I’ve finished the game. This continues directly from my previous post.
If the idea of playing another game by the author of early Magnetic Scrolls works appeals to you, I’d certainly recommend trying this. If you don’t want to try the BBC Micro version I’ve got a download here for the TRS-80 version. Just drag and drop the file onto trs80gp and it’ll launch.
I will say the first puzzle might be worth spoiling, but it is mostly smooth past that.
Zoom-in on the wrist bands, shield, and dagger, the three items needed to defeat the demon.
So what I suffered last time turned out to be a colossal piece of disjoint visualization — that is, I was seeing the situation very different from the author, based on text that could be understood multiple ways — combined with my uncertainty about the parser (and the fact an unusual verb is required here). I will say it is a four-word parser and there even is a special data line for prepositions, which is a slight hint of Magnetic Scrolls going on to make one of the better parsers of the British companies.
3010 DATA 9,ON,IN,AT,INTO,OVER,ONTO,ACRO,WITH,TO
I needed to get a key from a fountain. The only description you get upon finding the key is that
THERE’S A KEY THERE!
and the fountain otherwise receives no description. TAKE KEY responds:
I CAN’T REACH IT
This was my first visualization issue. I figured, if the key was in the fountain at “ground level”, it would be easy to grab it, and otherwise SWIM FOUNTAIN and GO FOUNTAIN ought to really work anyway.
I thus thought of it being a fountain with tall layers, where you can see the key on top, but you somehow need to climb the fountain or shake the key loose.
I am fairly certain now, no, this is a regular all-on-the-ground fountain, and the key is floating in the middle and our player doesn’t want to get wet (??) I guess (???). So we just need to extend our reach a little. (I guess this technically could also be consistent with snagging a key up high, but honestly, what I visualized completely excluded such a solution.)
The other important item is a WIRE STAND, and this one does give a description
IT’S A THICK WIRE BENT INTO A STAND
and if you’ve ever fiddled with one of these in real life, this is not the kind of wire you can bend by hand (it even says “thick wire”). Of course I should have tested it, so I wouldn’t call this unfair, just I’m giving the reason I got sidetracked.
Something like this. I’d expect to melt it under heat or something.
If you try BEND STAND, the game says
USE BEND INTO WHAT?
which is prompting for an exact creation. What works — and I did figure this out once I realized what the game was going for — is a HOOK. Then you can GET KEY from the fountain and finally move on with the game.
Incidentally, if the game had said “it’s just out of reach” instead of “I can’t reach that” I probably would have worked this out faster.
Just to prove this game really is designed on the tighter side, here is the entire rest of the map:
The first new room, the altar room, uses the items I’d been gathering up thinking there was going to be some Aphrodite ritual: a statuette and the incense.
There’s no explicit instructions, but the indent plus the burner for incense make their case pretty clear. I also realized quite naturally I should try to GO PRAYER MAT and the game then explicitly mentions you should try out PRAY.
I also needed to light my torch with the flint and steel before this. I don’t know if there were any “dark rooms” being kept track of; I don’t think there’s an inventory limit so I had my lit torch the rest of the game.
The flash of light is the WRIST BANDS appearing. They have “odd glyphs” which you can’t read (yet).
Because of the sequencing here, I could see someone forgetting about this by the time they get the ability to read glyphs.
The next room uses the metal triangle from a few rooms ago, as there’s a triangular space on a dias.
You can climb the stalagmite to get back, so this isn’t a one way trip (for now) but given the mention of something metallic inside, you’ll need to do some destruction later.
The niche has some brown powder with writing indicating to mix with water. Conviently, there’s a stream to the west that serves to do this very task, leaving you with a potion. Drink the potion and now “odd glyphs” are readable:
Go ahead and scoop it up, there’s no inventory limit.
The WRIST BANDS tell you to say APHRODITE at the evil temple? But where is the evil temple? Well, if you go back to the stalagmite room, open the door (not controlled by the keyhole, I was confused at first), and head north, you’ll find a wardrobe. Move the wardrobe to find the temple.
Importantly, the pool has some nasty green liquid which turns out to be acid. The APHRODITE phrase that the bands mentioned opens up a secret stair down, leading to a sacrificial room.
Given the black rock I just scooped up was quite thoroughly described (…unlike the fountain…) I quickly realized it was in the shape of a toe and added it to the idol. This opened up a gold keyhole, but I had no gold key to go with it yet.
Heading back and wandering some more, I found a plank of wood and a platform with a key of ice on it. I scooped up both (the plank and the key, that is, the platform’s too big).
Applying the key to the glass keyhole led to a room with a chasm. I immediately thought to PUT PLANK ON CHASM and it worked.
A weird case where solving a puzzle too fast turned out to be a problem, as you’ll see.
The next room has a stone block which I spent entirely too long fiddling with (it’s the only pure red herring of the game) and a ZOMBIE MOVING TOWARDS YOU. I thought back to all my resources and remembered the holy water back at the font I moved at the beginning. I didn’t have a container at the time but I did now (with the empty jar that used to hold a potion). I scooted back up the stalagmite, grabbed the water, and took it back to the zombie and hurled it:
And now we reach the part of the game I had second-most trouble with after the hook. This is entirely a self-contained riddle. The answer makes sense but I think there’s something unfair to it. However, what I’ll do is withhold giving the answer here, and put my thoughts in the comments instead.
If you get it wrong, THE SHIELD SPIN TOWARDS YOU AND SLICES YOUR HEAD OFF. If you get it right, you have the magic shield and are one step closer to defeating the demon!
From here, two issues remain: finding the dagger, and finding the gold key for the evil temple (which will lead directly to Disrondu). I alternated between noodling with the stone block at the zombie and the stalagmite at the cave, and it occurred to me that I could re-use the jar yet again to pick up the acid from the evil pool.
The metal box has the dagger of truth, but also, this melts your path out. However, that wardrobe from earlier had a POLE in it, so you can bring it over and CLIMB POLE if you want to as a substitute and get back up. The game isn’t softlocked! Classy. (Well, that means the pole is huge, right? Eh, I’m done trying to visualize stuff.)
Now is the part I was stuck third-most after the riddle, but I’m not calling this one unfair at all. Just I kept trying to do things to the STONE BLOCK and never realized I had overlooked trying to LOOK CHASM back one room over. I had to actually look at the map from the Strand Games website to see what was going on.
Climbing up leads to a ledge with the missing gold key. I was then able to bring it back to the evil temple, unlock the last barrier, and make my way down to Disrondu.
There’s been enough lead-up, I don’t need anything more than exclamation marks.
And thus ends our visit to (sort of) the start of Magnetic Scrolls. Other than heavier than normal use of prepositions I didn’t spot anything that would indicate the company’s future; this was much closer to Scott Adams than anyone else.
The most pleasant part in the solving sequence was the triple re-use of the jar; it didn’t originally occur to me to scoop up the acid, but the first re-use applying the holy water immediately gave the idea that I could scoop up any liquid I wanted to. This was essentially a small piece of object transformation, which is one of the key elements I’ve identified in the past as being a way for these super-old games to have puzzles that strike the right balance between simplistic and arbitrary.
Using the word ‘design’ makes it sound like we had a grand plan thought out over many months of agonizing over analyst presentations and consulting focus groups. If we liked it, it was good. There was no pressure to articulate why but usually if it made us laugh it was good. If we thought it was a bit dull, it got cut.
As far as what’s coming next, I’m not sure. I’m slated to write about a game with a very high technical start barrier (think back to that French pocket calculator game in difficulty, although this game’s American) but that might get postponed if I run into too many emulator woes. So there might be a wild card! We’ll see.
Renga in Blue 
so the solution to the riddle
is
BLUE
it is a synonym for AQUA, and one of the letters, U is the same between the two
‘LETTERS SAME BUT ONLY ONE IS TRUE’ indicates to me something different — the meaning is the same, but the letters? I’ve tried to parse this in some abstract cryptic-crossword way and I still have nothing. The only thing that helps is it becomes quickly clear that “rearrange the letters of AQUA except one of them stays in the same place” gets no word at all.
Yeah, I agree with you. This doesn’t seem super well clued.
I got the hook, with a bit of a nudge from Exemptus about fishing, and I did find the game pretty friendly about cuing syntaxes as well as not closing the map up. With the exception of a couple of the truly generic error messages like the key, and a similar “You can’t go that way” direction when I had unlocked but not opened the door. I did get a bit discouraged by the BBC Micro port crashing a couple times (when trying to read the glyphs too soon). I did learn (on one of my restarts where I hadn’t gathered everything) that the downstairs is unlit, but if you go there in the dark it will suggest that you can climb back up.
I think you don’t have to be on the prayer mat to pray, that is a hint to the verb for those who do not run through a large list of verbs to check error messages. The green residue in the burner also seems like a clue for the incense (which is lime colored). Also I was able to gather up holy water in the pot of oil, and use the holy water to get the potion of enlightenment. This may be a bug. (Though does the oil get used?) I didn’t move the wardrobe and, more importantly, didn’t get to the chasm room, because I thoroughly flummoxed myself about which exits from the stalagmite room were opened by what. And the ice key was a little confusing because I thought there would have to be a puzzle about keeping it from melting.
Anyway, my laziness aside, this seemed like a much friendlier game than most. Lack of inventory limit alone gives it a boost, as well as the effort to avoid many softlocks–pretty sure you can softlock it by messing up with the incense but it’s also pretty clear that you’ve messed up.
yeah, I’m pretty sure the Magnetic Scrolls games proper had legions more softlocks than this game did
(Corruption intentionally so, it’s Suspect / Deadline-style where you’re supposed to play a bunch of times until a perfect run)
I don’t know who to report the BBC issue to but it seems like worth a ping whoever needs to be pinged
TRS-80 version has no crashes as far as I can find
I probably haven’t played Corruption since shortly after it came out, but what I remember most about it was having to start over from the beginning about a million times. Oh, and also that cassette tape it came with, which had some sort of game story or clues on it, IIRC. I remember thinking that was pretty cool at the time.
I sent a bug report using the contact form on the BBC Micro page.
I’ve fixed the reported bugs in the BBC Micro port.
The container subversion I mentioned earlier is that it is possible to carry both the oil and the water in the clay pot *at the same time*, and use them independently, which of course makes sense. This is not unheard of to me (in fact, I can’t put a name to the game now, but I remember that this was the key to a puzzle in another adventure), though it is highly uncommon: normally one expects liquid containers to only carry one liquid at a time. The oil does not need to be used anywhere, by the way, so it’s apparently a red herring. Spoilery comment follows:
Va zl svefg cynlguebhtu V jnf pneelvat gur cbg jvgu gur ubyl jngre naq pnzr ol gur fgernz. Va beqre gb znxr gur cbgvba V hfrq CHG JNGRE VA WNE naq vg fhpprrqrq, ohg jung gur tnzr qvq jnf vf genafsre gur ubyl jngre sebz gur cbg gb gur wne naq znxr gur cbgvba jvgu vg, abg gbhpuvat gur fgernz ng nyy. Abguvat pyhrq zr gb gung orpnhfr V qvqa’g rira vzntvar gung jnf nzovthbhf va pbagrkg. Nsgrejneqf V sbhaq bhg V unq ab ubyl jngre gb pbasebag gur mbzovr naq V jnf onssyrq guvaxvat vg unq rincbengrq be fbzrguvat. Gur evtug pbzznaq gb hfr vf CHG PYRNE JNGRE VA WNE vafgrnq, juvpu xrrcf gur ubyl jngre va gur cbg.
You can OIL the first lock which is described as rusty. You don’t need to for it to work, so I assume this is a puzzle the author just broke by accident.
There’s a weird message about liquids mixing if you fill the empty jar with the acid, so I think the author may have also been trying to anticipate potential issues but the code got muddled with all the possibilities.
it is possible to carry both the oil and the water in the clay pot at the same time, and use them independently, which of course makes sense
I agree about the oil, since it would float on the water; but then how do you get at the water if you want to use it? Turkey baster? ;)
Just flip the container upside down and let the water out at the bottom. You might have to look for something to use as a lid, but that’s easier to find than a turkey baster…
There is a cryptic crossword parsing of the riddle, in fact:
The expression ‘LETTERS SAME BUT ONLY ONE IS TRUE’ splits as ‘letter’s same but only one’ instead (with an implied Saxon genitive), meaning ‘only one letter is the same’, and on the other hand, ‘only one is true’ where ‘true’ means ‘loyal’ instead, which strongly suggests the expression ‘true blue’. Since BLUE is a match for both parts of the cryptic (literal and semantic, as per the classic Ximenean Style Rules) it is the expected solution. But I’m a long-time cryptic setter and I agree that outside of this community the clue may too opaque to follow.
Where do you set? I do the Guardian puzzle every day these days and with that explanation I still find it a <i>bit</i> indirect.
Hey, nobody said it was a good clue. :)
I set in the journal of a professional association, so nowhere important nor well known (I’m not even paid but I get a courtesy discount off the membership fee). I have been doing it for many years now though.
Thanks for featuring and playing this game. It was lost for many years until i recovered it from an old cassette tape. The TRS-80 version. I don’t know if the BBC version was the same and I definitely don’t have a copy of that. So it may be lost forever.
These old games had a certain elementary charm to them, although it’s quite true that their puzzles aren’t always straightforward partly because of the necessarily terseness of text. Looking at the source code, it’s clear these old machine did not have the space for modern IF luxuries we’ve come to expect nowadays.
Thanks for your interest!
There was another game for All the Adventures, Irvin Kaputz, where the author had really interesting ambitions with realistic physical modeling (like when you go underwater with paper, it turns soggy), but flat out ran-out of space and wasn’t able to finish the game (adding any more text causes it to crash).
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/irvin-kaputz/?order=ASC
Was the parser purely Rob’s, or was it partly your implementation? I’m guessing the game was simply copied between you two, but do you know if he managed to sell any?
i wrote the code including the parser. Rob did the game design and it was an early “stab in the dark” at making a game by two people that didn’t really know what they were doing. There were no special ambitions for the parser and, you’re right, the model was more of “build a Scott Adams” type game than any other. So two words plus was totally adequate.
I built the TRS-80 version first and Rob ported it to the BBC micro. He was quite good at coding stuff on the BBC. Rob attempted to market the BBC version, and I can’t remember if he sold any. Probably none. But the BBC micro was quote popular back then.
Maybe I’ll ask him, perhaps he owes me !! :)
I listed both of you as the authors, then, for my sidebar.
For most parsers I’ve seen from this time that were two-but-sometimes-four words, the four word part has almost always been bespoke (that is, they special coded certain situations) — you having a preposition list in data is actually unusual. Infocom did it of course, and I think maybe Warp from my mainframe games did it, but I can’t think of anyone else who did.
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/warp/?order=ASC
(Warp parser was totally unique though and probably shouldn’t be compared to anything.)