Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Not to be confused with the other Island Adventure game published in 1982.

With Vince Apps having many books to his name (admittedly very similar books) it feels strange that his company Apex Trading is still somewhat mysterious.

Via the Internet Archive.

The games have been

Devil’s Island

Forbidden City

Pharoah’s Curse

Haunted House (the oddball of the set, more of a strategy game)

where the main games all feature a lot of “deadly exits” where there isn’t necessarily a way to find out about them until hitting the end screen. Island Adventure is no different and follows the same structure as the other games so I’m fairly certain Vince Apps is the author (~99.5%)…

It has the exact same variable definition as his other games, for instance.

…but I also think this might be an early game of his, if for nothing else the fact the game requires the whole text TAKE INVENTORY in order to show what the player is holding (as oppose to just typing INV or INVENTORY).

From the World of Dragon

A January 1983 ad for the company mentions the games Haunted House, Treasure Quest, Forbidden City, and Pharoah’s Curse in order. I have never found an ad that mentions Island Adventure; perhaps it only showed up in the Apex Trading catalog because the author was sheepish about it (again, I think it’s an early game).

You’ll notice I haven’t linked to a playthrough of Treasure Quest. We don’t have this game. We do have a game called Treasure Quest that’s on TI-99…

…but it doesn’t mention Apex Trading and is undated, attributed to a Jim Beck of Canada where he asks players to please send $5 to his address if they like the game.

Not Brighton, England.

It’s an easy name clash to have and I suspect there’s likely just a lost Apex Trading game out there.

With that out of the way, let’s hit the island, where we are hunting for a “FABULOUS TREASURE”.

Things kick off on a beach with a driftwood, which isn’t quite as common as being in a forest with trees, but it feels up there. When you EXAMINE it is described as “very dry”. (This suggests you can light it on fire, but I haven’t been able to do, which is the main catch to why I haven’t beaten the game yet.)

Don’t worry, the forest is nearby, just to the west.

Incidentally, EXAMINE WOLVES says there are too many to fight, and FIGHT WOLVES doesn’t go well.

Laying out the rest of the map as I have it so far:

To the east of the start is a pirate guarding a cave (hanging near a dead rat and an old boot, for some reason)…

…to the north there’s a cave with too many pirates (probably not meant to be entered)…

…and a pirate who needs a password (which I’ll get a little later).

I was hard stuck for a bit and had to make my verb list early.

I was somewhat suspicious of one room which had a “FLAT BLANK FACE OF A CLIFF” but only a bush. A bush is not a normal “secret mechanism” but I ran through my verb list anyway and got a secret opening.

This leads to a orthogonally-arranged set of caves with one pitfall, and two rooms with a item you can use PULL on. One is safe, the other is death. Death first:

The graffiti reads — keeping in mind the word wrap — LLPU ROF TTSNIAN ETCIUNORTDS. This anagrams to PULL FOR INSTANT DESTRUCTION although it’s faster to just test things out.

The other pull-moment has a slight cryptogram, although again it is easier to yank first and solve later.

Move the letters backwards by one to get PULL FOR WEAPON.

The sword has a serial number of 2119562112 61518 16918120519 where the numbers go with the pattern 1 = A, 2 = B, etc. to translate to USEFUL FOR PIRATES. Given the pirate alone at the cave with the dead rat for some reason is described as needing a weapon to be defeated, this seems redundant.

The “NUT CRUNCHIES” mentioned in the cave are the password to get by the other pirate. This leads to a small area with an empty bucket, another deadly fall, and a dragon.

Here I’d like to try lighting the driftwood, but nothing I’ve tried has worked. I especially am interested because at the WOLVES the command HELP gives the information YOU’LL HAVE TO BE BRIGHT TO GET RID OF THESE! Just to summarize, I have:

some sand, a bucket, some driftwood, a rock, a stone, a dead rat, an old boot, a sword, a flask of water (poison)

The stone and rock are not given any description (I might suspect flint and steel, but they’ve been highly resistant to any verbs working on them at all). The source code is BASIC so checking for a solve should be easy but there’s enough to play around with (despite the murderously limited parser) I’m hanging on for a bit longer. In this kind of circumstance it doesn’t feel like an adventure game as much as a puzzle game where I’m in a battle with the machine to find the next command it will understand.