Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

This is my victory post, so my previous posts on this game are needed for context.

From the North Star Catalog, January 1978, via Bitsavers. I tested the North Star version of this game some and the only major difference I found was that the oil for the lamp was placed one room over.

I was originally going to title this post “Outsmarting the Parser” but one puzzle near the end (the last treasure I couldn’t get) dropped me with a pile driver from the top rope.

Continuing from last time, I started prodding at various elements in the environment trying to get them to be recognized. I came across some luck with a suit of armor in the entry hall.

ARMOR MAKES SENSE–BUT TOUCH??

This is different than the usual message which would be TOUCH ARMOR??, so I ended up just jamming through the various possibilities on my verb list.

OPEN turned out to get a different reaction, meaning it was possible for OPEN ARMOR to do something useful, but what item was I missing? I had a piece of cheese still which didn’t seem right, but maybe the hammer?

I would not have gotten that without some of the parser juking there. The whole sequence gave me pause, though, because even in some circumstances with an item I knew was usable, (like the lamp I was holding) I wasn’t getting the “MAKES SENSE” message. I played around some more and realized not only was the parser cutting at five letters, to get the “MAKES SENSE” message on an noun that can be used it needs to be typed in at exactly five letters: no more, no less. That is, the command “TOUCH LAMP” gets

TOUCH LAMP???

but “TOUCH LAMP ” with the extra space at the end gets

LAMP  MAKES SENSE-BUT TOUCH??

This turns out to be a vitally important fact which helped me break most of the rest of the game. Going back to the drawbridge puzzle from last time:

The screen above shows the state of the drawbridge room before having applied the oil to the gears. If you do any verb followed by GEARS, the game will recognize the noun GEARS. Even a non-real-verb works; after Z GEARS:

GEARS MAKES SENSE-BUT Z??

Getting this important message means that the gears is a recognized noun in the state of the room at this exact moment. After doing OIL GEARS, gears no longer is recognized, so Z GEARS gets the regular message of

Z GEARS???

and you’re instead supposed to refer to the TEETH, so that noun gets activated. Then, after PULL TEETH, the game reaches the horribly stuck condition I was in last time.

I had already rammed through a verb list (ROTATE, TURN, MOVE, LOWER, OPEN, OPERATE, USE, PUSH, PULL, SPIN) with the DRAWBRIDGE, MECHANISM, GEARS, and TEETH. Rather than futilely testing the whole set on every noun in the universe, I could now check to see what noun was actually recognized through the “MAKES SENSE” trick! I did Z on every plausible and non-plausible object that might be referred to in the room before finally hitting paydirt on … the noun BRIDGE. Not DRAWBRIDGE, but BRIDGE. Sigh.

Doing this unleashes some RATS. I was able to give the rats the cheese I had been hanging on to (turning them into FAT, LAZY RATS) and then I could take the rats whilst holding the sack. They’ll be useful later.

I was then able to use the MAKES SENSE trick to figure out the heraldry room. (I want to emphasize I would not have found the trick at all except the word ARMOR had exactly five letters in it. This feels a bit like when a speedrunner finds a glitch that allows skipping a level just because the exit was made 80 pixels high rather than 78 pixels high.)

Mind you, no noun in the entire room description succumbed to the trick: I did Z LARGE, Z COAT (with that crucial extra space after), Z ARMS (ditto), Z HOLE (ditto again), Z VOLUM, Z BOOKC, Z SHELV. This meant I could say with confidence that the solution was not “verb + some noun in the room”. This of course assumes that there is a solution, but the hole in the volume was screaming for something to happen.

Excluding the magic words (which I tried) this left “verb + some noun I was carrying”. I remembered (or rather, noticed from my map) that the SIGNET RING started in the room, so I took that item over and crawled through every verb on my standard verb list, hitting paydirt with INSERT.

Does this feel like “adventure gaming”? Not in the slightest. But at this point I’m satisfied with beating the computer.

The passage leads to the last area of the game, where things mostly went smoother.

The area is mostly dark which means the dragon is in play. I ended up having to get the bow/arrow setup just in case; just note that the dragon can come back any time after being shot, even the exact same turn it gets shot! A much better solution — which I found out when I was done with the game — is to carry the “friendly dog” around which scares the dragon, kind of like the kitten in ADV.CAVES. (The dog is needed anyway because it counts as a treasure.)

The “through happiness” hint applied soon after, as there’s a wine room with a wine bottle (treasure) in a rack.

With some intuition I tried Z RACKS and hit paydirt (that is, it gave the MAKES SENSE message so I knew the noun was recognized), so I just needed to roll through a (very long) verb list before finally reaching SLIDE RACKS.

Those treasures I could cart back “by hand” to the start if I wanted. Moving on, there’s a guard room with a key (useful in a second), a dungeon with bones (not useful at all) and a torture room which looked like it held a secret.

Again using the noun-reference trick, I found that the GRATE did not count as a noun as far as the parser was concerned so any method of opening it required referring to something else. Going through my very small inventory (barring the whole pile of treasures, none which seemed applicable) I came across dropping the rats.

The passage this opens leads through a “bottomless room” (door which needs a key) up to a “meditation room” with a chair. The chair again can’t be referred to, but I decided to try SIT with no noun.

The dragon remained annoying through all this.

Once I managed to coordinate sitting in the chair with no dragon, I tried various meditation-adjacent verbs until I hit THINK, which teleported me to a “round room”. Going in a random direction led to a THRONE ROOM with more treasure.

The round room otherwise teleports back into the castle somewhere random, so after a bit of dragon juggling (and some issues with randomness because I had to take a second loop; the round room’s destination is purely random, rather than always landing you in the throne room first) I was able to get out with nearly every treasure in the game. The dog and book with the spells also count as treasures and were non-obvious at first; however, even with those I was short some points.

I needed the walkthrough from this, via Alex, and I’m going to take a guess Alex looked at source code. I don’t know how anyone was supposed to solve this.

Back in the study — which to be fair was on my strong suspicion list — I had found via The Trick that no nouns were recognized. The picture of Merlin made me think of magic, so tried bringing over the various magic gizmos like the ring that had previously summoned a genie to see if I could get an effect: no dice. I finally — and fortunately — gave up, to find the right command is USE MAGIC.

…

…

…

Look, your guess is as good as mine. That’s one of the worst parser abuses I’ve ever seen, including the entire 40 years I’ve been playing adventure games.

Taking the pouch of rubies over (and the book which I hadn’t dropped yet) triggered an endgame, which is tricky as well but at least it’s a different kind of tricky.

There’s a SORCERER’S ROOM, a MAGIC ROOM and a STAR ROOM. Between the rooms there’s a sorcerer’s hat, a book of black magic, a rod, and a star. After some experimentation I realized you could not carry the book the same time as the hat; I started sensing the kind of logic used in Chinese Puzzle with an arbitrary set of object flags that need to be set. I was also suspicious that this was the sort of puzzle where the meta-command HINT was necessary to get anywhere.

MOST MAGIC IS MERELY ILLUSION, BUT YOU DO NEED THE RIGHT PROPS.

Needing the right props suggested to me I needed to make a thing; the only thing that seemed reasonable was putting together the star and rod to get a wand. Some parser struggle followed as MAKE WAND and PUT STAR don’t work at all. The right conditions are:

a.) you’re in the MAGIC ROOM

b.) you’re holding the STAR and ROD, and only those two items

c.) you type ATTACH STAR

Going back to the STAR ROOM and waving the wand, I was clearly on the right track.

After some fiddling I finally got HOKUS POKUS out again and got an ending, but not the right ending.

All the points, though! Maybe we can call this a real alternate ending because our protagonist deserved it.

I finally succumbed to the walkthrough … which told me to do exactly the same thing I was doing. It said

HOKUS POKUS (you must carry the hat or else the wand explodes).

and I was, in fact, carrying the hat. I finally got a success and I think it simply involves making sure the black magic book doesn’t get touched ever at all, but I’m still unclear on this. At least I got a win.

Windmere Estate, despite having the same parser system, was a much better game; it had mostly reasonable actions, it had better pacing, and it had a map that was memorably interconnected with multiple routes. This game’s emphasis on magic was its downfall for the same reason fantasy has had issues in other early text adventures: the lack of rules makes it tempting for authors to make arbitrary puzzles.

Mind you, it’s possible to make carefully crafted rules that elevate fantasy game puzzles to a high level, like Enchanter (1983) did, but we have to get there first. Lurching ever closer! Coming up: Misadventures 5 and 6. Mexican Adventure. (Change of plans, technical issues plus one of them looks to be a bad dump.)