Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(You should read my previous three posts about Starcross before this one.)

I’ve made enough progress to feel like I’m “close” to finishing, yet I simultaneously feel far away.

One thing I stared testing — and this will turn out to have payoff later — is trying to figure out different ways to die. For one thing, Infocom’s prose sometimes waxes its most poetic on killing off the player, but more importantly, death can contain clues.

>shoot me with ray gun
If you say so… The blast destroys you and your possessions so quickly there is no point in even describing the carnage.

(OK, this probably wasn’t going to give a hint, but it was worth trying still.)

>shoot weasels with ray gun
Many aliens are disintegrated, in the best tradition of the 1930s pulps. The remainder of the tribe attacks you, seeking revenge. You fire the ray gun at them. Nothing happens.
Ultimately, you are overwhelmed.

(The game lets you vaporize some things you might not expect and keep playing, like the cleaning mouse and the rat-ant nest.)

Yellow Airlock
This is the main airlock of the yellow docking port. The inner door leading up to the interior is open, and the outer door leading down to the surface is closed.
The room is lit by an emergency lighting system.
Discarded here is a metal basket with a small pocket.

>OPEN OUTER
A bright light over the door flashes menacingly until you remove your hand.

>CLOSE INNER
The yellow inner door closes.

>OPEN OUTER
The door appears to be jammed. There may be debris outside blocking it. Perhaps if you pushed again.

>OPEN OUTER
The outer door opens and air rushes out of the airlock.

Didn’t they teach you anything in the Academy? You can’t breathe vacuum! The process of dying in this way is very painful but at least relativley short.

(Yes, the typo at the end is in the original. Also, that metal basket is useful for carrying rods — if you put one in, a new hole will form for a second rod, and adding a second rod will cause a third hole to form, etc., so clearly it is meant to be a convenient way to carry them all.)

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.

>look in projector
The light being emitted is so bright that your retina is scorched and you are blinded. You blunder about for a while, end up in a dark place, and are set upon by grues.

One death in particular is arguably the most interesting, but let’s save that for the end…

Via eBay.

…and instead kick off with the Laboratory, where I hadn’t done that much experimentation yet. Just as a reminder, that has a “silvery globe” with a dial that has 4 settings, and the settings change the size of the globe. At setting 1, a “blue crystal rod” is visible but it is stuck.

>turn dial to 1
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, shrunken. The silvery globe is the size of an orange. Imbedded in the silver globe is a blue crystal rod.

>get blue rod
The blue rod is solidly held by the silvery globe.

>put gold rod on sphere
The blue rod sticks out of the globe, preventing you from placing the gold rod there.

You can put things on the sphere at different size settings. For example, if you switch the dial to 2, put the gold rod on top, and then switch the dial to 1, it will cause the gold rod to slide off (“it falls to the new surface and then slides to the floor.”)

You can have combinations like crank the setting to 2, put something on top, crank the setting to 3, put something else on top, and then crank back to 1 and have both items fall simultaneously. The sphere that is being generated is hollow, though, so when switching between 2 and 3 whatever you had on top is now is sitting on the bottom of sphere.

>set dial to 2
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, shrunken. The silvery globe is the size of a basketball.

>put gold rod on sphere
The gold rod is now on the globe.

>set dial to 3
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, expanded. The silvery globe is the size of a beachball.
You hear something fall inside the sphere.

The ultimate goal, clearly, is to extract the blue rod in the setting 1, but I admit the whole setup has me baffled as to a procedure. All that really seems to be happening is the ability to have an item from above fall onto the top of the “orange” sized globe, but that doesn’t cause the blue rod to budge.

>set dial to 1
The globe flickers out for an instant and then reappears, shrunken. The silvery globe is the size of an orange. Imbedded in the silver globe is a blue crystal rod.
When the sphere shrinks, the safety line falls to the new surface and then slides to the floor.

The closest I’ve had to something “productive” is with the red and blue disks that are in the same room. I at least managed to figure out what they’re for. When you drop one of the disks there is an “inaudible click”. If you drop both of them and step on one…

>drop red disk
The red disk drops to the ground. There is an almost inaudible click as it comes to rest.

>stand on red disk
There is a loud click as you step on the disk, and then a moment of disorientation.

Laboratory
There is a thin blue disk the size of a manhole cover here.
The silver sphere contains:
A blue rod

…you get teleported! This only works once, and it can also work on items.

I was able to slide one the red disk under the sphere (suspicious that the parser even accepts that), crank the sphere to 4 (that’s the huge setting) and teleport. Unfortunately this just kills you:

>stand on blue disk
There is a loud click as you step on the disk, and then a moment of disorientation.
You reappear amidst the sphere. Unfortunately, parts of you are inside it and parts of you are outside it. Very untidy.

I tried going for extra-grisly (collecting deaths, remember) by putting the disk on the sphere in size 2, cranking only up to size 3 (so the disk should be sitting on the bottom of the beachball-sized sphere), and teleporting inside. Unfortunately, teleportation in this scenario does nothing. I think the disk needs to be set specifically on the floor to activate. This also means that the mouse that likes to pick stuff up (and occasionally disappears in a hole in the wall) can’t be teleported to, even if the mouse has picked up one of the disks.

I found a spot later where the teleporter was useful, so this mucking about likely was for nothing, but there is the faint possibility this game has alternate solutions to things that use up resources in a wrong way (like Hadean Lands, but without that game’s ultra-fancy rewind system).

After getting nowhere on the lab gizmo I decided to take another run at the red rod. This time I brought out the big guns:

Infocom has enough verb coverage that this almost doesn’t seem useful to make. (This also hides some details, like how POKE seems to be interpreted the same as SMASH. Some are also likely “vestigial” via porting from Zork — that is, they’re standard enough to be included like DRINK, but they don’t do anything.) I went ahead and tried all of them on the nest, the rat-ants, and on the red rod, and nothing worked. This is where I found I could shoot and vaporize the nest (this vaporizes the red rod too), shoot and vaporize the red rod individually, shoot and vaporize some of the rat-ants…

>shoot rat-ant
Several rat-ant warriors are reduced to ash, but many more rush out to replace them, and these look mad!

…but most interestingly, give items over that are then incorporated into the nest.

>give black rod to rat-ant
A rat-ant takes the black rod and incorporates it into the nest.

Unfortunately, while each item you give over then lands in the room description, nothing of use happens with the procedure.

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 black rod, a gold rod, a space suit, a metal basket, a blue disk, a red disk, a safety line, a ray gun, and a red rod. The rod is embedded in the mud near one of the entrances of the nest.

No luck nudging the mouse up to the cage, either. The mouse seems to be restricted to the bottom three rings, and I suspect it has more to do with the wall on Ring Four with the distinctive message (“There is no exit visible on the aft wall.”) since it sometimes goes into a “mouse hole” and disappears.

However, the reason I still have something to report is that verb list. FOLLOW is a very rare verb, and when it does appear it can be anti-intuitive. You’d expect to just be able to use a compass direction to have identical effect to a verb FOLLOW, but sometimes it gets used as a direction system bypass (like how in Demon’s Forge you needed to FOLLOW a man to find a secret room, which was otherwise inaccessible).

I remembered seeing the chief of the weasels in the “warren maze”, and since it wasn’t acting like a real maze, maybe FOLLOW would work instead (even though the chief was staying in place, making the command might spurn him to move?)

Where my map was before solving the Warren puzzle.

Shockingly, it worked! This is decidedly a bit where the game earned its Expert label (remember, there’s no indication he’s trying to “lead you” somewhere, it only happens if you’re applying FOLLOW).

>follow chief
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.
The chief slips through a crowd, which parts deferentially.

>follow chief
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.

>follow chief
You can’t follow him until he leaves…
The chief slips through a crowd, which parts deferentially.

>follow chief
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.
Dodging several youngsters, the chief enters a hovel.

(…etc. for a bit…)

>follow chief
Center of the Warren
This burrow is deep within the warren and the aliens seem to avoid it. An exit to port leads back into the warren. The walls are covered with crude but vibrant paintings depicting a huge spider, a gigantic mouse, man-sized lizards, and in the center, a being in a space suit. You realize that this room is the center of the green hall’s junction with the ring corridor. In fact, a ladder leads down to the green airlock.
The chief alien, wearing your space suit, is here.
The chief grins, exposing his pointy teeth, and points portentiously at the ladder. He curls up on the dirt floor and waits, watching you with interest.

Plot-wise, the paintings are interesting — we know from the spider that the physiology of humans was pre-announced, so to speak, but I’m curious if the paintings were added one by one, or all four species intended to be contacted were known from the start. (I’m thinking the former, especially given the dead lizard who tried to escape.)

Page from the manual. Notice the mention of Leather Goddesses of Phobos.

Going in the green airlock, we find the ship that brought the weasels, and a shrine.

Umbilical
You are in a plastic umbilical about two meters in diameter which connects the green airlock to starboard with a spaceship about ten meters to port. The plastic is cloudy, obscuring your view of the outside.

>w
Cargo Hold
This was once the cargo hold of a spaceship, and is filled with fetishes of wood and clay, totems in the shape of strange beasts, and a great deal of withered fruit and grain. Openings lead fore and aft, and the umbilical tube is to starboard. There is dim illumination from ancient glow bulbs.
A large fragment of black smoked glass from the chief’s helmet visor lies on the floor.

>get
(black visor fragment)
Taken.

>s
Guard Room
Once a guard room or barracks, this room is now dusty and unused. The only exit is back the way you came. A large door that may have led to the engine room is fused shut, as if by enormous heat.

>n
Cargo Hold

>n
Control Room
This was the control room of the ship which originally carried the now-primitive aliens to the artifact. The control panel was obviously destroyed by a fire or explosion long ago, although the lights here still glow dimly.
Outside you can see the surface of the artifact. Gazing longingly at that view are the empty eyesockets of a skeleton; the skeleton of an aliens weasel. It is dressed in the shreds of a space suit and sitting in the control couch. Scattered around the couch are fresh offerings of fruit and vegetables.

>get
(alien skeleton)
When you touch the skeleton, its arm falls off the armrest. Something slides out of the space suit and onto the floor.

That’s a violet rod, so we need it. Unfortunately, disturbing the skeleton is Very Bad, and if we go back after having done so (even if we hide the violet rod by putting it in the basket and closing it) the chief will realize something is wrong and you’ll game over.

As you re-enter the warren an alien approaches, spear in hand. Initially he looks friendly but becomes suspicious and rushes past you into the ship. There is a loud roar as he realizes you have desecrated the altar! Other aliens surround you, spears at the ready.

However, the teleporter works! We can simply warp out after the violet rod heist, with the only problem being we can only do the trick once.

The black visor fragment is useful for an entirely different puzzle, and I knew about it because I was collecting deaths. Go back to the list, and notice one time we simply died because of too much light.

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.

>look at projector with glass
The light is very bright, but the black visor fragment filters it enough so that you are not blinded.
Inside the projector is a clear crystal rod, which has a prismatic effect on the light being emitted.

>get clear crystal rod
Taken. The image displayed is now clear and correctly colored.

So that’s two more rods down (violet and clear) but I still don’t have the one I really want, which is red! Argh!

Part of a letter included in the grey box packaging.

I’m still making progress, so no hints please. I’m hoping that the red and the blue are the last two to go (although surely the mouse is hiding something?) and I’ll be able to make my final push.

Before checking out I should share what I thought was the most interesting death. This happens if you run out of time on the life support (just WAIT a bunch) and happen to be wearing the space suit so you don’t die outright.

Suddenly, everything begins going dark, as though the artifact was shutting down. A thrumming vibration stops; one you didn’t even notice until it ceased.

**** You have died ****

An expressionless voice seems to be trying to express outrage, but not successfully. “The candidate has not made the necessary repairs in time. This is a disaster. All are now dead, and repairs are not possible. They would not approve. This area will be marked, that is certain.” Everything fades to black, and silence reigns.

The game just hard quits here; no revival, no prompt asking if you want restore a saved game.