Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(This continues my previous post.)

Via eBay.

I mostly did mapping without puzzle solving. There’s a lot to take in.

Before I start showing maps, I should mention this game describes directions in terms of ship directions (port/starboard/etc.) but you can just use n/s/e/w if you want. I will be sticking with normal compass directions to avoid hurting my brain. One interesting side effect — due the lack of a word for, say, port-aft — is that there are no diagonal compass directions in this game. Nevertheless, the map manages to be complicated due to the physics involved.

Last time I was at a red dock and just made it into an airlock, getting a black rod in the process. This leads to an appropriately color-coded red hall.

>GET ROD
When you take the black rod, the airlock door opens!

>IN
Red Airlock
This is the main airlock of the red docking port. The inner door leading up to the interior is closed, and the outer door leading down to the surface is open.

>CLOSE OUTER
The outer door closes and air rushes into the airlock.

>OPEN INNER
The red inner door opens.

>IN
Red Hall
This is a wide room with corridors leading in four directions and a ladder down to the airlock. The lighting is poor, as though the lights were worn out. Halfway up the walls are planters full of wilted plants.

>S
Red Hall
This is part of a long hall with failing lights. It intersects with another corridor at right angles. The plant boxes here are empty.

The map is a cylinder, with blue, red, green, and “dark” stripes going north/south — the dark being portion of the artifact that doesn’t have light. The map wraps around when going east/west (I’ve marked the exits in orange) so if, for example, you start from the farthest north point and go east five times, you get back to where you started.

Red Hall
The red hall ends here. A smaller corridor curves away on both sides. The light is dim and the plants are stunted.

>E
Green Hall
The green hall ends here at a ring corridor. The planters are well-tended.

>E
Room on Ring One
A passage leads aft from this point on the ring corridor.

>E
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

>E
Blue Hall
The fore end of the blue hall meets a ring corridor here.

>E
Red Hall
The red hall ends here. A smaller corridor curves away on both sides. The light is dim and the plants are stunted.

The “eaten by a grue” room is noteworthy for two reasons. First, it’s a whimsical reference in what is otherwise a serious game; I guess Lebling didn’t want to change what was a convenient way to keep the player from stumbling in the dark. Second, the way grue logic (and Crowther/Woods logic) has always worked is that stepping into a dark room is safe, as long as you step into a lit room afterwards. Normally this is intended to force the player back to where they came from, but since this map clearly is forming a wraparound cylinder, I tried doing the “pass through” seen in the transcript above and it worked. This allows reaching one bit of the “Village” that is otherwise inaccessible, although it’s just a dead end:

Blue Hall
A ring corridor joins the blue hall here. There is an entrance (presumably for the blue docking area) below, and also a way up.

>W
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

>W
Outskirts of Village
This is the fringe of a populated area lying to port. The corridor is filled with primitive huts, and is being used for the cultivation of grain. It seems that the inhabitants heard you coming and have fled.

>W
The corridor is blocked by a wood and mud palisade.

Let’s zoom in, starting with the aforementioned village.

The village is centered around the “green hall” zone, and has a weasel-like race.

This is the edge of a populated area, growing denser as you move starboard. Primitive huts line the corridor, which is blocked ahead by a palisade built of mud and wood. An open gate, guarded by several spear-bearing aliens, leads into the structure. A small crowd of aliens has gathered to watch you.
They resemble human-sized weasels. Their bodies are thin, flexible, and covered with several colors of hair. There are all sizes and ages, and the stronger ones are armed with spears, knives, and other nasty hardware.
They gesture in a way intended to show friendship (they bare their huge razor-sharp teeth).
The smaller ones are hustled away, but almost immediately begin to sneak back.

In the center of the village I encountered a chief alien (“all-grey”) who wanted me to give him my space suit.

He looks at you in awe, staring at your space suit. He points to it, and then at himself, and brandishes his spear menacingly.

I was then able to point at the brown crystal rod he was wearing to receive it in trade. Given I already had a black rod in addition to the brown rod, and we’ll later see a red rod (which I haven’t been able to get yet), there is clearly a collect-a-thon element to this game, where likely we’ll need to full set of rods to fix something.

To the east there’s what is technically a maze, maybe?

In the Warren
This is an earth and reed burrow within the warren. There are many aliens here, going about their business. The younger ones stare at you and make funny noises. There are passages all over the place, and a constant traffic in and out.

Any direction just loops back to the same room description. If you drop an item it gets stolen by children. I wandered enough times and made it back to the Village Center, but I don’t know if there’s any real geography. You can later find the grey alien in the Warren in order to confirm you’re just looping back to the same room over and over.

In the Warren
This is an earth and reed burrow within the warren. There are many aliens here, going about their business. The younger ones stare at you and make funny noises. There are passages all over the place, and a constant traffic in and out.
The chief alien, wearing your space suit, is here.

>N
In the Warren
This is an earth and reed burrow within the warren. There are many aliens here, going about their business. The younger ones stare at you and make funny noises. There are passages all over the place, and a constant traffic in and out.
The chief alien, wearing your space suit, is here.

One other bit I marked on the map — but which turned out to be not particular to that spot, since I’ve encountered the robot elsewhere — is a “mechanical mouse”.

A small metal contraption about a meter long and half a meter high enters the room. Its guidance system (two dish antennae at the front) circles quizzically. A power antenna juts from the rear. On top is a small tray. It cleans the floor as it goes, humming contentedly. All in all, it looks like nothing so much as a mechanical mouse.

The tray is empty (at least it was when I looked). I don’t know yet what puzzle the mouse would help me solve, but I assume it can go places I can’t (and maybe get stuff from the dark if it turns out the lights never turn on).

Let’s zoom in around the blue corridor next.

The Observatory is self contained. A blindingly bright projector would be great to take to the dark areas of the map, but given the response to TAKE PROJECTOR is “Not bloody likely” I think we’re not talking something at the portable scale.

Observatory
This is the interior part of the artifact’s observatory, with an exit to starboard. There are no telescopes or other instruments visible, but in the center of the room is an image of space in the vicinity. Examining the image, you see a tiny model of the solar system. The sun is a bright dot in the center; Jupiter and Saturn are easily discovered. The colors of the dots are not what you would expect, though, and range throughout the spectrum.
A holographic projector is on one wall.

>EXAMINE PROJECTOR
The projector is a type of laser, producing a continuous holographic view of space outside the artifact. The light issues from the front of the projector, and is blindingly bright.

Nearby this is the Zoo, which I’ve got on the map as a dotted “region area” because it actually is four rooms:

To the west is a broken cage which appears to have once had the grues; that must be whey they’re roaming the ship freely. To the east is a Nesting Cage.

Nesting Cage
The force projectors here aren’t working, but the cage is nonetheless inhabited by many creatures who resemble crosses between a rat and an ant. They are multi-legged with chitinous shells and pincers around their mouths, but they have long ratlike tails and sparse tufts of hair. Some of them are armed with tiny spears and walk precariously on their hind legs. In one corner is a very large mud and stick nest. The nest is constructed of all sorts of odds and ends, including a red rod. The rod is embedded in the mud near one of the entrances of the nest.

Here’s the red rod I already mentioned, but if you try to take it you get snapped at by a rat-ant. I haven’t tried anything as a counter yet.

Returning to the Blue Hall and heading south, the Weapons Deck has one more fun items of the game: a ray gun.

Weapons Deck
This was the armory of the artifact. A massive bulkhead has been burned away, giving free access to the weaponry. Unfortunately, it appears that the vast stock of futuristic armaments has been mostly destroyed. Gigantic projectors are scorched and shattered, strange battle armor is reduced to splinters, and wall racks for small arms are mostly empty.
Mounted in a wall-rack is a genuine-looking ray gun, large and formidable, with a long, ugly barrel. It’s difficult to tell whether or not the gun is fully charged.

I like how the description suggests some sort of past history to the place. I don’t know if deciphering the lore is part of figuring out the game as a whole. The ray gun itself initially backfires if you try to shoot it; on the second shot it issues “searing orange rays” and the recoil knocks you over. The third shot just gives a “click”.

I tried it on a suspicious wall in Ring Four, between the Red and Blue halls:

Room on Ring Four
You are between the red and blue halls on a ring corridor. The corridor looks damaged to port. The illumination dims to starboard.

>SHOOT WALL
A giant blast of silvery rays issues from the barrel, but it doesn’t go very far. In fact, there is a secondary explosion about a foot from the barrel, scattering dust motes in the air. There is almost no recoil: instead the gun vibrated almost painfully. This felt like a misfire.

>SHOOT WALL
An explosion of orange rays sweeps over the wall, but when the smoke clears, it is still there (though perhaps a bit singed).

No luck! This might be the sort of puzzle where the solution just reveals itself on its own later.

Before going on, a quick summary:

1.) upon entering the artifact you get a black rod
2.) there’s a village with a chief that you can trade your space suit for a brown rod
3.) a red rod at the zoo is protected by a rat-ant that snaps at us
4.) an electronic mouse is running around
5.) a projector is running with a super-bright light
6.) a ray gun is lying around but can only be fired twice
7.) there’s a suspicious damaged wall

There’s still more to go! (And in the main cylinder area I’m skimming over the Computer Room that’s back at the Green Hall, because that’s better saved for last.) In the middle of the Blue Hall, at the same ring as the Red Dock, there’s both a Blue Dock (if you go down) and a second, smaller cylinder (if you go up). Heading to the Dock first:

Blue Dock
You are viewing this area, color-coded in blue, through the first of several transparent bubbles connecting the dock with a large spherical object tethered by silvery ropes. The blue airlock dome is behind you, and the spherical spaceship is aft of here. There is a hook by the airlock.

Yes, that hook is suspicious, and you can attach your spacesuit to it using the safety line, but given the line has only five meters of slack you can’t go anywhere. It might come up in a specific moment later.

>S
Bubbles
This is a series of plastic bubbles connecting the blue airlock with a spherical spaceship docked aft of here. The bubbles are made of a thick material which is nonetheless transparent.

>S
Spherical Ship
You are within a huge bubble, transparent from this side. The interior is crisscrossed with wire webbing, so that an agile creature could move around using only the wires. Objects are stuck in the wires in various out-of-reach places. The whole impression is of a rather untidy spiderweb. The connection to the artifact is at the forward end of the sphere.
Crouched in the center of the sphere, where the wires converge, is a creature resembling a giant spider. A closer look reveals that it is not an insect, but rather a multi-legged, endoskeletal mammal. It has huge eyes and impressive grinding teeth. It grips the wires with many tiny fingers, and gazes at you with almost hypnotic intensity.
The spider watches you with multifaceted eyes.

Hang out at the spider enough, and he’ll talk with you:

The spider draws forth an object from a wire clump. He fiddles with it and a voice issues from it: “Greetings, creature from Earth. Are you afraid of me? Come closer, I won’t harm you.”

The spider tells you his name is “Gurthark-tun-Besnap,” (or something more-or-less that). Like yourself, he landed here to explore. He failed to control the artifact before it left his system, and has been stranded here for centuries. He sighs. “It’s getting a little boring. The other inhabitants of this place are not too stimulating. The computer was some company until it malfunctioned. When we began to approach your system, I got excited! A whole new culture to learn! The end of boredom, for a while at least. I fed your language to my translator, from your radio broadcasts, and have eagerly awaited your arrival.” He grins broadly, a fairly horrific sight.

I’m having a lot of trouble here; TALK TO SPIDER gives a blank prompt (!). (I’m not playing one of the early versions, either, this is from the Masterpieces of Infocom collection in the 90s.) ASK SPIDER ABOUT THING isn’t even an understood syntax. We’re not playing Deadline here. Still, I assume given the spider’s behavior I’ll need to figure out an interaction somehow. But let’s save that for later, since we still have yet to go up from the Blue Hall’s 3rd ring, which reveals a whole new area.

You climb a vertical shaft for a considerable distance. The shaft opens into a gigantic space which obviously occupies most of the interior of the artifact. The area is brightly lit and has an interesting geography…

Grassland
You are standing on the floor of an enormous cylinder, kilometers in length and hundreds of meters across. Above you and all around is revealed a micro-geography of trees, grassland, and manufactured structures. The cylinder is divided into various bands, of which this is approximately the central one. Things cling to the floor (or ceiling) above you, as each band continues all the way around the cylinder.
You are in the midst of a grassy plain, a sort of savannah with warm breezes and tall grasses. An exit leads down to the outer deck. Looking forward, a metal floor circles the cylinder, and extends all the way to the forward end of the cylinder, which is a sheer metal wall with a crystal bubble at the axis. Looking aft, the grassland becomes more and more densely forested. The aft end of the cylinder is totally obscured by impossibly tall trees. A herd of creatures not unlike unicorns crops grass in the distance.

This is a whole new cylinder within the cylinder. Just like the other one, it has a “wrap-around” effect if you keep going east or west.

If you wait long enough, some weasels will hunt and kill one of the unicorns. I have yet to try to interfere (the ray gun might be fun). A bit farther south is a “thin forest” with a hatch that goes down to a Repair Room, which I’ll show off in a second. Even farther is a tall tree.

Base of Tree
You are in a primeval forest, near the base of a giant tree. The trunk is thick, perhaps 40 meters in diameter, and the height is incredible. The forest is dense, so you can’t see exactly how tall it is, but extending all the way to the axis isn’t out of the question. The bark is so rough that climbing would be no problem.

>U
Up a Tree
You are climbing a gigantic tree, one that would make the largest sequoia blush with envy. Fortunately the bark is rough and climbing is easy. The gravity lessens as you near the axis of rotation, which also helps.

>U
Top of Tree
You are at the top of a giant tree, just below a huge crystalline bubble full of machinery and controls which lies at the axis of rotation at the aft end of the cylinder. Out of reach above you is a hatch which leads into the bubble. Beside the hatch is a silver slot. Gravity has almost disappeared here as you near the axis.

Keeping in mind the physics of the situation (low-gravity) I tried out JUMP and reached a Drive Bubble.

Drive Bubble Entrance
You are floating (clinging?) outside the drive bubble, a crystalline half-sphere covering the aft end of the artifact’s axis of rotation. Small knobs like handholds lead up the surface of the bubble, away from the end of the cylinder. The drive bubble is transparent and through it you can see the controls for the main engines of the artifact, which must be aft of here. The only way in is a hatch which is closed. Beside the hatch is a silver slot.

>U
On Drive Bubble
You are floating near and clinging to a large crystalline bubble covering the aft end of the axis of rotation of the artifact. There is no weight here. Small knobs resembling handholds cover the bubble; you could use them to climb back down. Far away at the fore end of the axis you can see another bubble very similar to this one.

Note the silver slot; we’re about to see more slots in a moment. If you’re having trouble visualizing the “drive bubble” (I know I did), it might help to go back to that map cover from the Zork User Group. Zooming in:

You can see the half-sphere at the end, the tentacles at the dock prior to dragging the Starcross in, and the spherical spaceship with the spider.

Now, we finally get to the two rooms that I skipped talking about. One of them is the Repair Room below the hatch.

Repair Room
This room is taken up by two large pieces of machinery. The leftmost has a symbol depicting the emission of rays beside a yellow slot. The other machine bears a symbol in three parts: the first two parts, in black, are a solid block and a fluid level. The third, in red, is a series of parallel wavy lines. Beside it are three diagrams; under each one is a red slot. The first diagram shows four single dots equally spaced around a six-dot cluster. The second shows two eight-dot clusters in close proximity. The third has three single dots equally spaced around a seven-dot cluster. The only exit is up some stairs.
There is a metal and ceramic square here.

The metal and ceramic square does not fit in the yellow slot, but it does fit in the red slots; however, it just gets swallowed up. I’m not sure what rays are being emitted by machine #1. Machine #2 I’m going to guess shows chemistry diagrams (I haven’t sat down to figure out which chemicals are being represented).

I never bothered to test the square back at the silver slot (with the engine) because I found somewhere better for it to go. Near the green hall, down at Ring One (the far north), there’s a Computer Room.

Computer Room
This is the main computer room. The builders of this ship were obviously still wedded to large mainframes: this one fills the room and is thirty meters high. There is an overlarge switch at about eye-level and an access panel below it, which is closed. The power seems to be off.

>OPEN PANEL
Opening the access panel reveals rack upon rack of metallic cards. There is one slot that has no card in it.

>TURN SWITCH ON
The lights in the room come on and there is a deafening FOOOOM! noise as the computer starts up.
Lights blink on the main display and the word “Fault” appears.

The “metal and ceramic square” fits here, giving a different reaction.

The lights in the room come on and there is a deafening FOOOOM! noise as the computer starts up.
The main display blinks twice, a bell rings, and a gold rod falls from the output hopper onto the floor! A moment later, a previously unseen enunciator panel comes on.
The panel has three banks of four colored lights: red, yellow, green, and blue. The first is labelled with a symbol of the emission of rays: of the lights underneath, the red one is flashing and the yellow one is brightly lit. The second bank is labelled with a stylized docking port and the third with an airlock. Of these two banks, the first yellow one is brightly lit and the other yellow one is flashing. The panel also contains six other lights, each bearing a stylized picture. The first four, all dark, represent navigation, engine, library, and defenses. A fifth, picturing a cage, is brightly lit. The sixth is flickering dimly. It bears a symbol in three parts: the first two parts, in black, are a solid block and a fluid level. The third, in red, is a series of parallel wavy lines.

I assume the colors are referring to the different Halls. This is very hard to parse and I had to make a picture. (L = lit, F = flickering)

I think the writing could have sorted things out a little more clearly. If I’m reading it correctly, an indicator being lit means “broken”; a indicator flickering means “danger zone”.

So in the Yellow Hall, illumination is broken, the docking port is broken, and the airlock is nominal. Navigation, the engine, the library, and defense are all working; the cage at the zoo (the grue one) is busted, and whatever is represented by the three-part symbol is in “danger”. The block, fluid, and wavy lines suggest solid/liquid/gas to me, so maybe temperature regulation?

To add to that enormous info-dump:

1.) upon entering the artifact you get a black rod
2.) there’s a village with a chief that you can trade your space suit for a brown rod
3.) a red rod at the zoo is protected by a rat-ant that snaps at us
4.) an electronic mouse is running around
5.) a projector is running with a super-bright light
6.) a ray gun is lying around but can only be fired twice
7.) there’s a suspicious damaged wall
8.) there’s a spider at the Blue Dock who wants to talk
9.) there’s a unicorn that gets hunted at the secondary cylinder
10.) there’s four slots at the Repair Room
11.) there’s a “square” found in the Repair Room that starts a Computer Room display showing what’s broken
12.) there’s an extra slot and hatch entrance at an engine found by climbing a tall tree

The items I have are a black rod, brown rod, ray gun, safety line, space suit (before trading), tattered suit (after trading), and a tape library (from the ship, which I haven’t mentioned yet — it plays Earth media, and now that I think about it might interest the spider). Also the square that started the computer if you want to count that.

One last thing! I had discovered this early but mentally brushed over it; however, it seems to be integral to the plot. Just like Adventure/Zork, you can get revived if you die.

You wake to find yourself alive, on board the “Starcross.” It appears you have been given another chance.

This was given neutrally enough I thought maybe this was “meta”, just some sort of automatic multi-undo command. However, if you die after docking you get a much different message:

You hear, if that is the right word, an expressionless voice. It seems to be inside your head. “This is not promising. The candidate does not deserve another chance, but the instructions are explicit. There are not even any more docking ports. They would be disappointed if they knew.” You wake to a brief glimpse of a pallet (on which you are lying) surrounded by metallic threads. The whole apparatus begins to vibrate and you feel very dizzy. As you lose consciousness, you realize that you can’t see the rest of your body. There is a feeling of dislocation, and then…

Curious. This suggests we’re undergoing a “test” just like the Dungeon Master was giving in Zork III, although in that game, the Dungeon Master was essentially controlling everything (even appearing in disguise). Trying to explain why all the items needed to beat an adventure game are somehow always at hand leads naturally to “clearly some external intelligence was controlling the strings!” Given the weasel-creatures and the spider-creature are their own beings, I don’t see how that can quite be the case here. The broken pieces of ship also suggest things have gone awry. Maybe this is like the tests in Portal, which supposedly follow a script, but the cake is a lie?

I’ve had two people tell me they started playing along, but please no spoilers (or speculations) yet. I’ll let y’all know if I hit the threshold.