Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

We are back in the house of Brian Howarth, whose Mysterious Adventures series started with Golden Baton, followed by The Time Machine, Arrow of Death Part I, and Arrow of Death Part II.

Via eBay.

Howarth still had a friendly relationship with Molimerx who kept publishing his games in TRS-80 format (Dale Dobson used that version in his playthrough) but he also had his own spinoff company Digital Fantasia in order to make BBC Micro and (eventually) ZX Spectrum ports.

The new element here is that Mr. Howarth had a collaborator: Wherner Barnes. According to an interview with Brian in Retro Gamer, Wherner was

a dude who was around the same age as me who I knew from a group of my drinking buddies that went fell-walking in the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales

and … that’s all we have. This is despite the collaboration happening for 3 of the Mysterious Adventures games (that is, about 25% of the series). I don’t know how the division of labor went — was this a situation where Howarth was just editing what someone else wrote, or was this more of a 50-50 split, or what exactly?

From the Molimerx version of the manual.

Well, at least we can get into detail about the game itself! The premise is that we are part of the crew of the space freighter Pulsar 7, with a mission to obtain and deliver the ore Redennium to planetoids in the Xanotar system. An alien creature was given as part of the payment from one of the planets.

The creature, normally peaceful, had managed once to escape from its cage and roll around in some Redennium. Unfortunately, this led to disasterous effects in the days ahead, as the creature grew at an alarming rate and started to kill and eat crew members.

Via the Tynesoft version. The Mysterious Adventures were re-published an astonishing number of times.

Everyone is now dead except for you and the still-hungry creature. Your goal is to reach the freighter’s shuttlecraft and escape.

We’re back to the curious ZX Spectrum graphics system (I have an explanation here of how it works) which is why there’s “color bleed” from the blue onto the black.

We’re also back to how the graphics system is oriented with the text system, which is you need to hit ENTER to switch from the picture and back. Enough information is given on the text portion you really need to be looking at that most of the time. Hence gameplay involves playing the game like a normal Scott Adams joint, except every time you enter a new room, you’re supposed to peek at the room’s picture (a process with a very small draw speed at authentic speeds) and flip back again afterwards.

When you see blanks after WHAT NOT? on my screenshots, that’s just me switching modes back and forth.

You start at a crew social area next to two rooms with bunks. If you want to speedrun Death%, go into one of the bunks rooms, GO BUNK, and then SLEEP. Fun!

Ready for submission at the next Games Done Quick. This also is not quite the fastest — you can just SLEEP anywhere, including the spot you start at, to get the same result.

With the bunk to the south, there’s a door you can close; by closing the door, the game says “Something happened!” and the bunk has a “auto-dispense pillow” but I haven’t found anyway way of taking it or manipulating it. Perhaps this is meant to tempt you into the SLEEP death above.

Back in the social room, you can MOVE COUCH…

I’ve found something!

…which reveals a “Dull Illuminant Rod”. You can then TURN, TWIST, or ROTATE the rod and it will light up. You can turn it off again the same way (unclear yet if the creature utilizes light in any way, but I could see needing to turn it off for stealth reasons).

To the west is a bunk with a different setup: there’s a vent visible.

You can GO VENT and then sometimes — sometimes! — die by the air blasting and blowing dust into your lungs. As far as I can tell this is entirely random. (I tried LISTEN and SMELL, both understood by the parser, just in case there was some indication the vent was running and was unsafe.)

Past the vent is the main part of the ship. You’ll notice it is a bit twisty and while I could see a ship being a touch labyrinthine I can’t make topological sense of what’s going on here.

To the west is an airlock where you can push a button and it blasts you into space. I get the impression this is the route we need to take to find a shuttle, just we need a little bit of safety first.

The “Ship’s Bridge” has an console with a Electrical Edge Connector (not mobile). I don’t know what to do with it.

The “Galley” connected to a “Larder” has a bottle of water, a bag of flour, and a bag of raisins.

I found a cake tin later and was able, after fussing over the parser enough, to make a CAKE MIX. (POUR the water in the tin first, then MIX while holding everything.) Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to actually do the final deed of cooking the cake. I even enlisted my verb list to help.

It seems like a lot of coverage! But given the cake, and a bit later where there’s a locker that can’t be opened, this isn’t the greatest of parsers — “knowing” a word in the vocabulary database isn’t the same as having a good response to using it, or at least a response that makes clear why the action isn’t working. There’s a “closed steel door” at the start of the game (which you arrive at the other side of after using the vent); “OPEN DOOR” says “Sorry” and you have to just imagine what’s going on, since the room is enterable from the other side (and then you’re trapped in again).

Other than the places I’ve mentioned, there’s also a “workshop” which you can only enter in one-way. It has a lathe (which the game says needs repair) and a socket (which I have not been able to manipulate or get a description of).

Going down from the workshop leads to a maze. The maze has a lot of “loop back to the room you’re in” exits, so when mapping them out I used a line stub to indicate the loop for a cleaner image. Additionally, “up” is on the northeast side and “down” is on the southeast side of each room.

Other than the cake tin I already mentioned, you can get to a reactor and find a hammer and peice of wood. (Yes, spelled that way.) I haven’t found a use for either yet.

The “creature’s hide out” is where you can finally encounter the beast while awake.

If you duck out right away you’re safe; spend any time and you die.

CREATURE rips my head off!

My best bet is I need to finish baking the cake by fighting the parser boss, and somehow that will be sufficient to distract the creature long enough to get the boots. After that?… maybe we’ll be led along a chase. There’s multiple places where you can go into a “bunk” which feel like they’d be used for hiding; there’s also one extra steel door that can be left open or closed leading from the “metal passageway” to the “galley” on the main map. It is possible this will be a “preparation puzzle” where we have to yoink the boots first, then do a series of puzzles to make it safely to the airlock for escape. This means while I haven’t been impressed with the game as of yet, things could pick up.

One last thing: the locker in the maze. Can’t go in, can’t lock or unlock either. I am truly baffled.