I’ve finished the game; this is continued from my last post.
Via the Centre of Computing History. ftb on Discord pointed me to one of these mega-shareware discs having a copy of Raspion, but compiled for DOS.
First off, RavenWorks cleared something up for me: that SLIT message was referring to the acronym that goes with the “say Lymbar in tomb” in the book; I hadn’t been paying attention to the acronyms and I additionally had already mentally “used up” the book so had thought SLIT was referring to some other thing. Figuring out to use that phrase is honestly easier than the GIVE REGARDS puzzle so I would expect most people playing to hit the two moments out of order.
The desert was the real obstacle. I was frustrated trying to figure out something clever so I went into “brute force mode”, doing things like dropping an item and testing one exit before dying, then repeating. I thought I was honestly “spinning my wheels” a bit, like when I solved for a dark maze in Savage Island 1 too early via brute force. It turns out the game really does intend brute force:
Now, at first visual glance — and probably to the author’s eyes — this doesn’t look too bad. It’s just a grid where you’re supposed to find the right location. However, in context, with the loops there, this comes across as a maze, and I had to treat it as such. I only realized the author intended a grid (with us starting at the southwest corner) at the very end of the process. Once you look at a finalized map with a loop it can seem straightforward but from my experience it can double the mapping time.
Another case shows up right after falling into the underground river:
Heading north from the river drops the player not only in an endless loop but a softlock. I wasn’t expecting a double-loop there so it took me a while to realize what was going on. The right way to go is south to a shore.
Going west leads to a dead end, but the spade — which I had been testing absolutely everywhere — finally pays off.
The exit you dig leads back to the park near the house, so I had no new treasures to speak of, meaning I had missed something (rather, two somethings). The first is a “platinum nugget” that just washes up on the shore when you visit it the second time (I guess saying things wash up is a hint to be checking back, but a player with a different sequence of events might get very frustrated because it doesn’t feel like solving a puzzle). The second is found by going back to the water and using DIVE, which I knew to do because it was on my verb list.
The chest is described as “locked” but the keys don’t work.
The “sign” is the subway sign I had been carrying around in order to do mapping. It was genuinely useful to bump up my item count in the Caverns of Syl.
It immediately occurred to me the hammer was now useful, but I couldn’t SMASH CHEST either, and it took me some fiddling to realize the chest’s description mentions a lock, so you’re supposed to SMASH LOCK.
And that’s everything! The coins and nugget get dragged back to the start, the end, horray.
Rob in the comments compared the setting to 70s sci-fi shows like Ark II and Morpheus Kitami mentioned the concept being like a Lovecraft story.
From the third episode of the only season of Ark II. Yes, the chimpanzee is a crew member.
I personally was hoping for something like the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last where there’d be a twist ending.
From Vivarium (2019), an A24 movie about a couple trapped in a mysterious labyrinth of houses. It hit most theaters right before the pandemic lockdown.
Look, this was a TRS-80 game in 10,500 bytes, I knew there wouldn’t be much, but a two-sentence twist ending which reflects on the state of the player would have been possible. Nothing about being trapped in the city is explained, nor what happens after. In a way this is like Strange Adventure which lands you trapped on a tiny island with your treasures; the “winning” is almost abstracted from the practicality of the narrative. The sarcastic narrative voice of Strange Adventure made it clear the author had awareness of the bizarre ending point, but here I’m not sure if the author intended anything more with Raspion than a straight treasure hunt.
(Here’s a related question: when the player shoots the nosy neighbor in It Takes a Thief, does the author realizes this shifts the narrative tone entirely, or is it just another puzzle?)
BONUS:
A bit of history deleted from my last post but the picture is too good not to include.
When the General Electric OARAC computer started working, they invited 6 humans in a computation contest, trying to find the square of 8,645,392,175 by hand vs. the computer. The computer time was 0.004 seconds, the average human time was 8 minutes. All six humans failed to get the correct answer. Connie Hodgson of Syracuse, New York, is shown here pointing at where she forgot to carry the one.
Renga in Blue 
Hmm, the time when “computer” still often meant a person (and a woman at that) — one who computes — instead of a machine…
I don’t know if all 6 were women, but I do have one more picture.