Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(You can read all my entries on this game in order here.)

I had the nagging feeling there was some frustrating, brand-new way of hiding stuff I had to muscle through, and then I could make it to the end of the game. I was essentially correct.

Close-up from the Digital Fantasia “blue” variant box. Via the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

Bach to the maze!

And specifically, something where I was looking at what I wrote and re-considered my position. Here, I’ll go meta:

This part, where I was assuming the vent was just random picture re-use.

Given finding the bunk in the first place required searching some wreckage (and it is the only place where SEARCH works in the game), I thought it highly improbable there was nothing here, but I concluded after failing enough times it was a situation where I needed to come back later (maybe pushing a different button elsewhere opens a secret). Not an unreasonble conclusion, but the vent picture in particular kept nagging at me, so I kept trying a whole slew of things, like LOOK UP (on my regular checklist, but it didn’t work here) and, for what I believe is a first for this blog, EXAMINE CEILING.

Colossally frustrating. I have trouble believing I could — in the real circumstances — be searching so thoroughly and never come across a grille that’s right there. At least I got saved by the ZX Spectrum picture; the TRS-80 and BBC Micro version have no such help. (Dave Dobson needed a walkthrough here and somehow that didn’t bother him, but I’ll get back to that.)

It’s also unclear from the description (and attempts to enter) that you need to JUMP to enter, you can’t just GO in.

Just above is an area with a cable. I immediately guessed that went back to the lathe, but I wanted to explore a little further before testing that.

Don’t go in the cage; you’ll get locked up and die of hunger. While unmentioned, you probably have the satisfaction of the creature dying of hunger first.

The storage crate here has a square block. Remembering that the oven needed something ROUND in a hole, and that the cable probably goes to the lathe … I immediately knew what to do next, except for the eternal “struggle with the parser” bit.

Specifically, you need to FIX LATHE while you have the cable (not PLUG CABLE, or INSERT CABLE, or ATTACH CABLE … you’re not really fixing it in the classical sense, are you? …).

Something happened!
Lathe works

Then you can TURN CUBE (??) in order to insert the cube in the machine and transform it into a ROUND BLOCK. With this in hand you can go back to the oven and FIX OVEN (not INSERT ROUND BLOCK, of course). With the mix I mentioned last time (including the tablets) you can make a poisoned fruit cake made especially for the creature.

I then took the magnetic boots, and the space suit from the locker, suited up, went over to the airlock with the orange button, and–

I’m blasted into deep Space!
I’M DEAD!

Well. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Fortunately, I already had a bead on an alternate exit, because I went around trying EXAMINE CEILING on all the bunks and found the Captain’s Bunk (which already held the tablets) also held another secret.

I admit I was annoyed at the game enough at this point that I just checked a walkthrough. I was missing the fact at the lathe you could GO LATHE. Urf.

Because I had already been noodling with the MAKE command off the verb list, I came across MAKE SCREWDRIVER without too much trouble, which is apparently enough to allow REMOVE PANEL back at the Captain’s Bunk. You do not refer to the clips that hold the panel down despite them clearly being part of the issue. It seems like for every basic action, the game insists I try phrasing it four different ways before it’ll work.

The rest is straightforward: you walk into an airlock, out the ship to a shuttle, and escape. (Putting on those boots and suit in the middle there, and pressing the white button at the Bridge from a while back was needed to let the airlock open.)

Look. Object Hunt: the Game can be fun; I already noted that Jigsaw essentially uses it as its premise (but also with a prevent-change-in-the-timeline plot and delicious prose). The gameplay here was essentially overwhelmed with me having to check if there were any more obscure ways to EXAMINE a thing I was missing, cojoined with an epic parser struggle. There was a creature to worry about, I guess? But it just peacefully hung out waiting for you to bring some poison, and was only a threat if you decided to take a nap. (There’s technically a time limit too — after enough turns the natural daylight cycle of the ship turns off and you need to leave the rod on, and your rod can run out of energy. I never came close to this being a problem.) The overall plot effect was the most un-heroic disaster escape ever made.

Both nimusi and Exemptus at the CASA Solution Archive had similar disappointment to myself over the game. Exemptus additionally points out the larder (the room) works as a container that you can pick up and carry around with you.

Map of the whole game, via Sudders from the CASA Solution Archive.

What I find fascinating is that Dave Dobson (and one of his commenters) had the exact opposite reaction.

Escape from Pulsar 7 was an entertaining challenge — not too arbitrary, and tough for (mostly) the right reasons. Maybe I’m just personally biased toward the science fiction side of things, but I had a lot more fun on the Pulsar 7 than in Howarth’s fantasy worlds.

I totally agree that this was better than the Arrow of Death games. Needed some of your tips there!

It’s easy to brush over such disparity with “it’s just subjective” and move on, but given how often my opinion has matched Mr. Dobson’s, it’s worth some thought about what’s going on. I don’t think it’s just because of being sci-fi. Studying his post, he had to use the walkthrough on three crucial parts:

I had to reference a walkthrough to learn that SMASH LOCKER (once the hammer has been found) is the way to access its contents.

There are two points where we have to EXAMINE CEILING from a bunk to find somewhere new to go — I missed this entirely and needed a walkthrough nudge, as the first ceiling entrance I found was clearly visible.

I spent quite a bit of time in the Pulsar 7’s airlock trying to figure out how to keep myself from getting blasted into space. Even when I was wearing the space suit and magnetic boots, the result was always the same. A much-appreciated walkthrough informed me that there’s a secondary, well-hidden emergency airlock.

For the second moment in particular, not only did I not need to check a walkthrough, I found it enraging when I solved it. Is this a possibility where using a walkthrough makes a puzzle more palatable? I certainly have encountered games before where people have given thumbs-up but I long suspected that the thumbs-up is conditional on not lingering too long trying to figure things out. Perhaps Dobson was being more casual here about when to check hints and moved on as soon as the experience started to be trying.

Still, though, better than Arrow of Death Part II? That game featured a clever unfolding structure which overlapped, and had reasonable enough puzzles I made it all the way with no hints at all.

For the record, my current ranking is something like

Pulsar < Golden Baton < Arrow Part I < Time Machine < Arrow Part II

but maybe (as my final theory) some people are more immune to guess-the-verb troubles.

How could this location not make someone mad though?