Circus is the next of our Mysterious Adventures, and allegedly better than the last, Pulsar 7. According to the author it is his favorite.
Circus comes to mind as the effort that satisfied me most. (Nobody collaborated with me on the one BTW – entirely my own effort). Can’t think exactly why it’s my favourite, but I did think it was cool that a number of people felt it was somehow reminiscent of “Something Wicked This Way Comes” by Ray Bradbury.
I don’t have more history to share at the moment that hasn’t been in my previous Mysterious Adventures posts; eventually Brian will form the company Digital Fantasia to sell his own games but that doesn’t come until 1983.
As is typical of spooky protagonists everywhere, our car has run out of gas on a strange road. We go exploring and find, strangely, an abandoned circus.
Despite us seeing many spooky domiciles games, this one feels a little different; there’s no immediate vampires or clowns with axes chasing the player around and there’s a genuine attempt at a slow burn. Something Wicked This Way Comes doesn’t start with a circus, but rather a storm, where near the end of the fourth chapter there is the incidental smell of licorice and cotton candy.
You can first go south back to the road to visit the car. Going all the way back there’s a hole for petrol, and a boot that is not described in the text version; fortunately, I was playing the graphical version so it was prominent enough for me to try opening it.
The boot (or TRUNK, the game is nice enough to have US/UK synonyms) has a spanner (wrench) and a flashlight, which supplements the player’s starting inventory of car keys, a penknife, and an empty petrol can. We’re better equipped than a doctor dropped off on a secret operation by the Air Force!
Staying outside the circus…
…to the east there’s a generator which needs a cable to be fixed, and a field with a shovel. The shovel digs up a “starting handle” which I presume goes to the generator, but I don’t have a cable yet.
To the west is a maintenance wagon with a locked door. The resistance to my attempts to break the door or pick the lock suggest a key simply comes up later.
Heading inside the tent, having the flashlight on is required.
Again, slow burn: there are no obvious mystical things going on. A clown will occasionally appear and run away, and I’ll show off what happens after the tour:
To the east of the entrance is, straightforwardly, a tank of water you can enter (but DIVE doesn’t work). To the west is a closet, a chest which I can’t open, a clown costume which we’ll get back to, and a whip.
Headed into the ring, there’s a rope you can pick up and two ladders. One leads to a tightwalk (walking leads to death) and another leads to a trapeze. I was able to SWING TRAPEZE to find a new “room” where I was swinging near the roof, but I was unable to do anything yet from there.
Off to the west there’s a freezer with some fish, and off to the right there’s a cage with a tiger. I assume whip + fish + tiger can get something interesting but I haven’t experimented enough yet.
To the north side of the tent there’s another ring where the clown starts appearing (“Clown runs off!”) and a cannon adjacent. You can climb in the cannon and pull a lever to launch it from the inside, which kills you.
If you go back and wear the clown costume, rather than the clown running away they hover nearby instead, and point at the ground. A note appears.
That is, even though we are not technically trapped (we can still walk back to the car just fine) and there are no immediate threats in the circus, the circus is nonetheless cursed and our fate is to destroy it.
This is far stronger (so far) than Howarth’s last game. Somehow the sparse Adams-minimal prose works together with the premise better than any of his regular fantasy games. I also like how there’s a reason for open exploration which nonetheless promises we’re going to get layers as we figure out a mystery, something akin to Voodoo Castle requiring the player to enact a ritual.
Mr. Crosetti looked at the pole, as if freshly aware of its miraculous properties. He nodded, gently, his eyes soft. “Where does it come from, where does it go, eh? Who knows? Not you, not him, not me. Oh, the mysteries, by God. So. We’ll leave it on!”
It’s good to know, thought Will, it’ll be running until dawn, winding up from nothing, winding away to nothing, while we sleep.
“Good night!”
“Good night.”
And they left him behind in a wind that very faintly smelled of licorice and cotton candy.
— from Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
Renga in Blue 
Have you tried to JUMP from the trapeze room?
Speculation: Walking the tightrope will require a pole.
A little surprised the flashlight wasn’t a torch!
Howarth favoured the word “flashlight” in his games. He did the same in Gremlins (1985), where the object in question has a much larger role to play. “Torch” is much more common in the UK, but “flashlight” will not cause any confusion, as it is difficult to mistake for anything else (unlike “trunk”, which is a large portable hinged box). I blame this on Scott Adams’ influence.
This game made me realize that I don’t have a word for the petrol filler hole. I have “gas cap” and “gas tank” but nothing for the thing between them. Looking around I see “gas tank filler hole” but I’ve never heard anyone say that. It looks like the American Automobile Association, and probably the instructions for gas station pumps, say “insert the nozzle into the gas tank.”
torch is a particular oddity in the adventure genre, because if you’re spelunking in ancient caverns and you tell an American they’ve found a torch, they will assume they need to find matches.
Kind of like how “petrol” I just mentally have as a synonym for gas, but my first encounter with a “boot” I was very confused
In all honesty, the way both British and North American English handle that particular device is archaic and silly. Most other languages I’m familiar with describe it as a either a “pocket light” or some form of lantern, which is much less confusing.
I’m surprised no one ever did a player-unfriendly puzzle where you’re given a battery and a match, then a torch, and whichever one you try to use on it first is wrong.
I imagine Americans might also be confused by a British person saying that they’re off out to the local car boot. Which is our equivalent of a garage sale. Oh, the wonders of the English language.
you go splat if you jump
I’ve been trying to get the rope arranged in such a way that it doesn’t happen, but no luck so far
I did manage to cut a hole in the canvas roof but I haven’t found a way to climb up there. I _think_ the cannon might actually launch where the hole is but I’d first have to be able to get back down to ground floor to test that
also I did manage to move the tiger (CRACK WHIP) and get down there, and the method of blowing everything up is down there, but I need to find the petrol first
“a tank of water you can’t enter (but DIVE doesn’t work)”
A bit like buying tea and no tea, no?
haha, whoops, yes, that’s “can enter”
@Ross about a player-unfriendly puzzle: That’s not evil enough for an “easy there, Satan,” but it is rather puckish 😏
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The appearance of the game is similar to me to GAC/Quill. Or maybe this is one of the reverse engineered Scot Addams engine? Do we know how it was written?
it’s Scott Adams database format, you can run Mysterious Adventures in the same engine as Scott Adams
(the first three had TRS-80 versions that were their own thing, but all three got re-done, if you go back and check Golden Baton especially you can see side-by-side comparison)
according to interviews someone had given him details on the database system as a standalone file, there’s one affiliated with the folks who did The Adventure System
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/miners-adventure/?order=ASC
so my best guess is he saw that and wrote his own Scott Adams interpreter and then started using it (it doesn’t look like he ever saw The Adventure System itself, but it never got officially distributed in the UK)
his own games eventually started getting published by Scott Adams International UK and I believe his own ports of the database format were used to help publish Scott Adams original games, so there was a weird synergy that happened even though Howarth originally used the database format in an “unofficial” way
Wow, thanks for the info. Indeed, interesting synergy.