Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I have beaten the game. You can read my posts in order here.

From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.

I broke through most of the rest of the game myself, but I did have to look up hints on two things.

Essentially the game consists of:

• going through a number of “secret walls”; some of the walls have specific flags and conditions that are cryptic
• evading deathtraps
• gently applying the commands ACTIVATE, PUSH, OPEN, ENTER, and BLAST as needed

If you add TAKE, DROP, WEAR, and REMOVE, that’s essentially all the commands in the game. There are esoteric conditions and fussy spots with verbs that make this non-trivial to handle. For example, one room I was stumped on had a DOORLOCK I couldn’t get through, and after much suffering I finally came across PUSH LOCK (not DOORLOCK) which revealed a bulkhead. Opening the bulkhead is then a deathtrap and kills you, so all that time I spent on the lock was wasted. Good times.

A TRACTORBEAM GRABS YOU FROM INSIDE…. PULLING YOU IN!

THE BULKHEAD SLIDES SHUT.

YOU ARE IN

AN OBSERVATION STATION BELONG TO THE UNITED STARS ORGANIZATION. BUT IT IS OUT OF ORDER. THERE’S NO POSSIBILITY OF RETURN…..

To be fair, maybe not wasted — this sequence is what led me to really grokking what’s going on. PUSH, TOUCH, and OPEN all are mapping to the same action. Given how broken the parser was being overall I made the guess at the highly reduced verb list was all I really needed. (I found out later that the source code behind the scenes is checking the noun first, then the verb, so the verbs PUSH, TOUCH, and OPEN lead to the “I’m confused about everything” message if being applied to anything other than one of the “secret wall” type objects.)

It also led me to test out referring to the HOWALGONIUM-CLIPS just as CLIPS; it still didn’t work, but with a little more testing it worked as long as I tried to WEAR them directly and not pick them up.

That is, you ignore the “HOWALGONIUM” even though it is part of the same word, just like you ignore the DOOR of DOORLOCK.

I had been trying to take the INFO-CUBE everywhere and doing INSERT CUBE and various other “why is there no machine that reads this” maneuvers, but given my newfound zeal to stick with a reduced verb set, I found all I needed was ACTIVATE. (On the word INFO, though, not CUBE. God forbid the nouns be treated with any consistency.) The game then asks which INFO-MODULE I wanted (1 through 9). Each of the 9 represents a hint:

SPACE-SUIT……..1…..2……..DOOR
SUITS COMPLICATE IDENTIFICATION
NOTHING IS AS IT APPEARS TO BE!
ROBOTS DIMINISH CHANCES OF SURVIVAL!
THE INFO-CUBE IS A KEY
BLASTING IS HELPFUL AT TIMES!
CLIPS SECURE ENTRY
ONLY ANSON ARGYRIS MAY SURVIVE
AFTER 2 ACTIVATIONS, THE INFO-CUBE BLOWS-UP!

The last hint is true: you can only use the cube twice before it goes away, but fortunately there’s the magic of saved game states.

One thing you might notice from the list (ACTIVATE, PUSH, OPEN, ENTER, and BLAST) is that there’s no SHOOT on the list. That verb is not understood. So back where I was getting shot by the Laren, all I needed to type was BLAST LAREN (not SHOOT LAREN) and get a little animation of a crosshair moving from the enemy getting vaporized. (I could swear I had tried it, but I must have tried it on other things and not this moment.)

Even though the manual takes pains to say you have a blaster and a disintegrator and they’re different, there is no difference and no reason to do anything other than blast things.

Past the alien led to a new area, with the same one-way exits as before and the same instant death rooms as before:

I marked the room with the Laren in blue.

For example, just past the alien is a “SEEMINGLY UNIMPORTANT” room, with only one exit mentioned: to the north, which tosses you right into a deathtrap. There are “MARKS” indicating the east wall has been tampered with.

Using The Method ™ the right way to proceed is just PUSH WALL.

This leads to a “distribution corridor” where there is a spot where a crystal goes. Ignoring that for now (since we don’t have a crystal) yet you can take a loop around to the north, reaching a large “BIO-POSITRONICON”.

The machine stops you to quiz you who the founders of the Free Traders was (that’s the folks you’re the Robot Emperor of) which essentially counts as copy protection; the name is mentioned in the manual.

I don’t know if they were thinking piracy prevention or they just wanted to incorporate some of the lore.

Moving on you find an “INFORMATION CELL” with the missing crystal and an AMMUNITIONS CLOSET that frustrated me a long time (more on that in a second). If you keep going you get a dire message about everything being doomed, and then a step further kills you.

You’re already Dead Robot Walking when you see this message.

I flailed around here for a bit until I realized the AMMUNITION CLOSET cannot be referred to as a CLOSET (again, wonderful consistency) but instead as AMMUNITION. You’re supposed to BLAST AMMUNITION which reveals an invisible door, and then OPEN DOOR (not OPEN INVISIBILE). This lets you find a one-way door that leads you back to the transporter with the gap needing a crystal.

Before using the crystal, I should mention as an aside you can also find a room nearby with a BULKHEAD that opens to be a GATE. At the time I found it, none of the commands I tried worked, and it turns out I wasn’t supposed to open it yet.

Just remember this room later.

Returning the transporter/crystal combo, DROP CRYSTAL will activate the transporter, and then you can step inside and find yourself … sent to the west side of the map, with the frustrating wall that I could never open.

Even using the standard verbs got nothing this time. All the previous parser suffering had me decide it was time to reach for hints; I used Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure Games II this time.

The offending room is near the bottom at “Hall Well Hidden Bulkhead”, marked 13.

The hint “THE INFO-CUBE IS A KEY” is supposed to apply here. I admit this occurred to me but I tried to ACTIVATE the cube while in the room with no help. For some reason, dropping the info-cube is the key. Once you’ve dropped it in the room, PUSH WALL then works to reveal a TRANSPORTMODULE.

This has smoke. Art-wise we’ve had nothing like this for the Project.

Moving on (in a one-way circle) is a transmitter station that had an “accident” (ew) a “gravity trap” that crushed some Laren (ouch) and a desert.

I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this and I prowl the “bizarre” tag on itch.io for fun.

The desert has a spacesuit and a key. The key is a trap that will kill you if you take it. You want the spacesuit (and you can only WEAR it, you can’t take it or the game gets confused). The transport doesn’t work, so it appears we’re trapped in a loop again, but I had a clue from the info-cube in mind:

SPACE-SUIT……..1…..2……..DOOR

That is, “when you find the space suit, take two steps, and then there’s a door. That means in the northwest (with the transporter malfunction) the command OPEN DOOR ought to do something, and indeed it does, opening another passage to a computer room, followed by a defense room.

The display shows Laren being killed by the automated defenses.

Past this is a transporter. Now: I had actually been in this section before. It is possible to arrive here from the start of the game, where you are in a dark room, as there is a ROBOT hanging out that normally just lets you pass by. If you pause and try to do some action, the ROBOT catches on and activates a transporter, sending you here. Then entering the transporter kills you. For some cryptic reason, entering the transporter while wearing the spacesuit instead sends you back to the east side of the map, near where you killed the Laren.

Here is the final challenge. Remember the GATE I mentioned? Now you can finally open it.

You have to drop the spacesuit, and drop the mask (or rather REMOVE each), and it works. You might wonder “well, you’re not wearing the spacesuit already, can you drop the mask right away and get into the gate early?” The answer to that is no: the game says

YOU’RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG!

like it has always been doing when conditions are off. I admit this part really doesn’t make sense to me since it is unclear what you would have triggered in that whole jaunt with the spacesuit to make the gate suddenly work! At least, unlike Chinese Puzzle (which this was starting to remind me of) there is technically a hint off the info-cube, namely, “SUITS COMPLICATE IDENTIFICATION”. I guess that means the door can’t identify us for leaving, but why wasn’t the door working before?

I assume setting up a sequel which never happened.

Regarding the art, there’s an assembly routine called FASTDRAW and each of the rooms has a TXT file with the information to draw it. There’s some kind of compression going on because the byte size can vary quite a bit. I still don’t think it’s any kind of vectors; rather, the screen is divided into multi-pixel columns and those chunks are being expressed in the draw data somehow. Whatever is going on has to be very clever because even at authentic speeds it goes fast for an Apple II routine.

I know “outsider art” doesn’t make sense as paradigm for adventure games this time, because nearly everyone was making outsider art. Every company was starting fresh; even the starting-to-be-commercialized Sierra On-Line was just getting out of their “summer camp” period. Still, this was far more outside the curve than normal, but I have a notion as to why: this isn’t an original setting at all. This is based on a book series from Europe.

In the original disk version, there’s a file called DATEN.TXT (that is, “data” in German), and the main basic file is marked:

HOEHLEN VON OLYMP

This is also the name of a 1977 book by Kurt Mahr, Die Höhlen von Olymp. It is one of the many Perry Rhodan books, number 164, which you can read about here.

Via eBay.

Perry Rhodan is a space opera book series that’s been around in Germany since the early 60s, with two billion in sales. Some books have been translated but as far as I can tell this one never was — and of course the title is given in German and it was sold only in Europe — so I strongly suspect our pair of authors was from Germany or Austria, maybe with subscriptions to an overseas publication; they saw Wolf’s solicitations and decided to send the game in.

And yes, the Laren come from Perry Rhodan. You can read more about them on the Perrypedia, and you can read a summary of the original Caves of Olympia book here. The plot goes in a very different direction but this was clearly meant to be a sort of fan-fiction. The main character in the book is Sanssouq (a psychic with amnesia) but he meets the game’s protagonist Vario-500 (in one of his masks) as part of the story.

The Hordes of Garbesh, referenced at the end of the story and seemingly setting up a sequel, are from Perry Rhodan book #328.

Coming up: Tolkien, Star Trek, another haunted house, and the glorious return of Infocom.

ADDENDUM

I found the German version of the game. We’ve certainly had multiple languages on our games before due to translation after the fact (there are some ’82 dated translations in German of the old APX text adventures, for instance). This one is marked 19xx so never raised any eyebrows, but given the file names still have German in them, and the source material, what we likely have is the first adventure game written in German. What got published in the US must be a translation made afterwards.