Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I have finished the game; my previous post is needed to make sense of this one.

Mind you, I’m not sure how much sense things really make. This game is, in a way, easier for beginners than veteran players: veteran players (ahem) might actually sit down and try to figure out the connections between the various rooms, and why some things appear or don’t appear at random, while a beginner might be satisfied wandering to the end without any such documentation.

Illustration of the hallowed mountain Amon Anwar, part of the Firien Wood, via the story “The Path to Amon Anwar” by Matěj Čadil.

I really did make an honest attempt at first at mapping…

…but I kept having connection not make any sense, and directions that went one way during one play-iteration go a different way on another. On top of that, testing exits always could randomly lead to being randomly walloped by a goblin with no chance of rescue, or even by a balrog (who appears at any time).

I found the general idea of the authors was to have hyperconnectivity. By which I mean: there would be two or three or even five ways to get between two points. This can be a fun and charming aspect to early games: Zork might drop the trapdoor after you enter its world at first, but gives quite a few ways to get back to the daylight (someone with more flexibility than others) and it gives the impression of a universe with lots of options; here, it feels more like the authors were just drawing in links at random. There’s a trapdoor that lets you wrap around back to the starting area. You can somehow land back where the boat is (and take the remaining set of items) with the boat never having left.

This only opens from the other side, which is dramatically interesting, but the other side is roughly six steps away and just as easy to get to as walking through the trapdoor, which is not so interesting.

Eventually I managed to randomly come across someone saying the word NEIRIF. This is a trigger to send you to another part of the map that is quite important.

No puzzle solving, just patience and luck I didn’t get walloped by a balrog this playthrough.

This lands you just outside a tree with a rope and some food; all you really need to do is grab one piece of food. Later, nearby, there’s a hungry person who will help you assuming you share.

With the wizard hat on from the starting area, the staff that the dog brought over works and you can WAVE STAFF to form a bridge (and then, with some parser difficulty, CROSS BRIDGE). This leads to a new area where you can just wander around until you find the golden bird, the whole point of the quest.

Hang out and a wizard will eventually appear. The word ZOOT previously just gives a rumbling noise, but here it actually wins the game, for some reason (and yes, I just got annoyed and looked this up rather than actually solve anything).

Referring back to the paradox of the two reviews, yes, I could see someone blustering to the end in a few hours and assuming (given that very little in the way of puzzle solving happened) that this was an easy game. I could also see someone impossible stuck for weeks because of the RNG going in weird directions.

The design intent clearly had the player whacking at monsters — you can get 10 point per monster, and you can use the staff to send down lightning bolts on things. But back even in 1982 we didn’t care that much about score and it was a mainly a way to notice “hey, you missed some puzzles”, not get a genuine feel of achievement the way a new record on Asteroids might.

Via Acorn Electron World.

I feel like the authors zeroed in on aspects they liked (hyperconnectivity, monsters, randomness) without thinking that the structure they’d be left with wasn’t fully sustaining. It’s the sort of game where since the designer knows their map they easily can get a different impression of play than an actual human who has no insider knowledge. I’m hoping they got some feedback which can be applied later, since this is only the first of four games, even if it is the only one of the authors that lands in 1982.