Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Today we re-visit the Sharp series of computers, and specifically the Sharp MZ-80K, the original built from a kit. Haunted House is the third game we’ve had from Sharpsoft. We’ve already tried out Colditz (1981) and Secret Kingdom (1982). The author of the latter, G. Clark, is listed as a co-author for this game, along with A.J. Josey. However, it is faintly possible (for reasons I’ll get into) that one or both authors also worked on Colditz.

(I realize they’re not technically pseudonyms, but I still always feel like an author is mysterious when they use their initials. If nothing else, it makes it impossible for me to search if they’re on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatnot and still making things.)

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

I don’t have an additional history to throw at you here that wasn’t already in my last two posts, except I found a review that points out “all the Sharpsoft games” are £5.85 and this was considered expensive. We’re getting the deluxe experience, everyone!

The start of the game includes some music, so I’ve made a video to let you get your Beethoven on:

It does not set up this “introductory adventure” as spooky to me, but whatever works.

I know there’s 100 points but not what those mean. “Extensive vocabulary”, heh.

I’m not sure what the objective is yet. Normally with this ambiguity I would automatically say “take the treasure to the right place” but haunted house games do often have an “escape” or “kill vampire” theme so I’ll hold on that until I’ve had confirmation.

There are only four starting rooms, in a two by two square. At the start, to the northeast, is the room shown above with the warning. The rock seems to be unmovable and unclimbable.

To the northwest is some undergrowth concealing a cassette (you can find it with LOOK UNDERGROWTH, looking at the cassette reveals it is a standard C12).

To the southwest is a pond with a log. The log is described as hollow and the pond is described as having shallow parts.

The last room, to the southeast, has a GARGOYLE which is also a GRIFFIN, somehow.

You’ll notice there seems to be no way in the house. The HELP command at the house indicates you should UNLOCK DOOR, and the game does seem to indicate a door is present if you try to unlock it (“YOU DON’T HAVE THE KEY TO THE DOOR!”) and there is otherwise no way to see the door is there. (You can look at the house, but the game just says it looks haunted and you shouldn’t go there.)

Now I suppose I should mention the relation with Colditz —

The parser is dodgy, much dodgier than in Secret Kingdom. I could see a writing progression going Colditz – this game – …. – Secret Kingdom with improvement between games.

To illustrate, here is my verb hunting list:

That’s almost too tiny to do anything, and I think JUMP has an auto-reject message as “A FRIENDLY SPIRIT STOPS YOU.” EAT doesn’t really eat, it just goes EAST; that is, only the first two letters are being used to parse EAst. WE, NO, and SO also all work, suggesting this is a two-letter parser overall, but then if you take that non-visible door and try to UN DO (rather than the full UNLOCK DOOR) the game says

I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN BY ‘UN DO’

The phrase “UNLOCK DOOR” is hard-coded in so that you have to be standing in that exact spot for it to work, and you have to type the full phrase.

All the parser reject messages follow that same form (I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN) so you can’t puzzle any extra things out other that what is on the list. Despite the pond and log seemingly both hiding something, I haven’t been able to get help from either. I even used my entire verb list specifically on the LOG just to be sure.

Come to think of it, this is in some ways worse than the Colditz parser — even though that was a one-letter parser at least it became clear early on what worked to communicate, and the game tried to hand out explicit command combos. Here, it’s like the parser is pretending to be one that understand things but falls incredibly short even though the game clearly requires some “normal” parser commands to make any progress. At least I don’t have to type LOOK DETAILS rather than LOOK to examine the room.

I’m going to keep taking my best swing at this a little while longer, but this seems a candidate for assuming that puzzling out directly from the source code will be part of the game.

ADD: If someone wants to play and doesn’t want to deal with emulator wrangling, I dropped a copy in the comments where you just need to start the mz80k executable, then load the save state.