Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Sherwood Forest is from Phoenix Software. We last saw them with The Queen of Phobos and Masquerade; the latter was written by today’s author (Dale Johnson) before Sherwood Forest but wasn’t published with final art until much later (1984). Today’s game has a different artist, Dav Holle (he is in the “thanks to” credits of Queen of Phobos).

This is the last time we’ll see Phoenix for this blog.

Unlike the Robin Hood game we’ve looked at already (or Sierra On-Line’s take) we’re not re-creating all of Robin Hood’s adventures in his battle with the Sheriff of Nottingham, but rather just trying to get married.

Welcome to Sherwood Forest. Robin needs your help. He doesn’t seem to remember who he is or that he was supposed to marry the beautiful Maid Marion today. It must have been that nasty bump on the head he took while fighting the Sheriff of Nottingham the other day.

From what I have gathered so far, the famous elements of Robin Hood are in but they are getting used in a much sillier way (Little John guards a log bridge, but rather than wanting a quarterstaff fight, he is looking for Robin Hood, since somehow he doesn’t recognize you, and you need to make a green uniform first … look, we’ll get there).

From the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities. There was no Sof-toon #2.

The game is in machine code; quoting Dav Holle about the process:

I did the drawings, and the image compression and decompression, the disk bootloader, and animation and data input code. Dale would get the text strings from my data input, and would parse the text and come up with the text response. His code would also tell me what location should be drawn and what objects or characters should be drawn in the scene, and my code would draw that stuff as needed. All of Sherwood Forest was written in assembler.

The difficulty of Masquerade was listed as Class 5; this is Class 3 so is allegedly easier. I say allegedly because Johnson games always tilted fairly hard; at least the opening was reasonable to do.

Regarding the graphics, notice how the title screen refers to animation. The screen above animates the eyes. The first room has an owl which also has animated eyes.

There’s nothing as extensive here as Sands of Egypt with screen scrolling or Temple of the Sun of a complete motion; it’s all small spots like a banner moving, but it complements the overall cartoon style.

You start out in a quite open area where you’re free to wander. To the immediate west is a pond that has a “grindstone”. To the east there’s a haystack where the text suggest it can be burned to find something inside.

Giving out the full starting map…

…let’s start our tour by going west to the Castle. There’s a taxman on the way, where Robin Hood can do his thing and ROB him.

Robbing the taxman yields a bag of gold dust we’ll be using shortly.

The Sheriff of Nottingham at the castle is pointing at the poster as shown above. It’s supposed to be “you’re going to land in jail” but it’s curious in how it could simultaneously refer to the (future) couple being royalty somehow.

Turning north, down a “well traveled road”, up next comes a Faire.

The gold dust goes to the beggar at the entrance (probably, Johnson isn’t above using “wrong” routes for items).

HE SAYS, “THANKS! HERE’S SOMETHING YOU MIGHT NEED.” HE TAKES THE GOLD, DROPS A SMALL FLINT, AND DISAPPEARS.

The west there’s a dock with no boats (I assume this is for a story event later)…

…and to the north is Maid Marion at a kissing booth.

If you go for KISS MARION, though, she says “SORRY HONEY, BUT YOU JUST AREN’T CHARMING ENOUGH.” (It’s like an amnesia plot, except everyone except the main character has forgotten who he is.) I’m not sure how to deal with her yet, but I’m guessing I won’t have the item(s) needed until the end of the game.

One of the main mechanics to try in every room is LOOK, because it seems to be fairly well behaved about telling you what is genuinely interactable; it may not always be obvious from the initial room description and picture. Here, LOOK reveals and awning — the green awning above the booth — that you should take.

One last place at the Faire I haven’t figured out yet is a stage, with some “Merry Men” watching. You can hop on to the stage and DANCE or SING and get some tomatoes thrown in your direction but I don’t know yet the use of this, other than the MERRY MEN change to ROWDY MERRY MEN.

Circling around the map some more, there’s a tailor and a blacksmith in the center of town. The blacksmith has a broken grinder but while holding the grindstone you can FIX GRINDER. I don’t know the use of this yet. Rather more helpfully it has some STEEL you can pick up.

Before doing the tailor, let’s do a quick stop back at the haystack, because flint + steel means we can now MAKE FIRE.

(The smoke is animated.) In addition to finding the needle in the haystack, if you LOOK ASHES twice you can find some THREAD followed by a penny. Take the thread, needle, and green awning back over to the tailor.

The tailor is out but there’s a note indicating you can drop things off if you want. Dropping off the green awning, thread, and needle, and then leaving and coming back:

This happens immediately, there’s no realistic time passing. I had left the penny for payment but it turned out not to be needed. I guess we have an account.

Circling around our tour further, there’s a wedding chapel with Friar Tuck who talks about “quickie service”.

I gave the penny over and he said he would “put it in the offering plate next Sunday” then left. I assume there’s some important ramification to all this later (either that or I did something wrong).

Little John next! (Again, sort of a “reverse amnesia” plot.) The green uniform is enough to convince him to leave opening the way through…

…although I should point out if you just try to attack him, it results in a death (my first of the game; I thought maybe we needed to wrestle rather than use quarterstaffs).

On to the cave he mentioned! Here I am mostly stuck. First off comes a catapult:

There’s a button on the catapult. If you push it the game automatically assumes you are climbing on before pushing, and it launches you to death. I don’t know if there’s some syntax for launching an item, but I’m guessing the game is fishing for the player providing a method of safe landing.

Further on, there’s one branch over to a “cliff” with heavy winds, where jumping also leads to death.

Finally, there’s the warned-about cave with heavy winds, in addition to a boulder too heavy to be moved.

Trying to GO CAVE results in “A TREMENDOUS WIND” catching you and blowing you to a “ROCKY GRAVE”.

To summarize, I have as open problems the Sheriff, the boat dock, kissing Maid Marion, the merry men at the stage, the catapult, the cliff, and the cave. I don’t have any unused items other than the grinding wheel (which can’t be moved). Unlike Time Adventure, Johnson is the sort of author willing to re-use items, but I get the intuition I’m missing something simple here with what I have. No hints though, please, this has been enjoyable to play so far!