Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

You’re on a pasture. Straight ahead you see a strange vehicle which appears to be a spacecraft of some sort. You are being drawn closer and closer, as if by sone magnetic force…

Through the doors you can see an eerie red light, illuminating an otherwise dark, foreboding passage. You can hear strange cries from within.

Suddenly you are rushed through the door, almost as if pushed from some outside force.

The September 1982 issue of Softside Magazine was devoted to computer graphics.

Art from the cover, scan via Atarimania.

Meanwhile, the Softside Adventure of the Month series marched on as an all-text jam (previously: The Mouse that Ate Chicago), with Peter Kirsch once again the author, as credited in the TRS-80 source code (dated June 1982). Once again, there are also Apple II and Atari versions. This time I went with Atari. I’ve already done a thorough job on what we know about Kirsch (including his first game, Magical Journey) so this was an ideal pick to go with while the Internet Archive is still down wobbly.

We’ve been scooped up by an alien spacecraft and the action immediately continues from there.

We’re immediately next to a dark room, and has matches. They’re the kind of matches they light up a room temporarily without any possible action in-between.

This appears on the screen temporarily before the game goes back to the dark description.

You can still pick up the pole while in the dark, the flag just rolls away. You can then light the pole (requiring another match) and treat it as a torch.

(It’s fascinating how there are specific rules being followed here and how different they are from other games. Here, you can walk in the dark safely but can be killed by something specific that is dangerous; you can pick up items while in the dark. There are plenty of games where dark = no manipulation of items in a room other than possibly dropping something. There’s also been plenty of games with matches, and while they usually don’t work as long as lamps or torches, only in a few games have had the mechanics like this, with the room made visible but 0 turns allowed. The ability to pick up items in darkness compensates.)

The snake here is a little farther, and I haven’t gotten past it yet. You might think the pole/torch would be good for prodding it, and that might even be the right action, but I haven’t found the right verb to express this if so.

TICKLE is the main one I wouldn’t normally think of, and it’s useful to know now there’s an emphasis on conversation and SHOWing things.

Fortunately, the snake only blocks some of the exits. Specifically the east-facing exits are all accessible. To the northeast there is a passage to a room of mirrors; you can break one of the mirrors in order to get into a windy passage which blows out your torch. At the end (in a room you can briefly light up with the matches) is a room with a “light rod”, and typing ON ROD (and no other syntax, as far as I can tell) will turn it on.

Directly to the east of the snake is a single room with a suggestive metal wall, but again, if there’s simply a parser action to do, I haven’t found it yet.

While it is not unusual for me to be stuck on a Kirsch game, usually the verbs have been reasonable to find, but given how little I have so far to work with (pole, matches, light rod, and the red flag from the pole which you find after you get some light) that seems like the only possibility. My suspicion is one of the two puzzles (snake or metal wall) will fall and then I’ll have a whole chain of events next time.