and finicky than its predecessor or if the graphical version also took the chance to clean up some of the worst offenses in the original. I.e. Was the original version of the first game this troublesome?
one of these days I might go back (possibly close to getting to Farvar, the last game) and do some comparison playing
I remember with Will’s playthrough of Lucifer there were parts that were easier and parts that were harder, but on the whole the parser was a little better cleaned up on the Apple II version