Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post)

I’ve managed to beat the game, and while not the most cryptic game ending I’ve ever managed to resolve, it surely is in the top 5. I in fact had been mid-sentence trying to write my “I’m sorry, no idea how to finish this” post when I tested something and made a breakthrough.

First, to clear up some things I was puzzled on last time.

Regarding the goggles and the gravshafts, if you are in a room without wearing goggles, and then you put them on while in the room, the gravshaft is now “visible” and any future passes through the room do not require goggles. If you are simply entering the room while wearing the goggles (which does show the gravshaft, and even mentions in the text description there is one there) it will not give this effect. Taking the goggles off causes the gravshaft you spotted to “disappear” and you’ll walk in the trap if you try to leave. Yes, this seems like a bug.

This is a case where I entered the room wearing goggles. The better approach is to enter without goggles, put them on, and take them off again.

Additionally, the change of color when wearing goggles is the sole thing making drones invisible. This is meant to encourage the fact you shouldn’t leave the goggles on; I had at least one time I forgot I had them on so I thought a drone was just invisible normally, but it really is a goggles-only condition. I’ll grant this is canny in a game-design sense in that the traps are relatively nullified out if the goggles can be worn all the time.

One other method to deal with the traps is to use a WELDER. This also seems to be bugged, as if you’ve “spotted” the trap the welder doesn’t work, but if you haven’t then you can use the welder to seal up the hole.

There’s one last very important fact about gravshafts I didn’t discover until later, but let’s get back into gameplay.

The way the game is supposed to be configured — and I’m not sure it is airtight — is that you start on a floor where you can immediately find goggles, and then while carefully avoiding traps, find a white crystal and a black crystal. Somewhere on this floor there will be a place you can use the TRANSLATOR and open up a door, and to get down further, you need to use a white crystal to remove a force field.

The force-field door and translator door incidentally both visually appear (although don’t open) with the GOGGLES, which makes another good reason to test them in every room. Also, “floor” is somewhat approximate, as some of the rooms in this area might still be up or down stairs, but there’s still always a “white crystal barrier” blocking off any further objects.

Picture from a different playthrough; that black rectangle is stairs leading down, and they need me to USE WHITE CRYSTAL to pass.

The second section is where you find a welder and a blue crystal. So just to list all items: gun, translator, goggles, white crystal, black crystal, blue crystal, welder. There’s only one more we’ll talk about in a moment (a remote).

Other than an auditorium, which is just for color…

It is possible to find items or even gravshafts here.

…there’s another force field. This force field requires you to USE the BLACK CRYSTAL. The black crystal, oddly enough, causes all the objects you are carrying — except for your gun — to disperse to random spots on the map. The best option here on a playthrough is to drop everything but the black crystal, use it, and then don’t worry about where it snuck off to (you’ll see why in a second).

With the force field removed, you can enter into a room with a “faint hum”. The goggles reveal a gravshaft, although oddly, it won’t stay revealed if you do the wear/take off goggles trick. The goggles also reveal the remote.

Here I was trying to figure things out so brought every single item. I was holding the gun but it’d normally go in the gap to the left.

I tried every single item and saw nothing. I went back and tried every single item on every single room and saw nothing new. Don’t forget the shoot-em-up thing was still going on: I fought off waves and waves of drones in the meantime (I started getting decent at shooting them down, they more mostly an annoyance if I was trying to use goggles, since swapping the goggles off takes enough time for them to get you).

(Incidentally, last time I commented how swapping between joystick and keyboard would be a pain. There’s a contemporary review of the game that points out the annoyance, and suggests the game be played cooperatively, where one person uses the keyboard and the other the joystick.)

I thus was ready (and started) to write my final post, but for some reason it occurred to me even though the game doesn’t let me GO DOWN, perhaps I could USE GRAVSHAFT. At no other point in the game had I tried to USE an item “in the world”.

Access denied!!!

Huh, that’s a new message. I went back and tried USE GRAVSHAFT elsewhere — with one of the goggle-revealed gravshafts –and found I could “teleport” to a new room that way without getting hurt. So there was something special about the hum-room gravshaft.

It still wasn’t staying revealed without the goggles, but mucking about with my items, I somehow found if I picked up the white crystal the gravshaft suddenly appeared. Put it down, it suddenly disappeared.

The condition turns out to be extremely finicky: you have to be carrying the white crystal and the blue crystal and not the black crystal. As long as all three are true, the gravshaft in the hum room will reveal itself, and you can USE GRAVSHAFT.

This is on a return trip where I realized getting the black crystal was counterproductive, so I didn’t even bring it.

USE GRAVSHAFT takes you to the final room. There’s no visible exits other than the gravshaft, but if you wear goggles you can see an exit to the north. Then you can try to GO NORTH and crash the game.

Whoops! Again I considered maybe I was at the end and the game was broken. However, I took the time to ferry items over in the shaft just to see if I could cause something new to happen. (Incidentally, if you try to bring the black crystal to the end, you’ll get teleported back to the starting room. Black sheep of the crystal family.)

Nice of the game to tell me dropping the white crystal is death rather than just killing me. It never was clear what the two crystals are actually doing.

I finally hit paydirt with USE WELDER which opens up a shimmery rainbow door.

You still can’t just walk through, but since the REMOTE hasn’t been used yet, it didn’t take long to test out USE REMOTE and get the final animation sequence.

Bye bye, crystals.

We get back in our rocket and take off.

Winning is 100 points, each normal droid kill is 10, each invisible droid kill (with goggles) is 20, 10 points for each item. The score is pointless because you kill an overwhelming number of droids to make it to the end and you can always farm more.

I was unimpressed with the random generation aspect. I tried a “serious attempt” on this three times, and on my second attempt, the map yielded no black crystal, making the game impossible to win. So at the very least the random part is buggy. Additionally, there was nothing interesting in the random setup — which crystal you see first is honestly boring, along with if there’s a gravshaft in the auditorium or not. Randomness is interesting in Rogue because the exact layout of walls tactically affects what happens with the monsters; here, the drones appear in an identical way no matter what the layout is, and because the puzzles need a specific sequence, the items still appear more or less in the same order.

In a holistic game design sense, if you’re making a roguelike, the random aspect needs to contribute something to the game that makes multiple games play in a truly different way. With fixed adventure puzzles there isn’t the same benefit (and this was an adventure, despite the exhausting mini-game spread throughout, where I literally sometimes had to stop mid-typing to fiddle with arrow keys). And sure, someone could try “generated” adventure puzzles — like the riddles changing in Apventure to Atlantis — but doing it in a satisfying way seems to still be only in the capacity of human hands.

Referring back to the essay I mentioned from Clardy:

While Synergistic Apventures are full of obstacles, hazards, puzzles, and traps and while they may take hours or days (or even weeks in some cases) to play, it will never be because you are stuck trying to guess what the author wants at some point. The puzzles have logical solutions and hints are given. That doesn’t necessarily make them easy, but you won’t have to call us for help.

Consider the promise broken. The game never explains why the crystals act the way they do, and the only “alternate” solution has to do with using a welder instead of goggles to handle a gravshaft, but to find out the pit is there to begin with you’d normally use the goggles anyway. It seems like the author really just wanted to be making more RPGs, but the genre boundaries were still ill-defined.

We’ll be seeing another Clardy-Ollmann Jr. adventure team-up, but only in (squints) 1989 with The Third Courier. That’s punting it down a bit.

Let’s try a “normal” adventure game next time, shall we? (Maybe. It’s a company where the two times they’ve been featured here the game seemed initially normal and later went off the rails.)