Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I am likely just a few puzzles away from the end. (Previous post on Circus here.)

Via World of Spectrum.

In the the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Elementary, Dear Data (season 2) Data tries to play a Sherlock Holmes themed simulation on the holodeck but runs into an issue: the computer mashes all the previous Conan Doyle stories, ChatGPT-style, such that Data knows exactly what the solution is to the mystery he’s given. Hence what ought to be a jaunt lasting many hours is cut into a minute.

Data, Geordi, and Doctor Pulaski in front of a sign indicating The Red-Headed League, giving away significant details of the mystery.

Circus has a related issue. The design is fairly wide-branching (in contrast, with, say, the heavily linear Arrow of Death games), meaning it is possible to access many puzzles at once and solve them in any order. One of the very easiest turns out to be the method of destroying the circus.

Specifically:

STEP 1: Pick up the whip, out in the open in the circus tent.

STEP 2: Go over to the tiger and use the command CRACK WHIP (that exact verb was what I was missing before).

STEP 3: Go down beneath, where you’ll eventually find some terminals and a blueprint. The blueprint says that shorting the terminals will cause a detonation sequence.

STEP 4: SHORT TERMINALS, run away, and boom.

There is still of course a problem given that end screen: there’s still no way to drive away with the car without the petrol. But in a dramatic sense, it feels very weird to have a method already for blowing up the cursed circus (which didn’t involve anything mystical) and just need to get fuel. I was expecting the Evil to somehow interfere.

It is still possible the Evil might interfere because there’s a whole sequence with the cannon that otherwise doesn’t make sense. For the moment, though, the story tree feels a little deflated compared to the high I was on last time. A good analogy is how Geordi and Doctor Pulaski reacted when Data solved the newly constructed mystery instantly. It isn’t like the game is over, but I feel like I’ve skipped to the end nonetheless.

Let’s get to that cannon:

Launching it “splatters you against the canvas”. I had already experienced using the trapeze to get up to the canvas roof, but hadn’t been able to do anything with it; I was trying to open a hole with the penknife that the player starts the game with. I just needed to CUT CANVAS, not CUT ROOF (sigh).

I had trouble getting back, and I think I must have mistyped something before, because I tested again trying to get back on the trapeze (ENTER TRAPEZE) and it worked just fine. Then SWING TRAPEZE a second time lands the player back where they started, so it is possible to go back to the cannon with a cut-ceiling and die again:

Now, I already suspect what I need to do. If you LOOK ROPE it turns out to be a SAFETY NET, so I need to drop it in the right place, but I have no idea where the landing is from that description so I’m going to need to test everywhere I guess (and hope DROP NET is the right command and I’m not supposed to use something fancy). Why do the launch anyway, though? If you set the tent to blow up you can just walk to the exit. Maybe, if you have the car filled up, there’s one more spirit-obstacle that appears that threatens you, and finally Only a Little Evil becomes Actual Evil.

In the department of other-stuff-I’ve solved: I mentioned last time a chest I couldn’t open. OPEN CHEST says “Nothing Happened!”, UNLOCK CHEST gets the response “I don’t understand what you mean”, and SMASH CHEST says

How destructive!

The latter is the worst message of all: it essentially conveys to the player that violence is not the answer and they’re barking up the wrong tree. Yet, the answer is destruction, as you are required to specifically type KICK CHEST.

You can just feel my goodwill for the game soaking away.

With the slippers on, it is now possible to tackle the tightrope, and at the end there is a metal rod. So Matt’s prediction was kind-of on but reversed.

The metal rod isn’t used for tightrope walking at all, though. Back outside the circus tent there was a maintenance door where all the various destroy-verbs (including KICK) don’t work. However, if you are holding the metal rod and try to OPEN DOOR, it works, revealing a HACKSAW:

I don’t yet know what the hacksaw does. I did also figure out the water tank, which had some entirely different cryptic parser shenanigans.

Typing EAST enters the player in the water location, and makes it seem like they are swimming automatically. SEARCH WATER and so forth yield nothing. However, if you type SWIM while you are already swimming (?!) a sea-lion is revealed.

Bringing the fish over (which I previously assumed was for the tiger, but nyet) and feeding the sea-lion yields a snorkel.

To summarize: I have a hacksaw and a snorkel I haven’t used yet. I have a cannon where I can launch myself to the outside, but I don’t know the landing spot to put a safety net (assuming that’s even the intended act). I have yet to get the petrol for the car to escape. The generator is still broken (mentioning the lack of a cable) but it may be there’s petrol in the generator and we’re just supposed to get it out (siphoning with the snorkel, maybe?) but I haven’t gotten any commands like SAW GENERATOR to yield fruit, so I must have a puzzle or two still outstanding.

A good ending might rescue the game, but for now, the parser deception did not make me happy.