Progress! I think have most of the rooms, but that doesn’t mean I’m through yet. My prior post is needed for context.
Victor Lamba II HR, one of the French offshoots of the Interact. Notice the AZERTY keyboard. Every time I boot my emulator (which is French) I have to remap a few keys to turn it into QWERTY configuration. Via Retro Ordenadores Orty.
I flailed at nothing for a while before checking a hint Gus Brasil dropped; he suggested I MOVE the bed. I’m pretty sure I tried PUSH with no luck, ugh.
This opens up a HOLE, although it isn’t clear from the description the orientation, so I was a bit surprised when I tried GO HOLE and plummeted to my doom. Oops.
I had worked out the ROPE / SHORT ROPE business earlier — and I could see how that could be a huge hassle for someone who didn’t visualize the fact they weren’t reaching high enough to cut the rope — so fortunately TIE ROPE / CLIMB ROPE was now easy to come by. The landing place is dark.
I also had the MATCH from up in the high cupboard and the TORCH still, so I took these too back to the dark room to find a HOLE with a CROSS and nothing else of note.
Where things get interesting (in the “may you live in interesting times” sense) is upon trying to leave. This requires passing through the hallway with the cobwebs I found no use for.
Dropping the torch before entering is possible, but carrying over my knowledge from Troll Hole, I remembered the dark rooms in this parser allow moving around and dealing with items with no penalty. That is, you can go in the dark room, GET CROSS, and leave with CLIMB ROPE without ever turning on a light. So for my current run I still have a preserved match and torch in case I need it later (which might evade solving some puzzle involving clearing out the cobwebs first, and clearing out the cobwebs might reveal an item, so I can’t forget this entirely).
With the CROSS in hand the most immediately obvious next step was to try it on the vampire.
The vampire drops a ring, and just past the vampire is a skeleton with a missing skull. I figured I needed the skull from the witch, but the witch not only prevents passing through but also prevents taking the skull.
Fortunately, the ring that was just dropped presents a solution to this. I tried WEAR RING in case I could do a magic spell or some such (even though there’s no feedback given) and it turns out there’s a spell at work the whole time.
That is, the ring has turned us invisible! The skull can now be grabbed. The cat with two mouse holes is still hanging out in the same room but doesn’t present an immediate obstacle or threat so I’m guessing we’ll deal with that later.
Before showing off the skull, I should mention that going into the PASSAGE the witch was guarding leads to a CUBBYHOLE with a LEVER. Pulling the lever drops the player into a maze.
This took a bit of work to map at first, and I had to run the clock out once just trying out directions.
I still had the “turn, turn, turn” hint in mind, and thought it might apply here, since rather than the verb TURN it could apply to simple directional movement. The layout finally dawned on me, and the hint indeed helped:
Unfortunately, this doesn’t help me at all; the route here lets you go from the witch area down to the pantry next to the kitchen, but there’s no treasures in between. In Troll Hole, there was a maze where if you hadn’t found the gold nugget yet (too large to take out the normal way) the maze would also seem similarly useless, so that’s what I suspect here: this is intended as an alternate route later in the game.
Returning to that skull I mentioned, and doing PUT SKULL while at the headless skeleton in the vampire section:
The portal leads to a laboratory which is a dead end, with an APPARATUS, LOOSE WIRE, and BEAKER that has LIQUID.
The apparatus is described as having a loose wire and doing TIE WIRE gives the message
IT IS NOW FIXED
BUT NEEDS JUICE
but I’m unclear how to work things past that. I tried POUR LIQUID and the game said O.K. but with no apparent result. I’m worried that the parser is wanting something very specific, here (although it is also faintly possible it wants something other than the liquid). I did incidentally try drinking it…
…with little surprise as to the result. To summarize everything that’s a blatant loose end:
- There’s an angry cat at some mouse holes (this likely won’t come into play later)
- I can traverse a maze but didn’t find anything (this likely is meant as a through-route, but maybe I missed a secret)
- I still can’t get at the small key in the crystal ball, in order to unlock the door in the clock
- I need to operate the apparatus in the laboratory somehow
- There’s a chimney too narrow to enter
This is leaving out the possibility of more secrets (like from clearing cobwebs; there’s also an apparently empty closet but maybe something happens there?) I don’t know how close I am to when Gus Brasil got stuck but I’ll take any hints or spectulation whatsoever.
Updated map, with new rooms marked.
Renga in Blue 
This is pretty much where I’m stuck too.
It didn’t occur to me I could get the cross in the dark, so thanks!
Apart from that, just a couple of hints:
To get the small key inside the crystal ball:
Gnxr gur pelfgny onyy gb gur fgnegvat ebbz naq cynl gur betna.
Lbh gura pna bcra gur fznyy qbbe va gur pybpx ohg V pbhyqa’g svaq gur gval xrl lrg.
I also find out another use for the pipe:
Va gur jvgpu ebbz, qebccvat gur cvcr perngrf n pbaarpgvba orgjrra gur 2 zbhfr ubyrf.
V’z thrffvat gur nccnenghf jvyy zvavnghevmr lbh ng fbzr cbvag naq gur cvcr jvyy uryc gb nibvq gur png.
I thought the torch would be used in the maze (when you falls through the trap door it says that the light dims, so maybe there was an item in the shadows that you could’s see) but couldn’t find anything either.
Items that I couldn’t find any use yet:
-Sink
-Mirror (if you look at it while wearing the ring iy says you don’t see anything, so maybe it is just to let the player know about the invisibility)
-Table (in the dining room)
-Apparatus (does “juice” means electricity or some kind of fuel? I guess, since it has a wire, it’s electrical)
-Beaker with clear liquid (tried to heat it with the torch but I think I’m doing something wrong)
Got the pipe which seemed reasonable, did not get the crystal ball and I needed to check.
Maybe the apparatus needs electricity? Juice could be slang.
hm, I feel like this is meant to be something like the potato-experiment
maybe doing FIX WIRE is wrong, and we’re supposed to do something else with the wire either before FIX or instead of FIX
which would be frustrating in a parser sense (since fix would then technically break it!) but that wouldn’t be out of bounds for this author
maybe there’s a way we can use ourselves as the battery?
That fixing the wire might be a softlock came to me mind, too. I suck at physics but could you just hold the wire, maybe with wet hands?
I wondered if there might be a bell/book/candle setup, since you’re promised a book eventually, but it seems like you have to cut the rope early I doubt that will work.
I thought of a potential use for the poison but it violates my ethical code to even type it out. Hint here. (Though some of the rot13 suggests that might not be it.)
Yeah, at this point I’m fairly sure the sequence is
find three keys of decreasing size to open the doors of decreasing size in the clock
somehow turn yourself small (probably the laboratory experiment)
go through the tiny door, which will pass through the pipe protecting you from the cat
profit ??
mucking about some more, seriously concerned there might be a bug
If you PUT LIQUID after the apparatus “needs some juice” a RING will appear in the room
this is even if you are wearing a ring
you can pick it up and be holding two rings, but then they’ll combine into one if you mess with them
this is clearly a bug but since it is a bug making something appear I’m worried it’s a bug making the wrong thing appear
and it should actually have a modified version of the liquid appear after using the apparatus
Yeah, I also noticed that when you drop the ring after wearing it it is still described as “ring I’m wearing”, so definitely a bug going on. Perusing the game file there’s an item called “bubbling liquid”, so I guess it should have been the result of the apparatus.
The code contains the line “I SHRINK VERY VERY SMALL”, and BEAKER appears three times consecutively in the noun list, indicating changes of state. I think you basically have this whole sequence figured out, but the ring reappearing instead of the bubbling liquid is a fatal bug, unfortunately.
There’s three “beaker objects”. I did some hacking at my save file so I know the second beaker is the poison one, and the third is the bubbling one (and I assume the first is the empty one). Drinking the bubbling beaker does indeed make you small.
I might not take the game to the end (given it’s unclear how much is broken … there’s more broken stuff, like you can have the portal/skeleton thing happen elsewhere than in the basement) but I can at least document a bit more when I do my last post.
The code isn’t in basic, is it? I’m feeling full of hubris after the last time I figured something out by source diving.
Alas no, machine code.