Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game entirely without hints. It was decidedly easier than Masquerade. My previous post is needed for context.

I don’t think my success had anything to do with getting better at figuring out Dale Johnson’s logic; even with some intentional softlock (aka “walking dead”) points, everything is genuinely clued better here than his other games.

Via the Gallery of Undiscovered Entities.

Last time I was puzzled by a boulder I couldn’t move and a cave blasting wind. I had neglected to LOOK BOULDER, having “CARVINGS” on the side:

After some contemplation, I decided “total” strength was referring to not having your strength be split by holding items in inventory, as the “single” man is alone. Dropping everything and pushing the boulder worked.

With the wind stopped, while it meant the cave couldn’t be entered from this direction, over by the cliff it mentions you might be able to “jump” down and there no longer is any wind interfering.

Giving a full map from here:

The slope you land on goes a long way down, with a lifejacket, an ax, and a crank findable along the way. At the very bottom is a boulder (the same boulder you pushed earlier) and when trying to push it from the other side the game indicates you need some leverage. It also has some extra writing.

Going back up, I didn’t have much to noodle with other than the catapult, so I tried INSERT CRANK on catapult and found that it fit. I was then able to TURN CRANK before pushing the button again, leading to landing in a different (safer) spot.

I had already tried using the ax in various places with no luck, but at the bottom of the tree it clearly is intended to be used except the game says it isn’t sharp enough. Oho, so that was what the grinder is for! One restored save game later and re-creating the catapult jump:

The hole lets you jump back in the long sloping passage, but obnoxiously, the pole can’t come up as it is too big. However, it gets used specifically for going down and getting leverage on the boulder. This results in what would normally be a fatal plunge into water except we’ve got the lifejacket now:

SWIM a few times and a trading ship will appear.

I tried walking away and got thrown off the ship, with a message that indicated I could have traded something (on the trading ship, d’oh). You lose everything but the lifejacket when plunging into the water, so that’s the only thing you have to trade. It fortunately works:

The thread left over from sewing up the green uniform works to STRING LUTE (…pretty sure that wouldn’t work in real life, but I’ll accept the cartoon logic in a toon-game). I then took the lute over to the stage with the merry men, and found singing a song put them to sleep.

I was stuck a bit until I remembered that doing DANCE earlier changed their description to ROWDY (also, LOOK ME indicates we are covered with tomatoes). Doing the rowdy-dance first and then playing lute was the right sequence to keep the crowd from falling asleep prematurely:

Marion had indicated we weren’t charming enough, so the charm was clearly the right item to get to her next. (Except she doesn’t like the tomatoes; you need to go back to the POOL and CLEAN ME first.)

From here I was very stuck trying to work out she went; everything including the wedding chapel was empty. Of course Tuck had left prematurely when I gave the penny, so I re-did the sequence while holding on to the penny and found both Marion and Tuck at the chapel once I finished. (For a beginner player, this still seems like the thing mostly like to stump them, because it’s a softlock that can happen from an action long before the final result.)

Marion disappears, and the only obstacle left seems to be the Sherriff of Nottingham. The telescope clearly was pointing the way through, though, and the description mentions a mounting bracket. The only thing complicated enough to hold a mounting bracket was the catapult.

With the telescope mounted, you can TURN CRANK again to get the catapult to zero in on a different target. (This feels vaguely off since you could have technically turned the crank a second time before, but I think the implication is you are implicitly using the telescope to help aim, and otherwise it would be too exact a shot.)

I did PUSH BUTTON expecting some kind of dramatic showdown, but that turned out to be the very last action of the game.

Honestly, it worked for me? I liked the idea of taking a classic story but telling a story about the story, rather than what everyone would normally be expecting. The fact regular characters could be used allows for the “fan fiction shortcut” (like we saw with Trek Adventure) where a complex character can be painted with broad strokes, meaning Friar Tuck walking off with money isn’t surprising, nor the Merry Men being a bit temperamental about what constitutes a good performance. The textual hints were quite good at nudging actions the right direction and if it weren’t for the softlocks I’d be perfectly chipper handing this game off to an absolute beginner; as things stand, I’d probably start them with something like Transylvania but this would land early on the list.

At least the graphics were good while they lasted Dav Halle had developed his own system called Zoom Grafix which partly explains why they somehow lept ahead of Sierra to be alongside Polarware in terms of quality. I’ve been having trouble articulating what artistic direction I’d give to Sierra (assuming I could be alongside their past-artists). Consider an average shot from Time Zone.

The face is bizarre in a way that never gets glanced upon in Sherwood. Depth is particularly flat (notice the bricks). I do wonder if this was partly a technical restriction; if you go back to the finale screen of Sherwood, you’ll notice both characters are made up almost entirely of curves, while the vector-line aspect of the Time Zone thief above is hard to avoid.

In the end it was likely just about professionalization and technical issues. Both Sherwood Forest and Masquerade dealt with real artists, while Time Zone had most of its art cranked at speed by a fresh teenager. Sierra did what they could with their resources, and both Polarware and Phoenix represented the next level of advancement in the software. The combination was enough to cause a vast gulf in the look between the games (not even bringing up how Mask of the Sun had a dedicated team of artists at work).

Phoenix incidentally didn’t last much longer after Masquerade. Quoting the founder Ron Unrath:

By 1984, the software world has changed significantly. Very large companies such as Disney and Hasbro were starting to get involved in publishing, and advertising rates were going up. It was difficult for a small company like Phoenix to compete.

They did make it a little longer under the name American Eagle, even publishing another Dale Johnson game, FrakTured FaebLes, with art by fan favorite Rick Incrocci. Unless some new information is unearthed we’ll need to wait until 1985 to get there.

My prediction is still even looking ahead to just 1983 the art will be on the higher-quality side, but we need to make it there first. So coming up: a computer that failed completely in the United States, only to be given a second life in France.