Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

As I suspected, I didn’t have much game left to go. This continues from my previous post, where I was stepping off an elevator and getting electrocuted.

My confusion was thinking that the explosion was encompassing the entire house; that is, there would be no way to survive the explosion no matter what. However, assuming you can step out of the elevator and survive the electrical cords, while the explosion will cause the elevator to collapse, you will survive.

To be fair, the text upon dying says

LA GENERATRICE VIENT D’EXPLOSER LA MAISON N’EXISTE PLUS, VOUS NON PLUS

or

The generator just exploded. The house no longer exists, neither do you.

and I don’t think you’d normally read it other than “there was no way to survive that”? But moving on–

As long as you wait (either typing ATTENDRE, WAIT or RIEN, NOTHING) you can get the timing exactly right so that you step out of the elevator right as it collapses but also (because the generator is gone) you don’t have to worry about the electricity killing you either.

However, you still have to worry about the room immediately killing you some more. That “corde” (rope) is not takable, but it is oriented in such a way you might be tempted to climb. The verb list is confusing here but it turns out you can still jump, and the game prompts you to open the window first. If you do so, you die:

You crash to the ground

I don’t know what the deal with the rope is, but I appreciate the extra beat in there where you have to intentionally do an action leading incrementally to your doom rather than just wandering into death via a single step.

You should instead ignore the rope and window and just move on through the door:

The door has just closed. Hello…
How do you write this in 4 letters?

In French, this is COMMENT ECRIVEZ VOUS CECI EN 4 LETTERS, and is a word puzzle. The word puzzle works in both English and French; you’re just supposed to type THIS (or CECI) to move on. (There’s shades of the word puzzle in Avventura nel castello which worked equally well in Italian and in English.)

This allows you to find the Professor’s time machine.

There’s buttons to go to the PAST, PRESENT, or FUTURE, but if you try to do PAST or FUTURE (that is, do actual time travel) the game informs you that it isn’t a very good time machine and you die. With PRESENT:

There’s three pills on the ground and a laser gun. I bet you can guess at least one of the pills is poison. We’ll get back to the pills in a moment, though.

To the south is a mysterious black cube, and you can go up to a “saucer”. Neither serve any purpose other than make you hopeful you can … launch into space I guess?

From the cube room there’s one more room to the east, where you can find a book and rubber gloves. The rubber gloves need to be worn as there’s an electrified door to the west of the pills. The book is useless and can’t be read or opened. (I was hopeful it would kill the reader with a joke so good it makes you die laughing, but alas, this is another boring non-death room.)

Now, back to the pill room. With the gloves on you can go west into a room with a shower and a hole.

If you try to use the shower you find out it is full of acid. If you try to go DOWN (entering the hole) you find out it is full of water. So clearly the next step is either take the pills or use the laser gun.

The laser gun works with nothing, even though FIRE is a verb. I get the honest impression the author was starting to run out of space for puzzles and had something involving the gun and saucer which got cut.

With the pills:

1.) swallowing the Q pill is death

2.) swallowing the Z pill is not immediate death, but swallowing Z alone doesn’t help

3.) swallowing the K pill will make it so you can escape the house through the water

So you might think, horray, just swallow the K pill, and you’ve won? Well:

Phew, you found yourself outside, and irradiated. You die after a few days.

Hmm. What about the K pill and the Z pill?

Phew, you found yourself outside. But, you are all blue. It must be the pills.
And irradiated. You die after a few days.

So either you can escape the house and die of radiation, or escape the house and die of radiation while you’re also blue. And people were mad about Infidel’s ending.

I do appreciate the sense of humor the game had, and how it mostly invoked deaths in a “participatory” way, where the player is at least partly complicit (rather than choosing to turn left instead of right). A game like Revenge of Balrog which relies on stepping the wrong way for death doesn’t give off the same “death labyrinth” vibe (even when it is a literal labyrinth). Or to put it another way, navigating which action to take rather than what direction adds an extra edge. The fact deaths were almost in every room felt consistent rather than mean, and I was disappointed when there seemed to be no way for the saucer or book to result in yet another goofy demise.

I can at least explain where the author’s ending probably came from. Remember this was derived off of The City of Alzan, which the author admired. The game had two multiple routes through. One of them led you to catch the plague in the city (the whole reason you were trying to escape in the first place) and if enough turns pass, the plague kills you:

OH DEAR. YOU MUST HAVE CAUGHT THE PLAGUE IN THE TOMB. IT SEEMS THAT YOU HAVE DIED.

However, you can escape with the plague! The game will congratulate you like normal if you do so:

YOU MADE IT OUTSIDE THE CITY WALLS. THIS IS INDEED A RARE OCCASION. WELL DONE.

I speculated that maybe somehow leaving the city cured you, but taking a more realistic view, you “escaped” only to die just a little bit later. The author was clearly copying the same dismal ending.

ADDENDUM: I used the walkthrough in the Brutal Deluxe manual to confirm I had the “best ending”, but Gus Brazil in the comments points out there’s a way to survive still. The blue-generating pill also makes you immune to the acid in the shower, so if you swallow both pills, take a shower, and then escape, you won’t die of radiation. However, you still are permanently blue — it’s the exact same ending just the death is missing — and I do still think the author was thinking of Alzan when he wrote all that.

After this, Alain Brégeon did stay in games at least a little. Rob mentioned in the comments a 1985 RPG, Crystal 5, which he says has the “French touch”; by this he likely means something approaching this quote from The CRPG Addict:

French RPGs of the 1980s feature weird combinations of plot elements from mythology, fantasy, and sci-fi, NPC dialogue that makes little sense even in its original language, vague quests, and odd in-game asides. It’s as if their developers felt that RPGs were the next frontier for the Surrealist movement.

But what Brégeon is truly famous for is his later work on the Amstrad made with Patrick Beaujouan: the action-adventure game Carson City from 1986 and the traditional parser adventure Le passager du temps (The Passenger of Time) from a year later.

As far as direct influence of Professor Folibus, we have at least two games upcoming: Cauchemar House by an anonymous author in an unknown year (but almost certainly following Folibus) and The Manor of Dr. Genius from 1983. The latter was for the Oric but adapted the Toms engine. We’ll have to get deeper in adventure history in general to see if there are any other “trap labyrinth” games from France.

For now, though, let’s hop back over the Channel to England, and specifically, the start of the legendary company Magnetic Scrolls (kind of).