Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Previous posts on this game here.)

“It could have been a diablero!”

“A diablero? You are crazy! There are no diableros.”

“Do you mean that there are none today, or that there never were any?”

“At one time there were, yes. It is common knowledge. Everybody knows that. But the people were very afraid of them and had them all killed.”

“Who killed them, Genaro?”

“All the people of the tribe. The last diablero I knew about was S⸻. He killed dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people with his sorcery. We couldn’t put up with that and the people got together and took him by surprise one night and burned him alive.”

“How long ago was that, Genaro?”

“In nineteen forty-two.”

“Did you see it yourself?”

“No, but people still talk about it. They say that there were no ashes left, even though the stake was made of fresh wood. All that was left at the end was a huge pool of grease.”

— From The Teachings of Don Juan

My main key to progress from last time is to realize that I probably should just try anything that might possibly be a verb that is referenced in the game and in the manual. Doesn’t matter if no other game might consider such a thing: this game does not do its magic by SAY BLAHBLAHMAGICWORD (or at least, not so far).

Regarding the manual, I haven’t talked about it yet, as we only have the Dragon version. But Gus Brasil pointed out it was essential for something so I spent some time looking over all the notes.

From Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

When a location description is preceded with the words “I AM IN DANGER!”, there is only one correct response which will prevent you from being killed. There are no second chances, but there are subtle warnings. which can prevent you from getting into situations for which you are not prepared.

I’ve seen this already with machete man, and we’ll see this again shortly — this is indicating the way the code works, which really requires typing one specific thing in response. “Not prepared” suggests these will not be self-contained (like a puzzle where you have to WRESTLE the enemy but there’s no items or knowledge involved).

The manual also says you remember a poem on waking up:

Remember well the power word,
Remember that which twice you heard.
Awake to that which dwells within.
Throw off the yoke of ignorance.

I spent a long time trying various interpretations, and especially looking for anything early on that indicated something had been encountered twice. The closest was the shack which the game says you recall being familiar.

I still haven’t reckoned with being watched.

I tried using SAY on each one of the words in the poem in case any of them was a trigger: this was close to right. I needed to test each one as a verb. While in the shack:

Oho! This leads to a room with no exits or anything you can interact with, but you can AWAKEN to get out.

I discovered after some mucking about that you can DREAM OBJECT. In particular, at the well you can DREAM WELL. If you LOOK, though, it appears that nothing has changed; however, attempting to type DREAM again, the game says:

NOTHING.

And you are able to AWAKEN — even after wandering away from the well — to jump back to it. If you do something in the “real world” while you are dreaming it still stays.

I hadn’t unearthed the box while in “real world” state, but it stayed here after teleporting back to the well from awakening. This seems too elaborate to be a bug but I’m not sure what’s going on. It’s not the normal world-separation I’m used to with this kind of mechanic.

You can DREAM WELL while not even next to the well, and it’ll jump you over there; this puts you in the “sleeping state”, so awakening will warp you back to where you started dreaming. DREAM CANYON works similarly, taking you over to where the poisonous snake is. It’s almost like a warping “checkpoint” system?

Because you can dream of places you are not even at to travel to them, that lets you warp to a new area. I was able to DREAM ROCK to go to one of the flat rocks I had been seeing in the desert but had been unable to get to.

I found out, after the fact, that I had typed GO ROCK in one of the rooms which describes it being nearby but you aren’t close enough yet. If you are to the west or east of the flat rock, GO ROCK works.

Just to the south of the previous location.

The “looking familiar” means this is a “remember” spot. Using REMEMBER here says

I USED TO PRACTICE THE SORCERY TECHNIQUE OF “GAZING” AT THIS SPOT!

You can GAZE ROCK and find it has a blue shade. This seems to be a hint that blue = safe (the blue pool is safer than the yellow one, that is). There’s another rock you can walk on which is more ominous. You “start to feel anxious”, and gazing upon it gives a yellow glow.

Flat rocks marked with colored squares.

So the end result is I figured out GAZE and DREAM a little out of order, but the game lets you. For the new location with DREAM, you can dream about the mountains in the distance.

At the top of the mountain is another REMEMBER moment.

None of the verbs I might suspect seemed to be understood. I almost thought I had progress by pretending the parser understood more words and typing TAKE FORM OF CROW, but all that’s happening is “FORM” and “OF” get ignored — the game understands that as TAKE CROW, not shapechanging.

This doesn’t work either.

I can at least report two other locations found off the mountain. One is some “rich soil” where it immediately occurred to me to try planting the seeds.

I have been unable to take the bush afterwards, so I don’t know what purpose it serves. LOOKing just says I’ve never seen one like it before; gazing does nothing.

Off in another direction is an eagle’s nest.

I assume shape changing is needed here for progress.

I’m fine with speculation/hints now, although do use ROT13 as usual. I especially want to know if I am missing out on the shape-changing for puzzle reasons (in which case I’m happy to keep whacking on it), or frustrating-parser reasons (in which case I’m happy to spoil). To recap where I am:

1.) I can DREAM in addition to GAZE in order to teleport to other places. (There may still be teleport destinations I can infer, I should make a full list.)

2.) I supposedly can shape-change but I have no idea how.

3.) I’ve planted the seeds, getting a bush, but the bush doesn’t want to be interacted with.

4.) I now have an eagle to get by, in addition to machete man. Regarding the snake that causes death upon being picked up, I’m guessing that’s a non-puzzle and the snake is just a shape-change target. The same might be true for the lizard.

5.) I still haven’t used the bowl, the mat, the shotgun, the debris, or the brush. I still don’t have a rope for getting into the well. I still don’t have any way of helping the blighted cactus.