Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Previous posts on this game here.)

I have reached the lair of the sorcerer, but it’s an extensive area so I can’t promise this is the penultimate post. I can be hopeful, though!

Castaneda’s second book. Via eBay.

Nearly almost immediately after finishing my last post I made a breakthrough. This is not that uncommon for me. The act of writing sometimes helps me think, and having my tasks laid out with pictures can also help me zero in on what to do. I had listed as task number one to try different teleport destinations, and it occurred to me, regarding the scene with the eagle…

…that I could possibly DREAM my way straight to the nest, avoiding the eagle confrontation that way.

Remember, the mechanics are such that you can DREAM a place to go to it, then AWAKEN to return right where you left off.

I flailed a bit trying to transform with the eagle feather. I should mention I still have no idea how to transform — it isn’t needed for immediate progress — and I’m starting to suspect it is location-specific rather than a new general power.

I then tried a bunch of plausible dream locations — trying to imagine what the author might go for from the Sonoran Desert — and while RIVER and STREAM didn’t work, I hit paydirt with DREAM CAVE:

HIS POWER PREVENTS ME.

I technically was already able to bypass this. It turned out to be the hardest puzzle of the game so far. Let’s save that for a bit later.

I also did some verb-testing on each of my objects in turn; with BREAK, I finally got a hit when I reached my bowl:

The key was the missing item needed to unlock the box, and the box has a blue pebble and paper that gives instructions.

This opens a small area with an “ancient Mayan mask”. Wearing the mask is sufficient to translate the various inscriptions. They essentially already reinforced what I knew about the mechanics of the game, although the second message is subtly different; remember it shortly.

I next had the the tombstone to reckon with. The MAT, woven with blue and white threads, can be examined further. You can LOOK THREADS.

Second-order nouns — where you have to examine something in an description obtained via examining — are pretty rare in this era. I usually miss them and I’d argue in this case it’s unfair you don’t get any sense that there’s more to see from the first description.

I already had everything collected for this. The beetles came from using the machete on the cactus.

From a Computerware ad in Color Computer News, November 1982.

Heading over to Uxmal’s grave, I enacted the revenge medicine:

I absolutely loved this moment; no, we haven’t had our teacher built up as a character that much, but this is still a participatory plot twist rather than one just given to us. (See, relatedly, participatory comedy and participatory deathtraps. See also the “research puzzle” in Anchorhead which leads to one of the biggest plot moments of the game.) If nothing else, I’m pleased that the game actually appears to have a plot, even if a small one?

The next phase simply involved typing REVEAL to all three of the major critters (snake, crow, lizard) and finding the lizard was willing to chat.

I already had a magic bush, so I had a guess I could TAKE TWIG whilst there.

I have not dipped the twig in anything; I don’t think I’ve seen the oil yet, but it is faintly possible I’ve missed something in the initial areas of the game.

With all this reckoned with, I needed to reach the cave still. I was misunderstanding part of the mechanics of dreaming, in a way that feels like Castaneda getting told about some layer of reality he’s missing (or being informed in Journey to Ixtlan that not everyone needs drugs but he wasn’t smart enough to enter altered-reality at first without peyote).

You can DREAM, just on its own…

I AM EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE AT THE SAME TIME. A STEADY WIND BLOWS AGAINST MY FACE.

…and then AWAKEN, and you’ll be in the same place you started.

You can DREAM (LOCATION), which will take you to a location on the map, and then when you AWAKEN you will land back where you started. El Diablero is preventing dreaming of the cave.

However, you can also DREAM, no set location, and while everywhere and nowhere at the same time, you can AWAKEN (LOCATION). This can be used to arrive at the usual locations (like the well) but also can be used to bypass the power preventing you from arriving at the cave.

(Hence: “As you go, so can you return” doesn’t mean just that awakening is a power, but that awakening can be used just like dreaming with a specified destination.)

To the north is a ring on the floor which, quite straightforwardly, can be turned and then pulled to open some stairs. (I guess TURN isn’t used for shape-changing after all.)

If you’re wondering about the visual change, I switched to the Dragon version of the game here and switched the color scheme while I was at it.

The reason why is an item that shows up shortly after. You go down the stairs to a long east-to-west section by a chasm.

On the east side there’s a “copper bell”.

Trying to RING BELL caused the screen to clear (and no, that’s not supposed to happen). I was only using the first copy I found at the Tandy Color Computer Archive and likely one of the other copies works, but just in case I had an emulator issue I switched computer systems to the Dragon and found the issue resolved itself.

Going west to the “columns” (which have the message “FOR HE WHO SERVES”) and ringing the bell reveals a beast who is ready to give us a ride.

Before journeying deeper into the cave with beast-buddy, let me cover the two extra rooms to the west. One room has a “gold statue” but it seems to be illusionary:

MY HAND PASSES THROUGH IT! AM I IMAGINING THINGS??

Farther west is a bridge which seems to also be a fake-out.

However, since I’m stuck later, I can’t discard either room entirely.

Back to where we left our ride running:

This leads to another self-contained section where part of it is under water. I’ve marked the water sections in blue:

South of where you land there’s a skull; north is a pond. You can jump in the pond and then SWIM DOWN. This goes into darkness, but I realized I could SWIM EAST while underwater to reach a new area.

The first area you can pop your head out on is deadly. The game gives you plenty of forewarning about this, but I tried swimming in all possible directions anyway but I died of poison in all cases. (This is far more polite than the average 1982 game, which would just have the death happen without warning. There was even that mechanic with the blue/yellow shading earlier which was intended to hint at danger level; I suspect the author might have been annoyed at some deathtraps in a different game but still wanted to use them.)

Returning to life again, we can dive even deeper to swim east yet again, finding a safe pond to exit. This leads to a “granite block” adjacent to some “ruins”.

Combining the two hints together gets

HE WHO (WOULD)
FIGHT (THE DIABLERO)
MUST FIRST (DESTROY THE)
YELLOW BULL

with the catch that I have no idea what the yellow bull is, BULL isn’t even a recognized noun in the game, and I’m at a dead end. So I might have missed something in that whole sequence or I might be a few cryptic leaps from victory. (Do also note I haven’t found an appropriate twig-dipping spot yet either.) I’d still like to finish at my next post but I suspect the game will push hard enough back it’ll have to be two.