Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game to the extent I’m calling this done; my previous post is needed for context.

The alternate cover of the Tandy Color Computer version of the game. Via the Internet Archive.

This unfortunately a case where the Bedlam’s ambitions described by the manual were technically correct but in practice nearly everything is a smokescreen. There are only three (3) endings, and one of those gets chosen at random. The game starts to approach a fascinating idea but the author doesn’t quite fully get there. I’ll get back to this thought after I’ve done showing off the game.

Before bringing up TRS-80 screens again, I want to pull one more thing out of the manual: it has a psychological questionnaire.

While this is in the external materials, I’ll still count it as part of the game, marking a first of sorts that gets picked up again by games like A Mind Forever Voyaging and Tender Loving Care. It’s in a format similar to the (in)famous Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Test which gets used as a diagnostic tool. Here are some samples from the real one:

I think I would enjoy the work of a librarian.
I am easily awakened by noise.
My father is a good man (or if your father is dead) my father was a good man.
I like to read newspaper articles on crime.
My hands and feet are usually warm enough.

The test sometimes has the feeling of being “stacked” against the one doing the test and there are questions involving actions supposedly “everyone” has done so they are used to determine if someone is lying. For Beldam’s version, every question has no correct answer, so you are already determined to be psychologically unfit by the end:

Question 2 — Thinking you are smarter than others

Answering Yes points to a “Superiority Complex,” which may be corrected with time and shock treatment. Score 5 points for a Yes Answer.

Answering No indicates a feeling of inferiority, which may or may not be true. Further study is needed, so score 5 points for a No answer.

Unsure shows a very wishy-washy individual. Go back and answer with a Yes or a No, or else give yourself 10 points for your uncertainty.

Question 20 asks about the word PLUGH and is one of the “hints” for the game. PLUGH is from Crowther/Woods but here it is also useful, because if you’ve had the “lobotomy” it will cure it. (I’m fairly sure the neither the doctor nor nurse are licensed professionals, especially for a reason you’ll see shortly.)

Moving on:

To the west of the starting area there is a maintenance room with a “hook” intended for opening windows (there are no windows in this game) a BLUE PILL, and a cabinet with a red key trapped inside.

I tested after some thought GET RED KEY WITH HOOK and it worked. (The only reason it took me a little time is the hook’s description tags it for a totally different purpose which it never gets used for.) With the red key in hand it is possible to open all three doors to the south that are originally locked.

Two of the rooms are padded cells; note that they make for one of the available places that patients can show up them (I’ll give the full list of possibilities after I’m done showing off the landscape). The third red door (the farthest to the east) leads to a new hallway with some more padded rooms (these not locked), a kitchen with a refrigerator and MEAT, and finally an exit blocked by a GUARD DOG.

Now, I had some suspicions already about a branch right here, as I tested EAT PILL on a couple runs, and found sometimes it gets a YECCH, TASTES AWFUL! and sometimes it tastes like nothing:

SEEMS RISKY, BUT O.K. GULP! HMMM. NO EFFECT?

There is indeed no effect … if you’re the one that eats it. If you take the no-taste-for-humans pill and PUT PILL IN MEAT, giving it to the dog will eliminate the dog. (I would have expected the “yecch” pill to be the deadly one. The fact the game parsers the command and doesn’t let you deviate too far otherwise suggested to me I had to just keep trying, but it took until my sixth reset that I got the right effect.

This is close to a victory, but if you try to leave, you get tossed in a locked STORAGE SHED. You need to green key that the “nurse” was guarding. There are two ways of doing this.

One, the “normal adventurer” way, is to use the hook again. You can just GET GREEN KEY WITH HOOK while standing in the adjacent room. It’s unclear the hook visualization lets you reach that far, or that the green key was placed in such a way that this would even be practical, but it’s the sort of thing that was worth a try since it worked on the red key.

Two, the “thing I found out from a walkthrough” way, is to use the lobotomy. Specifically, when it happens, you start wandering randomly, the “wander” phase happens before the “nurse applies electro-therapy” phase, so you can pick up the green key, and have the brain damage trigger, escaping her clutches (and then PLUGH works to get out).

With the green key via either method, when tossed in to the shed you can then escape. (If you didn’t get the green key beforehand, you are stuck there forever. Bummer.)

This escape method only works if you randomly get selected the right ending.

If the game picks the BLUE-PILL-EXIT then you get BluePillA. Otherwise you get BluePillB. Both pills can be dissolved in the hamburger meat and fed to the dog. But BluePillA is poison and will kill the dog.

Before getting into the other two exits, let me briefly describe the characters.

HOUDINI and MERLIN we have already met last time. HOUDINI you can untie and he will follow you around trying to undo a straitjacket, but he’ll never manage (and there’s no way you can help). MERLIN will mutter about you being a demon but also is no help whatseover.

You can also run into a DOCTOR. Or “doctor”. Or “‘doctor'”. It’s hard to tell with this game.

Given the number of unlicensed procedures I experienced while playing, I think the fellow here might be telling the truth. Or maybe he’s only telling the truth on certain world-variants. Either way, he is of no importance to escape.

Next comes PICASSO. He wanders around — doesn’t necessarily follow you, I never quite worked out the logic — and paints doors on the walls.

This represents one of the exits! If this particular ending is the one chosen, then one of Picasso’s painted doors is a real door and you can open it.

THE PAINTED DOOR OPENS TO REVEAL AN ESCAPE ROUTE! YOU HAVE ESCAPED!

Another character you can run across is X-RAY RAY. He is genuinely useful for reasons I’ll get to.

Finally there’s NAPOLEON, the “MIGHTIEST LEADER IN THE WORLD”, as he tells us.

Napoleon being “mighty” is important as there’s a third possible ending. If you don’t have the dog-ending or the painted-door-ending you’ve got a secret-door ending, and you need to wandering around trying either EXAMINE ROOM (I looked this up, it’s pretty unusual parser use) or get Ray to help look at rooms. One of the rooms will have a secret door, but the door is stuck and you aren’t strong enough to open it. Napoleon is, and you can command him with NAPOLEON OPEN DOOR:

NAPOLEON GRABS THE SECRET DOOR AND BUSTS IT OPEN! THE SECRET DOOR LEADS TO ESACPE! YOU’VE MADE IT!

The actual gameplay is fairly chaotic with all the various people and it being unclear what use, if any, do the various people have. In the end, according to random roll,

* there’s an ending which doesn’t involve patients at all

* there’s an ending which involves one particular patient (Picasso)

* there’s an ending which involves a different particular patient (Napoleon)

with X-Ray Ray potentially helping with not only the Napoleon ending, but the Picasso one, as he can see the painted-door exit before it gets drawn in!

Still I feel like this game involved missed opportunity, as for the most part, the interactions you have with the characters is meaningless. It doesn’t always feel that way in practice — I enjoyed prodding Merlin trying to get him to react to things — but without a payoff it was akin to Deadline but without the character interaction model working, or the ability to command characters at all really.

NAPOLEON, GO NORTH
THE OBSTINATE REPLY IS “I DON’T WANT TO.”

What I was really hoping for is something along the lines of Maniac Mansion, where each character has suggested skills and rather than picking characters at the start there are patients randomly assigned to be “helpful”. This would lead to a variety of routes through the game where the skill availability itself is what determines what endings are available.

In actual practice with Bedlam, based on the various testimonials I’ve heard, people often never got as far as an ending; this was a tool to play around and mess around with Merlin and Co., and the randomization added an extra spice which gave it a mysterious aura. That is, by not resolving just exactly what was going on, the game becomes something more in the imagination.

Compared to Xenos, this game is more clever conceptually, while that game works better as an overall experience.

I do want to emphasize this wasn’t end of Arnstein writing games; in 1983 he wrote three action games (Radio Ball, Androne, Reactoid). I’m not sure his full story after, although he eventually returned to his electrical engineering roots. In 1993 his name is associated with three new companies: Rhotech Labs, R & R Labs, and PM Labs. In 1994 Rhotech started advertising a “cartridge emulator” for computers in order to “make your own video game workstation”.

Source.

You can see a picture here of their ROMulator.

Coming up: Zodiac Castle, which might be the last “traditional” game of 1982.