Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

WELCOME TO THE KINGDOM OF ZODIAC. IT IS A SMALL BUT VERY INTERESTING KINGDOM. THE LANDS ARE MOSTLY WOODED WITH LARGE OAK FORESTS. THE CASTLE ITSELF IS QUITE LARGE FOR THE SIZE OF THE KINGDOM BUT THE RULER ALWAYS HAS BELIEVED THAT HIS SUBJECTS SHOULD SUPPORT HIM WELL.

This is the last of the North Star adventure games we’ll be playing that was published by Dynacomp (see Uncle Harry’s Will for historical context; Whembly Castle and Windmere Estate were the other two games). Like Windmere Estate, this game is from the mysterious Dennis N. Strong.

Source.

I threw everything I could out but could not locate Mr. Strong. The Dennis Strong mentioned here who is a transportation engineer is actually Dennis W. Strong. That means all we’re left with is the Dynacomp ad copy, which compares Zodiac Castle to Windmere and says says:

This time you start in a glen near the castle and must find and accumulate treasures. The play is the same, but the treasures and circumstances are different.

Again, there are both North Star version and Apple II version again; this time the original Apple II version was broken but now has been fixed thanks to LanHawk. Apple II seems to be the optimal version now for both Strong games. My guess is it was written second in both cases and the author used the opportunity to make some bug fixes (and add a fatal bug in the case of Zodiac Castle, which now has been fixed).

THERE ARE MANY PLACES TO EXPLORE, RIDDLES TO SOLVE, AND TREASURES TO GATHER. THE ‘GUILDED COCK’ IS WHERE TREASURES ARE DROPPED TO SCORE.

Mind you, the game still isn’t bug-free, as you’ll see.

Action starts in a GLEN next to the usual forest-style area…

…with a DENSE FOREST room meant to catch anyone who goes the wrong direction. The game then (upon moving any direction from the dense forest) will either loop back to the same room are send the player to the glen. I am grateful there is no maze.

The tavern with the colorful name is where the treasures go. There’s a LAMP and ALE there that can be taken; the lamp uses oil, as an emphasis on while Windmere Estate was in a “realistic modern” area, this one’s set in a fantasy castle.

To the north is a cottage with a BOW (but no arrows). The sleeping loft above requires light (just the command ON to use the lamp). Upon entering I made a curious discovery:

Either the dragon is very small or the cottage is very large! In all seriousness, in various “dark rooms” across the map the dragon can appear in any of them so I assume does a fair amount of magical teleportation. It isn’t 100% aggressive, and if you grab the cheese and go you’ll be safe, but any hanging around or especially threatening the dragon will result in death.

Petting is considered a threat. In seriousness, this seems to intercept any verb connected to DRAGON to have this result, even a nonsense one. That is, every action is “blacklisted” here and there likely is only one or two “whitelisted” actions that will help defeat / scare away / make friends with the dragon.

The castle has its drawbridge up so can’t be entered directly; if you jump in to swim while holding the lamp, it will get ruined. The trick is to go to the south where there’s a visible ledge and THROW LAMP.

This dumps out the oil if done anywhere else, which is annoyingly inconsistent. If I were giving author advice I’d say to simply prevent THROW LAMP working elsewhere with some message about “that’s risky because the oil might come out, you should only do that where you really need it”.

With that done you can SWIM over (finding a SILVER GOBLET on the way) and then head southeast down a DARK SLOPING PASSAGE into some CATACOMBS. You might expect with that name and the predictability of being a Treasure Hunt that this is a maze, but only sort of.

In nearly every room, there is only one entrance and one exit. The “maze” is just a linear path. Mapping it still involved significant work because no directions are specified, so I had to keep testing all ten possibilities (N/S/E/W/NE/SE/SW/NW/U/D) in every room, and I had to keep testing even after finding the exit just in case there was some deviation from the pattern.

It is essentially the type of labyrinth without branches, where walking the path is meant as a spiritual experience. Picture via the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Chartres website.

There was in fact such a deviation, where you can go north, south and east from the room in the middle; this is reminiscent of the Crowther/Woods all-alike maze having a “diagonal” exit hiding the pirate treasure, when every other exit was normal cardinal directions. That is, the intent is to trick the player into thinking there is a universal pattern when there is one slight deviation that holds a treasure.

Both the magic ring and jade idol you get from rubbing it count as treasures.

At the end of the catacombs my lamp burned out, so I ran through again with the lamp off and had a unique problem.

The game doesn’t stop you from walking through darkness with grues or inconvenient pits to tumble into. However, at intervals along the path there are rooms where the code is broken (“YOU ARE”) and if the player walks into one they are now in a “Void”. Just like the similar rooms in Bilingual Adventure the game is now broken and softlocked.

It turns out there’s no need to be conservative: having the lamp run out upon leaving the catacombs is a hard-coded event! So the author sacrificed simulationism for a dramatic moment of getting out of the darkness just in time. After, there’s some oil in a vat (seemingly unlimited) you can find and FILL LAMP, which gives exactly 100 turns. In other words, the game switches from a drama-time treatment of the light source to a simulationist treatment.

Just past the catacombs is a small castle worker area; guard station, stables, blacksmith, carpenter. All of these locations are dark (you need to get the oil from a vat in the castle itself and then come back) and all of them potentially have the dragon show up.

All together there’s a MUSLIN SACK, THIN WOODEN SHAFT, HAMMER, MANURE, and ARROW HEAD. The quote marks around SHAFT in the screenshot above means you’re supposed to refer to the THIN WOODEN SHAFT as just a “shaft” in the parser.

The game does understand MAKE ARROW but says I don’t have the right tools yet. I haven’t experimented with this sufficiently to know if this message is location-based or object-based or both.

Trekking into the castle proper next:

The game tries hard to add color to the room descriptions.

I’m having the issue — which happened in Windmere as well — of not knowing what I should be paying attention to. The objects are clearly separate and able to be picked up, but is anything else in a room description interactive? The main issue here is that — assuming the answer is yes — then most nouns in the room descriptions don’t work. So this is a scenario where playing requires dealing with a lot of error messages trying to see if there’s anything special.

For example, you can’t find if the chair might unlock some secret until you try actions like SIT CHAIR. (The game just says SIT CHAIR??? if you try it. GET CHAIR and the game claims “THERE ISN’T ANY CHAIR YOU CAN GET”.)

The book above incidentally indicates some spells, it “MUST HAVE BEEN MERLIN’S BOOK OF MAGIC” and mentions “SHAZAM”, “HOKUS POKUS” and “ABRA CADABRA” as possibilities. Only HOKUS POKUS is recognized although the result is mysterious.

THERE ARE STRANGE RUMBLINGS FROM SOMEWHERE UNDER THE GROUND!

YOU ARE IN A LIBRARY

THERE IS A SILVER ‘GOBLET’

The goblet was not there before; it was a treasure I had stored back in the Guilded Cock. My guess would be the word lets you warp treasures back and forth somehow so you don’t have to go in person to deliver all of them, but it feels broken, and might even be buggy enough that the effect is supposed to be something totally different (like opening a particular secret passage).

Elsewhere in the castle there’s a VAT OF OIL for refilling the lamp, some MEAT, CHALICES, a SIGNET RING, and some BEANS. The BEANS can go over to some DIRT at the Atrium but the game claims the beans must need “SOMETHING ELSE”.

On to upstairs now:

The upstairs room are almost purely treasure dispensers. In a row there’s a blue bedroom (DIAMOND BROOCH), a pink bedroom (SATIN PILLOW), red bedroom (RUBY RING), and green bedroom (EMERALD NECKLACE). The only wrinkle in just snatching and leaving is that the rooms are dark and so the dragon can visit.

There’s some SILK in a Maid Room, a CAMEO BROOCH and DIAMOND NECKLACE in a Sitting Room, and JEWELED DAGGER and ferocious dog in the Master Bedroom. OK, I suppose the dog isn’t a treasure. Meat would be the most obvious thing to try on the dog but I haven’t experimented yet.

Finally, just like Windmere Estate, there’s a balcony with a view.

The issue that made Windmere difficult was a plethora of secrets to open (and those secrets ended up having some sequences where the puzzles got tricky). My intuition is telling me this isn’t as hard a game, but Windmere didn’t seem that hard at first either.

One bit I skimmed over outside: there’s a well to the south of the castle with no rope.

I’m not really “stuck” in that there’s many things I haven’t tried yet, but I’ve reached the edge of the obvious map so I’ll have to start prodding for those secrets soon.