Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts on this game.)

By the title up top, I’m not meaning games with wordplay-based mechanics. Basically this comes down to a suspicion of mine that got confirmed in this game–

Via the Internet Archive.

In the very early days, 1977-1979, parsers were not as terrible to manipulate as now generally thought. Crowther/Woods Adventure itself had a decent vocabulary and its puzzles did not demand complex combinations of objects that are hard to communicate. The immediate clones went the same route, Scott Adams games had mostly reasonable parsing, the early Greg Hassett games all demanded only simple actions for the player so never diverged into messy-verb territory.

When authors got more ambitious — 1980 — is when the trouble began. Scott Adams starts Savage Island Part II with what may remain the most absurd verb of all time. Authors tried hard to have “difficult” puzzles reliant on things other than magic words and mazes and inventory juggling that required communicating difficult things.

Parser communication started to be such a problem I wondered if there was anyone who thought that guess-the-verb was in fact an essential feature. That the adventure was at least partly a sort of word game, like a real crossword rather than a metaphorical one, and you might intentionally pick a tricky verb over a simple one — never even thinking of synonyms — as part of the game’s challenges, rather than as part of the game’s failures to deliver a transparent UI.

Let’s return to that thought shortly.

So I left off on not being able to drink, having tried DRINK WATER, DRINK CANTEEN, DRINK POOL, and every other combination I could think of. It turns out you just need to DRINK.

Interestingly enough, I still would have been foiled on first finding the pool as the game explains a gentlemen drinks out of a canteen if you try to DRINK. Just cupping your hands is too undignified, I suppose. This is the weird sort of condition that actually works — I love it when the character of the avatar intrudes on the game — and also actually explains why the action doesn’t work, unlike most “wrong actions” in this game.

Having said that, I wasn’t quite done with the canteen puzzle, but I’ll keep to the sequence I discovered things as I was playing. Moving on, I also realized while fiddling I could GO TREE to get closer to one.

The game only lets you climb up with one object in hand.

Keeping in mind the message about the old rope, I tried to get the fronds but was rebuffed. To be fair I didn’t have anything that resembled a tool for that. But I could get the dates and go back down, and try FEED CAMEL with the dates.

The moment where it redirects “GO CAMEL” to another word is unusual but not rare; usually it indicates an author whose code structure makes it hard to have synonyms so they just add a special text message instead. Doing MOUNT CAMEL as requested, I was then able to RIDE CAMEL. However, I couldn’t get off.

I went with HELP, as this does have a contextual help command, and the game asked me

-The opposite of MOUNT is?

The game could have done the same sort of command interception, and then turns the help for finding the right command into a riddle. It appears, as I suspected might be able to happen, the authors considered finding the right word to be an essential part of the gameplay, and not in a word-puzzle game way like Ad Verbum.

This explains how miserable the game is to communicate with otherwise, including the hellish bit in the pool. We’re getting there. Using DISMOUNT on the camel we make it to a pyramid with a carving. Examining the carving reveals a pharoah holding a scepter, that we can refer to separately.

It seems like we ought to be able to take the scepter, and if we try to the game asks HOW? but the game wasn’t understanding what I meant. However, I started to suspect it was “stuck” and what I needed to do was to get the snake oil way back at the north part of the desert over to the pyramid, so I could OIL SCEPTER.

This was trickier to enact than I expected because I realized I had my map wrong: when you get into the pool area, that’s a one way trip. The map doesn’t let you go back. So you have to do everything in the desert before getting to the pool: that’s get the shovel, get the canteen, fill it with the snake oil, nab the torch, nab the magnifier.

You cannot drink the snake oil, so you’re getting thirsty all this time. (When I played before, I took the canteen on a beeline to the pool, figuring I’d go back and dig and get oil as needed later.)

Fortunately, making the entire loop isn’t that tight — I just had to suffer being told I was extra extra extremely thirsty for a few turns — so I was able to move on, and try OIL SCEPTER, then return to the pool to fill my canteen. (Every time you use the canteen, you drop it, so a number of times I rode the camel but forgot to bring back the canteen.)

With the scepter and axe in hand, I took a visit to the top of the palm tree, did CHOP FRONDS to get some, and then tried to make a rope and found … the game was being quite picky again. I had to go check a screenshot to see that the OLD ROPE was specifically made by using BRAIDed fronds. Back to the word-game, this time cued by the game proper rather than the HELP feature. (You could sort of think of it as the correct instructions being encoded in the word, kind of? It feels less gauche than DISMOUNT, at least.)

Now, we get to the horrible terrible part. You can GO POOL, and to get out, CLIMB STEPS (as mentioned by 4am). The handle of the cover that we can use to drain the pool is described as a “hook”, and the scepter is also described as a “hook”. Quite obviously the two go together. But how? Switching to Apple just for 4am (and also I switched to Apple now when I got stuck so this is the actual screen I saw):

Wonderful. (Please note the sarcasm you can hear through the screen. OK, you can actually HOOK SCEPTER, but that’s still wild, because you’re really hooking the handle, and that doesn’t work, and yes, I tried HOOK HANDLE first and went wildly in a different direction after for a while.)

You can light the torch with the magnifier, then go in to find a sewer. I’ve made it a smidge farther with yet another outrageous verb but I think I’m close to the end of the game so I’ll save it for next time.