Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts.)

Poster from Jewels of Darkness (the trilogy repackaging of the game), CPC version. Via cpcrulez.

I haven’t had time to play much, but I did resolve something major that’s worth a post: how the teleportation system works.

First, though, the puzzle which I realized the solution as I was posting.

This is a case where the coffin is “ajar” and a zombi comes out of it and kills you; you don’t need to kill the zombi, you just need to stop it from coming out. Back at the jelly crossing there’s a hammer and nails nearby, and so, after a little struggle with the parser:

A couple of my other tentative solves fell through (I’m still annoyed about not being able to pick up the needle after turning small and using it as a spear on the ants) so I ended up switching to the BBC Micro version for a bit to see if (just like with the man with the wand in the forest) there were other parts made clearer via the expanded text. The dwarf says explicitly you’re looking for ore (rather than just “a treasure”) so my moment of confusion would have been cleared up faster:

As you wave the skeleton staff they all clank off, leaving the dwarf.
“Thank you”, she says, “You saved my life. I’ve found a rich vein of ore above the stone face and will share it if you visit the area!”

While I still haven’t figured out the goat yet, the horn has a description suggesting its use which isn’t in the later version:

You are on a smooth rock dome, a narrow path
A fierce goat is on guard
A large horn lies on the ground

EXAMINE HORN

It is very valuable!
It is enchanted!
The horn is decorated with pictures of fleeing enemies

Apparently the octopus solution was supposed to be another pun/proverb:

The octopus waves its arms and you can see. Thus “many hands make light work”!
You are in a second dead-end black room.
A staff of polished bone is here
A yellow collar is here

Let’s focus on the yellow collar a bit — remember I needed to use that to get through a particular exit because otherwise I wasn’t authorized. I had some urgency to try to figure out the teleporters because I found out (horrible!) the light source of the burning driftwood does have a time limit, and it is a tight enough time limit I might need to optimize my travel. (Might is because I still have a lamp that lacks wick and fuel; it counts as a treasure so just might be that, but surely such a device would be used for more than a treasure?) I’ve found optimizing somewhat fun before, but only in very small scenarios; when it’s a big game like this requiring many objects be tested on many places, it becomes irritating to run into a situation where you run out of time simply because you didn’t have the right inventory at hand.

I tried all sorts of antics with the yellow collar while on the teleporter. I didn’t do every single verb on the list…

The BBC version is different; for example, CHOP is accepted, but GET rather than TAKE is not.

…but I tried all the ones that seemed reasonable, and collars in different combinations as well. I finally turned to the possibility of voice commands and it worked!

Jewels of Darkness needs a “SAY” in front. The BBC version does not.

After playing around a bit more, I realized the security level setup was something like

red < orange < yellow < green < blue < indigo < violet < silver < "darkness"

although oddly, "Indigo" is a word in the BBC version but not the Atari one. If you have an orange collar on, you can only access the red and yellow pedestals. If you have the blue collar on (the best I've found) you can only access the red through blue pedestals. You can still teleport from the higher security pedestals with a lower collar, just not to them.

Now, looking at my previous map, I did not have “indigo” (but since it doesn’t exist in the Atari version I’ve been playing, it likely just doesn’t exist) but I also didn’t have “green”. This is a pedestal that can only be reached via the teleport system, but sadly, it doesn’t unlock anything noteworthy; it lands you inside the mysterious tower from the start of the game, with no new objects or locations otherwise.

The one thing that helped tip the puzzle towards being a little easier was the “SAY PASSWORD” puzzle I referenced last time — it meant that the game did have a SAY trigger with particular words, so the possibility was in my head as I was testing through the various collar manipulations. I don’t think the authors were intentionally tutorializing part of the game, but I’ll take a lucky accident.