Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(My previous posts on the game are needed to understand this one.)

I managed to finish the game, with some help from Rob digging through source code in the comments. I was in fact very close to the end, but it required a leap of absurdity to get through.

Back side of the packaging, from videogamegeek.

Specifically, on one of my runs I had found a POMME (apple). It was nowhere remarkable or specific, it was just another item in a room.

If you have a load of inventory you try to fence with the apple contained within, it gets no offer.

This is meant to be a pun. The apple is in fact an Apple, that is, an Apple Computer, the secret computer we are looking for! I was threw off by both the fact it was not very secret, but also the level of removal from the language; I think if I was holding an APPLE the pun might of occurred to me, but since I was mentally translating it, I only visualized it as a real apple, maybe for use in some specific event later where someone can be bribed with food.

Now, the problem is — as the instructions specify — we are supposed to then make a getaway with a vehicle. The VOLER (steal) verb comes into play again. Rob wasn’t sure where, but he knew that it was possible to steal some keys. I wasn’t seeing any scenes at either the bar or the restaurant until I realized it was possible to ASSEOIR (sit). You get offered a menu and then can order, and then have an encounter where you can try to steal.

You are told you need to order a dish so as to not raise suspicion.

In the scene above, we’ve been caught, and the manager searches Larcin and confiscates all the stolen items.

There’s a similar scene at the bar; I wasn’t able to steal anything resembling a car key in either one.

What actually worked was stealing at the register! Maybe there’s valet service such that the car keys get stored there?

You fortunately don’t need to say specifically you’re going for TROUSSEAU (keychain) but this was still quite random as the VOLER verb usually gives a “don’t understand” message.

I did have to go through the process twice. The first time through, I took the keys down to the parking lot and went trying to unlock doors none of them would open. Trying to steal again at the register led to failure, but if I ended the burglarizing session, and then went back to the register to try again on a fresh day, I was able to get another keychain. The second one worked.

Thus ends a very odd game that straddled between feeling like a strategy game and an adventure game. I would say it counts as an adventure: the chain is a puzzle which requires the magnet to solve, the moment-to-moment action felt more like roleplaying than the “big picture” style gaming that strategy normally involves, and realizing the odd pun with the apple is not something that’d be part of any strategy game. It’s still essentially a very minimal adventure game with strategy game dressing.

I’d like to end with another source that Rob found, of an interview done with the Louis-Philippe Hébert and the young authors of Logidisque’s first game (Têtards, or tadpoles). Roughly 1:19 is when Hébert starts speaking.

I’ll quote part:

Il ya un choc culturel parce que on découvre tout à coup un nouveau médium. Un nouveau médium donc une nouvelle possibilité, de créer de nouveaux objets … ça nous pousse que dans nos dans nos traditions, parce que évidemment la plupart d’entre nous avons une formation littéraire ou cinématographique …

There’s a cultural shock because we’ve suddenly discovered a new medium. A new medium, and therefore a new possibility, to create new objects … that pushes us in our traditions, because obviously most of us have a literary or cinematographic background …

We’ve only had a few people for All the Adventures (like Robert Lafore) who styled themselves in this period as “writers” or “artists”; Hébert here is recognizing that the leap over mediums is difficult to make, and he claims that young people in particular have a certain “banalité de demain”, that is, banality of tomorrow, where they have an easier time dealing with the new medium that seems to be “the future” as they were born into it.

Coming up: a large and very difficult puzzle-fest with an elaborate magic system. Back to roots!