Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Vince Apps has previously graced us with Devil’s Island and Forbidden City, and other than self-publishing under the title Apex Trading, he was mostly distinguished by having a whole set of books of BASIC source code in his name. For example:

40 Educational Games for the Electron
40 Educational Games for the BBC Micro
40 Educational Games for the Dragon
40 Educational Games for the VIC-20
40 Educational Games for the Atari
40 Educational Games for the Commodore 64
40 Educational Games for the Spectrum
40 Educational Games for the Amstrad

Some above even got Spanish and German translations.

The “Educational Games” series of 40 had picks with a minimum of complexity so they were easily portable. Less easy to port were the games in his Commodore 64 Program Book — now not solely “educational” works — and only some of them show up in his Texas Instruments version of the same.

However, the MSX version of the Program Book got the same set of games, including two adventures: the previously mentioned Forbidden City, and today’s game, Pharoah’s Curse.

From the Finnish version of the MSX program book. The game name is translated as “Faaraon kirous”.

I was unable to find the Dragon / Apex Trading version of the game so I went with the C64 port, and specifically the version here which fixes a bug present in that version.

This is the kind of adventure game that even your older friends and family may like to play, as it involves logic, memory and the powers of deduction —- you don’t have to be a crackshot arcade games player.

On this adventure you will be seeking for treasure, of course, but you will have to decide whether or not to collect stone urns, iron rods, boxes, earthenware pots and daggers on your way to the centre of the pyramid.

You will have to decide whether or not to go East, West, North, South and whether or not to open doors, enter ante rooms and tackle mazes. Beware that floors may crumble, walls may collapse, mists may envelope you as the tombs are protected against robbers such as you.

This text is from the printed book, not the game text. This game turns out to be extremely simple — even compared to the author’s last two games — and in such cases I always like to see what “script” the author has in mind for the players. The author mentions “deciding” twice. I think the expectation is that with the deathtraps in place (which you’ll see in a second) the player will be nervous at every step, basically relying on the power of possibility space, as I’ve written about long ago:

I know traditionally the “diegetic plot” of an adventure is the one that goes through without deaths … On the surface, the player is walking through a door. Underneath, the player is avoiding a death-trap. Without both branches simultaneously, part of the story is missing.

For Alien, which had a similar number of deathtraps, I think the author was just amusing themselves. Here, the author is hoping you’ll feel a tangible feel of danger and make it so even a choice of East, West, North, and South has some gravity. (Using authentic C64 load speeds, maybe there is something to fear. The game also runs fairly slow so if you die without saving it takes a while to get back to where you started.)

Anyway, let’s go raid for treasure!

You start in a “Valley of the Tombs” complex with multiple places to raid. In a Maze-Like Complex of Caves you can find a parchment with a clue.

In three burial chambers there are caskets, where you can find a key, a cloak, a mummy, and a box. The mummy, unexpectedly, does not sit up and mutter curses; the box, on the other hand, kills you.

The cloak includes a slip of paper with the clue:

HE WHO CARRIES UNTO HIS OWN REFLECTION INSIDE ON SHALL GO

TRANSLATION BY ADVENTURE TRANSLATIONS INC.

COPYRIGHT 2040 B.C.

The key goes to a door leading to the next section, with two pyramids. The first has some sand and you can just DIG SAND to reveal a secret entrance. If only all tomb raiders had it that easily. Or most of them are falling in the pit traps and so forth.

There’s an iron rod (which is useful) and a dagger (which isn’t). The iron rod was mentioned by the parchment earlier as being used to STRIKE a man, and the STRIKE verb is important. At the second pyramid there is a statue you can STRIKE with the rod.

At the inside there is a mirror, and here is where the second clue (from the cloak) comes into play, and the very specific word go in the phrase “ON SHALL GO”. GO MIRROR while holding the cloak leads to the last area.

This is simply a matter of navigating around the instant-death rooms until you reach the End, whereupon there is a sign you read that triggers the winning screen.

There was a large rock we moved earlier to open a passage to find the parchment, but this one is just a red herring.

Especially given the ending where the “treasure” was just a room, this came off as treating the idea of an adventure as an abstract exercise, which might be true if this was written for the book. However, this game was published in ’82 and the book was in ’84.

Devil’s Island, being by the same author and having a similar number of death rooms, makes a good comparison, in that I found that game plausibly sell-on-a-tape worthy, whereas this one seemed far too light. Oddly, I think the “hard” bits in Devil’s Island are at their essence unfair and bad design: the starting puzzle being real-time without letting the player know, the woodcutter that has only a random chance of appearing, the randomly appearing guards where you need to “run or fight”. But they made the experience “crunchier” so I had to reckon with it longer.

What I mean to say is the manifestation of some of these more outrageous elements we’ve seen in games is because otherwise (given authors who can’t handle complex mechanics) the game would be “for beginners” and there’s only so many that can go on a store shelf before the customer starts to be grumpy.

Coming up next: Il y a une porte en fer à l’ouest, et une autre au sud marquée « DANGER ».