Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game. This continues directly from my previous post.

Fortunately, I was just having some bleed-over trauma from The Sands of Egypt, and the rest of the game went smoothly. (Well, except for a moment at the very end.) To continue directly, I had been misinterpreting this scroll:

:read scroll
It says,
“PHLURF” is the key to this adventure.
:say phlurf
Oops! Your magic is not too accurate.
You will have to find the key for yourself!

I read this as “the magic word didn’t work, you need to revise what you said, or find some item to enhance your capabilities”. Instead, the way to read this is “yes, you cast the spell, but it didn’t turn out accurately, and it made a key somewhere which you need to find”. That is, a key appears in a different place and you just need to find it, so solving the puzzle just involves via walking back to the crocodile moat:

You are on a grassy knoll south of a huge castle. Between you and the castle is a moat full of crocodiles. A tree now spans the moat creating a bridge. A path goes east.
There is a gold key here.

I admit I did not solve the puzzle, but just was wandering in case I missed something, and had to puzzle a bit why the gold key was sitting there.

The gold key goes to the chest I’d been toting around, so another puzzle solved right there:

:unlock chest
A wizard’s staff falls out onto the floor!
Suddenly a voice says,
“This can free anything from the tightest of situations.”

This immediately suggested the stuck ruby.

You are in the Priest’s chamber. There are many sacred objects and prayer books here. There is a curtain to the south.
Imbedded in a quartz slab is a sparkling ruby!
:wave staff
The quartz disappears and the ruby falls to the ground.

Which of course immediately suggested the statue with the missing ruby.

:insert ruby
You feel the floor give way beneath your feet as you fall down into a dark and gloomy dungeon. The ruby bounces off your head and lands on the floor beside you.

You are in a dark and gloomy dungeon. A horrifying skeleton is chained to the wall and is looking down at you with haunting eyes. There is a hole in the ceiling to the north and some kind of equipment to the west.
There is a ruby here.

This leads to a new small area.

The only purpose down there, other than the authors describing a grim torture room (very teenager vibes) is to find a pool of oil, where you can FILL FLASK to get a flask of oil. To get out, you climb a latter, and unlatch the hatch that leads to the weapons room from the other side.

The oil goes to the rusted door, leading to some royal chambers:

This room is the holding place for the Royal Crown Jewels. The plentiful supply of gold, silver and precious jewels must be worth millions! There are rooms to the west and south and an open gate to the east.
There is a royal crown here.
:w
You have entered the King’s chambers. His closet contains only the most elegant of clothes. His beautiful brass bed is covered with white silk sheets. You can see the setting sun through the huge bay window. The room exits to the east.

All you need is the royal crown. The game doesn’t let you take the treasure or even touch it, really. You’re not here for treasure, you’re just exploring and passing through. (I love how explicitly and vividly the treasure is mentioned in the room description only to have it be utterly unimportant.)

The crown goes back to the cathedral with the gold ring. This is the only slightly unintuitive puzzle but given the gold ring is what immediately occurred to me, that’s only slightly.

:drop crown
The crown glows white hot as the altar suddenly begins to rise towards the hole in the ceiling. When the platform completes its ascent, you find yourself in a room high above the cathedral.

You are in a room resembling an attic. You are still standing on the altar, but your surroundings have changed greatly. Dust is everywhere, and the room has a smell of mildew. Light is coming in from the east.

Just to the east of here is a room with a window overlooking a village, and a rug that seems to be moving.

You are looking out of a large French window. You can see a small village in the distance. Under your feet is an Oriental rug that seems to be vibrating. The room goes in to the west.

And here I was stuck for the second time for a long period. Clearly I was meant to use the rug as a flying carpet, but my failure to SIT RUG and MOVE RUG and TAKE RUG and so forth led me to be confused.

:examine rug
I don’t understand.
:use rug
I don’t understand.
:fly rug
I don’t understand.

The problem is, again, this is a Sands of Egypt-style parser — almost every failure to do something is mapped to “I don’t understand”, and not to any clarity why something didn’t work. A good parser is about handling and re-directing failure easily and transparently; if the player types something “wrong” but their situation is clarified it can stall them for five seconds, if they type something “wrong” with no feedback they might be struggling for 10 minutes.

The winning solution was to just type FLY on its own.

:fly
You almost lose your balance as the rug takes off and glides through the window. The rug takes you over an immense field to the town, where the people eye you very suspiciously.

And that’s it! This game really emphasized the points I made recently about how a less robust parser can still work as long as the game sticks with very simple puzzles. The only problem is it is still possible to get stuck on a simple puzzle (in this game, one which involves walking into the right room) and then the player is free to type all sorts of absurdities in an attempt to get forward and then the parser is back to being miserable again. Still, I think all the games from Crandell and Peterson have fallen on the safe side of the valley. That is, in the development of ambitious adventure authors, a valley metaphor is appropriate:

(Yes, I could have made this look nice in Figma, but Microsoft Paint was calling to me.)

Mind you, some authors have played enough adventures that they start directly in the deep hurting section, and Infocom pretty much had their parser mastered straight out of the gate. What I’d really like to see is an author progressing all the way from the left side to the right side, but we’re just not deep enough into adventure history for that to happen yet.