Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

DEAR SIR,

IT IS WITH GREAT REGRET THAT I MUST INFORM YOU OF THE MOST UNFORTUNATE PASSING OF YOUR UNCLE, SIR HENRY VANDERBILT. IT IS ALSO MY DUTY TO INFORM YOU AT THIS TIME THAT THERE WILL BE A READING OF THE WILL OF YOUR UNCLE’S ESTATE IN THE ISLAND PROVINCE OF BURMESIA A WEEK FROM TODAY AND IT IS REQUESTED THAT YOU BE THERE.

We return now to Peter Kirsch and the Adventure of the Month series through Softside (see previously: Menagerie). By October he has essentially taken over, having no outside submissions for a while. Even when these games have had issues they’ve always had premises far outside the norm for 1982, and I find it exciting to see early stabs at various genres.

This is arguably Kirsch’s most ambitious game yet, with multiple plot twists.

Via the Internet Archive.

The Deadly Game invokes not even just a genre but a sub-genre of the thriller/horror movie: the house where you have to stay the night to get (some amount of money) but (your relatives/spooky ghosts/traps left by the antagonist) are trying to kill you. See, for example, Bring Me the Vampire (1963) and No Place Like Homicide (also 1961), although the latter is a comedy. (There are also two movies called The Deadly Game but they seem to have no relationship to the genre overall or this particular game.)

Probably the most famous variant is House on Haunted Hill (1959) with Vincent Price, where people can earn $10,000 by staying one night in the titular house.

I have all three versions this time (TRS-80, Apple II, Atari) but I went with Apple purely because my last game was on Atari. (Foreshadowing: I should have picked TRS-80 instead, but I’ll get to why later. For someone looking for the download, it’s on SoftSide Magazine Adventure Superdisk 5.)

1 ‘ THE DEADLY GAME
BY PETER F. KIRSCH ** VERSION 14.4.1.3 **
SEPTEMBER 1982

We are informed our super-rich uncle has passed, and you arrive at the reading of the will to an “ENSEMBLE OF RELATIVES THAT YOU NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D SEE AGAIN AND WISH YOU HADN’T”.

The will, then, is read: a sum of ONE MILLION DOLLARS to be divided equally amongst the relatives, except everyone must spend one night first, and the money will be divided — the will says this explicitly — “AMONG THE SURVIVORS”.

ALL OF YOU ARE GREEDY AND UNDESERVING OF ANY OF MY MONEY. WE SHALL SEE WHO CAN PASS THE TEST OF SURVIVAL TONIGHT.

You then land in a bedroom and immediately someone is trying to kill you via gas.

Here is where we reach one of the first things rather different about this game compared to prior Kirsch output: there’s a stronger emphasis on having indirect objects be included in the game. The right commands are to LOOK BED and notice a PILLOW and BLANKET, and then to PUT BLANKET; the game asks IN WHAT? and you need to respond IN CRACK, referring to the crack that the gas is escaping from.

This scene is followed by a persistent “PSSST!” message which only clears up when you LOOK WINDOW and find a woman underneath, after which you keep hearing the phrase DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND.

This is trying to simply hint that a diamond goes to the woman, but is bizarre in an environmental sense. Also, in addition to lacking a diamond the window is completely sealed off so we can’t get to her yet.

The room is still locked up, and it took a fair amount of time for me (maybe 20-30 minutes?) to get out, giving the impression this was almost a single-room game. Extra details are included by the game also allowing LOOK UNDER and LOOK BEHIND as commands (mentioned by the HELP command but not by the main game’s instructions); you can LOOK UNDER the chair and find some gum, and LOOK UNDER the bed and find a key made of bronze. To reach the key you need to use the portrait off the wall (it’s described as “long”); behind the portrait is a safe but you can’t open it yet.

Weirdly, LOOK UNDER does not note the death underneath the pillow. I discovered early you can SMASH PILLOW / WITH CHAIR in order to make the pillow safe to pick up.

The bronze key can then go to the top drawer of the dresser, which has a “BOBBY PIN” and a “KEY MADE FROM ZINC”. The key doesn’t go to the lock but you can PICK LOCK which will allow the bobby pin to work on the door leading out from the guest room.

That sounds fast narrated out, so let me be fully clear it took a while to get to this point; the LOOK UNDER mechanic wasn’t originally clear, the zinc key seemed like it ought to go somewhere (it didn’t yet), trying to use the bobby pin to pick locks of the dresser (there’s a middle and bottom too) makes it seems like it can’t be used to pick locks at all, the woman under the window messages are bizarre and I spent a long time trying to communicate or at least get her to stop from saying the same words over and over again, and I also spent a while noodling with the safe behind the portrait in case it was possible to be opened early. (It isn’t — you need to get three combination numbers from elsewhere in the house.)

Getting back to the action, we can now explore the house somewhat more freely, although a quick check through the open guest rooms on the floor we’re at reveals various cousins have already expired.

You need to get the power working later to turn the light on.

Getting the gold key requires stopping the walls from closing in, but that will require an item from a different floor.

That’s three out of five cousins dead already. The other two guest rooms are locked so we are unable as to inquire as to their health.

From this floor you can go downstairs or upstairs. I started by going upstairs. (Well, to be honest: I started by being horribly stuck, as GO UP, CLIMB STAIRCASE, UP, TAKE STAIRCASE and many more variants failed to be understood. I ended up needing to check Dale Dobson’s walkthrough for GO STAIRS, and it has to be phrased exactly that way.)

I’ll be hopping in the elevator in a moment, but first a mention on the maid’s room: you can LOOK UNDER / UNDER BED and find out THERE’S NOTHING UNDER THERE NOW, BUT IT LOOKS LIKE A GOOD HIDING PLACE. The broom goes over to those closing-in-walls although I took the route jumping into the elevator first:

Just like Critical Mass! But you don’t have to time it.

The ground floor consists of a living room (divided into a 3 by 3 grid), some side rooms including a kitchen, a front door that’s locked and that is a concern later, and a cellar door that requires the zinc key from back at the start.

Heading by the kitchen, you can find an “axe” and “nails” in a cabinet (LOOK CABINET, it gives confused parser messages if you try to OPEN it) and then the killer seems to be repeatedly trying to throw something sharp.

In reality the above scene is meant to be “do the right action to defend yourself” but the author decided here not to make it “right action or die”, but simply to pause the moment while you figure out what that right action is. You can grab the pot lid and it gets used as a shield. You then get the message DEFLECTED BY THE POT LID and the invisible killer leaves you alone after that. The thing being thrown was a rock, which happens to have part of the safe combination on it.

Heading down to the cellar, there’s a fuse box that can be fixed by the gum (from way back at the starting room, when you LOOK UNDER / UNDER CHAIR), along with some acid, turpentine, and a garden hose.

Before being able to escape upstairs to test the light switch now (and apply the broom which still hasn’t been used yet) there’s a rattlesnake blocking the way.

I can understand improv-throwing a rock from the shadows, but where did the snake come from?

With the snake out of the way via garden hose impersonation, we can first block the closing walls with the broom, nabbing the gold key. The gold key can be used back at the dresser to a second key, and that key unlocks a door to find yet another unfortunately expired cousin, and a paper with a second part of the safe combination.

If you’ve been counting, that’s four out of five cousins. That means the fifth must be the murderer, right? Well, no. Applying the axe to the last locked door:

The smashing leaves some boards which will be useful shortly, and there’s a saw inside the room.

So rather than the cousins fighting each other in a Battle Royale (as the expired Uncle may have expected) they’re all dead via someone else’s hand. Even more intriguingly, working out what’s going on can actually help a little with a soon-upcoming puzzle; a golden situation where solving a puzzle is equivalent to “solving” a plot that doesn’t happen often in this era (it came up earlier this year twice when playing El Diablero). Unfortunately, The Deadly Game doesn’t stick the landing quite as securely, but let’s fiddle with some last lingering elements first —

Once you have visited all the dead cousins, any attempt to go downstairs is fatal, as the unseen killer finally decides on a more efficient killing method than a rock (“A lone shot kills you”). So we’re now stuck on the second floor and top floor until we can figure out how to survive getting shot.

Given the fusebox has been fixed, now is the time to try to turn on the light switch (in the same room as one of the bodies). This is deadly: you get electrocuted. You need some gloves.

To get them, you have to

a.) throw acid at the window that was unable to be opened; it gets dissolved

b.) pour turpentine on the portrait, then do the most absurd action in the game, WIPE PORTRAIT, using the pillow; this reveals the third safe combo number

c.) enter the numbers into the safe; as is typical for these games, trying to figure out the right syntax is a pain in the neck (you have to specifically type DIAL 31R76L33R; that is, you concatenate one long string and use it as the noun)

d.) with all that done, you can throw the diamond down to the woman who has been singing about diamonds this entire time, she’ll toss back a key which coincidentally opens the last locked drawer of the dresser

e.) the dresser has the gloves

Now the light switch can be turned on safely. This reveals a hammer in the room. Yes, all that was to get a hammer.

So we’ve collected a saw, some nails, a hammer, and have some boards. Why do we need all these things? Well, if you try to go back upstairs, there’s been some sabotage done:

We can SAW BOARDS and with the other items in hand the player now has a STEP, and then FIX STAIRS works while holding this step. This amount of item-fiddling can feel correct in a tomb searching for ancient treasure, but a building project whilst a murderer is roaming around feels a bit off-kilter.

Now, the whole point of going back upstairs — do you remember the hiding place under the bed? There’s a gun there now.

Now things get very strange from here. You might think to take the gun with you to have a showdown, but the Uncle’s Lawyer magically appears to stop you.

The key thing to realize, or at least look up and rationalize on behalf of the author (it’s not very rational) is that the maid doesn’t count as one of the five dead cousins so is the murderer, and the gun is hers, so we can LOOK GUN, find there’s a bullet, and take the bullet out, making the gun now be safe. But somehow– then with this task down, when we go downstairs, the maid has teleported past us to pick up the now-unloaded gun, and then teleported in front of us to try to fire the shot on the first floor.

There was a much better version of this in Jack the Ripper (same author). In that game, there’s a part where you discover the killer’s medical bag and his murder weapon, and you can swap his murder weapon with a fake one, but you have to be careful to close the bag (otherwise you’ll have given away something weird has happened). Later in the night you have a confrontation and the previously dangerous weapon is now inert because of your prior preparation. That seems to have been the goal here but the teleporting maid just makes so little sense I stared baffled at the screen a couple minutes after having this scene.

The curious thing is that in a way the bullet trick is much more “fair” in a gameplay sense — the ramification happens right after the action so failure on the player’s part is more immediate (unlike Jack the Ripper, where you have multiple scenes in between when you make the setup and the punchline). Yet the long-term planning is what gives the action both its story punch and its, well, being an actual logical plot beat. This is an instance where optimal gameplay practice and optimal story practice clash.

You can drag the maid over to a phone and CALL POLICE (look, I was just checking the walkthrough by this point, I thought we were supposed to hang out the entire night you know the whole premise of the game?) and then we can meet them at the front door and then there’s not only one twist, but two of them.

However, if you’re referring to Dale Dobson’s version of the story, the game is already over.

The game loads a totally different file for the ending! I imagine Mr. Dobson (calling it just a “coda”) thought it would be just some text congratulating us on our riches, but the game isn’t over yet. The only platform I could find the ending portion is TRS-80, so we’re swapping over to there.

For those counting, this is a second plot twist: the police are here to kill us. (This admittedly patches one issue these plots sometimes have, which is why law enforcement seems apathetic to the game of death going on, or the very public ad about “surviving a night” in a house and people mysteriously dying.)

The game removes our inventory and we can’t run, so this isn’t a terribly hard puzzle since resources are low. The red carpet mentioned in the description is our savior.

We can then nab the revolver, and the policeman starts to pull a backup weapon, so the inevitable results:

What is not predictable at the end is the third plot twist right after, which makes no sense whatsoever.

Keep in mind, the opening of the game had the main character clearly shocked and surprised at receiving an invite to the reading of a will.

a.) so that whole opening section was the player lying to themselves somehow?

b.) also how did the player know things would play out the way they did, given they didn’t come to the event armed?

c.) what was with the lawyer magically appearing when we were holding the gun?

d.) what. I mean what

Curiously, we haven’t run into that many broken story moments in All the Adventures. There generally just hasn’t been coherent enough story for that to happen! Even Kirsch’s games have had a by-the-moment sort of plotting; while there’s Arrow One, which had the biggest plot wrapper (and the “Adam and Eve” ending), the Kirsch games mostly have had self-contained moments (like Robin Hood being a series of vignettes, or the individual passengers rescues on Titanic). Around the World in Eighty Days managed to be coherent by sheer dint of plot simplicity: the whole thing that connects the various episodes is that “time passes compared to the last scene”.

The Deadly Game proves that to strive for the full span of genres, authors really needed to start mastering traditional story beats in addition to juggling gaming norms. Just: this game came out more as a negative example.

Coming up: what will likely be the last game of 2024, as we return to Brian Cotton, one of the first authors to be commercially published in the UK.