Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

The game was mostly straightforward but there was one horrendously obscure part and two major bugs. My previous post is needed to understand this one.

This game was swiped by Keypunch on the same disk as the broken Cavern of Riches port; the one that made it impossible to score. Weirdly, the stolen C64 version of Castle Adventure might be less buggy than the original. Via eBay.

I had left off last time being captured and tossed in a cell with a “horny toad”. The most immediate obvious thing it seemed to try — given this was a princess-rescue expedition — was to try to KISS TOAD.

However, I had no method of getting through the locked door, so this was a dead end. The main catch to realize is that even though there’s a rope with grappling hook immediately adjacent to a place it gets used (arriving at the guard and then this scene) that doesn’t mean the rope gets used in that spot first! The right action is to grab the grappling hook, turn it around, and use it on the castle instead.

Doing this opens a significant amount of map since nearly the entire interior of the castle is now accessible.

New rooms marked in color.

You can technically scoop the rope up behind you as there’s a battle axe off in one tower that you can use to drop the castle’s drawbridge. I say “technically” because this was one of the bugs of the game: halfway through the drawbridge just disappeared for no reason and I had to restart.

Other fun items are the Baron’s best horse which you can steal away with…

…and some armor where the mere act of carrying it is enough to confuse wandering guards into thinking you are the Baron. (I assume it is passively intended that you wear the armor when you pick it up, but it still was funny the first time it happened.)

The bookcase here incidentally has two entirely different books, and both are needed. I got lucky and found one book on one playthrough and the other on a reset, so I knew they were both there, but this would be a case where it’d be quite easy to miss an item.

One book is a “horror” book that has a diamond inside which counts as a treasure, and the other is a rare edition of Scott which has the word “Ivanhoe” (as hinted at by the graffiti, so I guess it’d be fine to find the horror book first since there’s a hint that the second book exists, but I found them in the reverse order).

The “piano keys” are found by trying to play a piano. They get used later to unlock a door, because adventure game logic. The joke made sense in Kidnapped but not as much sense here.

The bookcase also hides a secret passage leading to a treasure room with gold bars and a silver cross. However, taking one of the treasure items causes the door to seal and lock (and not a lock openable via piano keys). What does work in the room is the word IVANHOE which teleports the player over to a dungeon area, but I wasn’t sure at first what use that was.

Another secret passage goes off of a fireplace (just ENTER FIREPLACE) and it leads into a family crypt with a talking skull.

The “vampire” being warned about is a little farther down, where there’s some rubies and the sound of flapping wings. At random, you might get bitten by the vampire bat and die (the silver cross offers protection, but it’s easier to just save your game and hope for the random luck, it seems like you get through about 90% of the time anyway).

The next move turned out to be slightly tricky: I had the means to escape the cell with the princess already. (You can try to attack a guard anywhere, like where the books are, and you’ll get sent there.) The guard is nice enough to send you to the cell while still holding a battle axe, so you can SMASH DOOR. It is unclear why smashing the door works there (and not any of the other locked doors); the three doors (guard in the cave, the door at the treasure room, and the cell) all have different methods of opening even though they look indistinguishable.

With the princess in hand you find yourself back in the dungeon, the same dungeon that IVANHOE works in to zip over to the treasure room. The problem is that the treasure room locks itself even if you don’t try to steal anything, so there doesn’t seem to be any escape. The trick (which I found out via walkthrough) is to wait around for a guard to appear, and then fight it. Fighting a guard before was useless other than to get captured, but the second time works out.

Now here’s the astonishingly bad part. Even though there’s no command to examine the guard further, and LOOK yields nothing new, you can still TAKE KEYS from the guard. I guess you’re supposed to assume he has some? This is so egregious I think it’s probably a bug. The keys from the guard work on the treasure room, so it’s now possible to escape (not only with the princess, but the gold bars and silver cross).

Almost done!

The last treasure is found back at the cave. The guard that was at a door is now unconscious in the dungeon, so you can open the door unmolested; this is where the piano keys work.

It’s a cute joke, but the game never previously established this kind of tilted-reality in the same way Kidnapped (which uses the same joke) or Mad Venture (where you pick up a “fork” in the road) does.

There’s a wrong route where you can end up LOST IN THE PET RAM (fine, there’s one other titled-reality moment), but the important part is the BARON’S SECRET STRONGHOLD.

The treasure just disappears if you try to get it, and I was past my patience at this point, so I just checked the walkthrough: the treasure teleported itself up to a previously-empty turret, so if you trudge up there you can pick up the chest (which I guess only has enough energy to teleport once).

This game had more charm than I think I’ve been getting across, but I really did have two massive bugs overshadow my gameplay and require resets. One was the previously-mentioned disappearing drawbridge (and it took a while to confirm that this was a bug, and not me messing up a puzzle); the other issue is the torch will suddenly start to run out of light, and then when it finally does rooms that previously don’t need a torch suddenly go dark. The torch is otherwise only used for a handful of cave rooms. Generally speaking, you can just drop the torch early in the game and ignore it and it won’t run out, so I feel like the author intended some kind of daemon which just broke hard.

Malmberg certainly kept it in mind because in 1987 he showed off his new AGT system with a game called Crusade, which is just a port of Castle Adventure.

You are in the midst of a thick woods. The ground is damp with dew. The night air is chilly and you shiver from the cold.
There are large trees all around you.
You see a crumpled-up piece of paper with writing on it.

(The paper is an ad for the AGT system.) One last noteworthy element that’s specifically in the AGT version: the author mentions the possibility of giving hints, but is emphatic that it should be done via letter. He is quite firm that you should NOT call his phone number, ever ever. This suggests the author had some unfortunate past encounters, given the number of exclamation marks used.

HOW TO GET INTO THE CASTLE, OR FOR SOME OTHER HINT!!! I will be glad to provide a solution, but I want to do it by letter, not by phone!!!