DOOMAWANGARA. Abbr: Doom.
Climate: varies dramatically from desert to jungle, glacier to swamp [N.B. Reason unknown; exogeologists baffled]. Atmosphere intensely volatile; explorers must guard against rapid corrosion of equipment and spaceship alike.
Dangers: Atmosphere, as above. Automatic defence system. Also the artefacts, reputed to have been the home, aeons ago, of the Ancients; none who has entered them has ever returned.
Special features: The large number of crashed spaceships littering its surface, many of which had been carrying treasure from one planet to another, make Doom a potentially lucrative source of income for that special breed of explorer known as adventurer.
[Extract from Intergalactic Times, 3,7,187/qbf.]
— From the expanded version of Countdown to Doom
There’s the 1982! Is it a typo or was the intent to have a much earlier release date? Via eBay.
Let’s take a tour! But before a tour of the planet, a tour of the game’s verbs:
The pale purple verbs are ones where the game helpfully nudges that they won’t be used, even though they’re understood, like
>EAT
Nothing on this planet gives sustenance
or
>SWIM
On an alien world? No way!
There’s no absolute guarantee they won’t be used, but it’s more likely they won’t be.
RUB and SHAKE are useful to keep track of because they tend to be used in non-obvious situations (where gizmo X is used by either rubbing or shaking), SAY lets you type anything as a noun (suggesting a “spoken keyword” type puzzle”) and SWING is the only one I’d call rare, and the response suggests it is only used in a special situation, like hanging off a rope:
>SWING
I’d be interested to know how you’d do that!
Continuing from last time, I had busted through the front door of the ship to reach a clearing “under a dull copper sun”. There’s lots of directions to go in, and I’m going to start with southeast and rotate clockwise. As the quote from the start implies, we’re going through a wild variety of environments in the process.
Southeast is a mountain pass.
You can enter a “vent hole” by just going down, leading to a “narrow chimney” where “you’re dripping with sweat”. Trying to go farther down leads to death:
As you climb, a red hot spout of lava shoots upwards and engulfs you
(There’s a lot of death coming up, if you can’t tell.)
Back at the mountain pass there’s another turn you can take leading to a box canyon with the message “write steep, read flat” which will come up later, you can also veer left to land at the south route via an alternate method.
I tried to get another death here for my collection but despite the warnings about sound, SHOUT doesn’t do anything (“Thanks, I needed that!”) To the south there’s a desert, and all I have been able to do is pick up a fishing net then get lost and die (phew, was feeling deprived for a moment).
Going back to the clearing, southwest goes back in the ship we started in, and west goes into a jungle, with the same sort of getting-lost as the desert, except without a thirst timer.
You’re in the jungle with exits in all directions
If you try to drop items they get swallowed up (“Something disappears in the undergrowth”) so you can’t do standard mapping. A general pattern of the game seems to be “geographic puzzles, but no standard mapping”.
Northwest, north, and northeast all lead to a swamp, although only northeast is safe, and only if you are holding no items; otherwise you fall in and die. This has the curious effect that for most players the section wouldn’t even be a puzzle, but for someone who happened to search in those directions while holding an item, they might not even realize the reason for their failure.
The first items I picked up in the game. The can has acid and opening it kills you.
East is complicated and gets its own map.
Events start out on an “area of scorched ground” where there is a blob approaching a cliff. Wait a bit and the blob will fall off a cliff, presumably to its doom, so I’m guessing there’s some timed thing here.
The sequence here freezes in time if you just pass through, so it’s possible to go by the blob, come back through, and still save it (or whatever it is you’re supposed to do). I remember a blob from the 2000 edition of the game but I just remember it blocking a path, not approaching doom like the game Lemmings.
Let’s consider the scorched ground a new sub-nexus and get rotating again; south moves the player into a mysterious metal cube that “vibrates slightly as if it only partly exists”. Down leads to a motor unit (presumably a ship part) on a platform, and while the unit is too heavy to carry, pulling a lever will cause the platform to float and follow you.
The hard part is to get the hover-platform to stop following because the lever breaks if you try to push as opposed to nullifying the movement.
East is, straightforwardly enough, a junction leading to a dead end with a phaser. The phaser is described as ancient and will overheat and kill you if you try to use it in most circumstances:
The cooling system in the ancient phaser isn’t too good; the phaser melts in your hand, which is not good
I have found the circumstance it does work, but we’ll see that later.
Northeast is a rather elaborate section with a “grey metallic dome” which is an ancient artefact. It’s possible to go in to find a new section, but first, a side trip to a random message on a cliff nearby:
I originally thought maybe this was the decipher code for a cryptogram and tried writing the letters a through z underneath, but I ended up going past by one; there are exactly 25 letters. That led me to suspect maybe I was dealing with a grid instead, so I broke the letters into groups of five, then spotted the word “say” while reading down:
sedlr
azieo
yzstb
ftaho
lobet
Fully deciphered this is “say flezz to disable the robot”, which is a codeword that will come in handy inside the artefact. The message “write steep, read flat” clearly was meant to hint about this but I only realized the connection after I had already solved the puzzle. (It indicates writing the text vertically and reading horizontally, which will give an equivalent solution.)
Now, inside the dome:
You are required to drop all items before going in (otherwise you get stopped by a sort of force field). The game in general starts to take a more abstract style like Xenos.
There’s a sequence of four shapes at it appears to be randomly rolled; for the instance I first played, I got the sequence square, pentagon, triangle, hexagon; on the second time through I got hexagon, pentagon, square, and triangle. Pushing on one of the niches drops the player into a maze where the compass has been broken.
This is a relative-position maze, with forward/back/left/right movement. It is fortunately consistent in terms of bi-direction; that is, if you go forward from one room, going backwards will return you to where you started. The symbols (square, pentagon, triangle, hexagon) are placed in such a way that you just need to keep track of their relative position (that is, if a hexagon is “near the door to your right”, and then you go right followed by backwards; the hexagon will now be at your feet).
Eventually — and I don’t know the pattern to this yet, and if it’s important to even work it out — you will run across a hole going down to a new area where there is a store room with a sword and a cramped cubicle with a portable nuclear reaction (again I assume a ship part).
The way north is blocked by a robot but you can use the earlier word FLEZZ to get by.
This is followed by a giant rat (which you can just kill with the sword, but that might be wrong) followed by a “weird vegetable mass which is also a computer. I don’t have anything to put in the slot so I may have needed to explore the maze more.
Going down from here leads to a “square room with four exits” and the four symbols again (pentagon, hexagon, triangle, square). All of them killed me when I tried it via the computer dropping a “heavy weight” so I assume I missed something while exploring. (I remember this whole sequence in the 2000 game but I remember the atmosphere and vibes far more than the exact solution. The vibes are excellent and feel on the right edge of alien but understandable.)
But that’s not quite everything yet! Way back at the starting clearing we have done all compass directions, but missed that going UP is another direction as well. This leads to the exogeologists just quitting in frustration as we go up to a glacier.
There are some persistent messages about being very cold (as well as a “non-functioning navigator box lying around, I haven’t fiddled with it yet). Climbing up higher leads to an ice wall and the message that “you’re freezing to death”, which would normally be a bad thing except we have the phaser from earlier.
Inside is another treasure, some visionary drugs for navigation (I’m guessing the ships work kind of like Dune?)
Finally there’s a branch off the glacier to the north, where you find it warmer and can pick up a “decrepit space suit”; further on is a “crevasse” and I’ll just give the screenshot this time:
There’s plenty for me to prod at, so I’m not in any sense “stuck”, but I figured I had enough of the layout to give an update. I remember from my last playing that there’s some options in what sequence to tackle puzzles (notice how the alien dome takes away all objects, so it has to be self-contained) but the puzzles aren’t entirely separate from each other either. Curiously enough I remember more the overall events than details about how to solve things, which I suppose makes this more like a real play-through. (Maybe it’d have helped me remember to have some sort of diary that follows along with my playing. I’ll need to get on that.)
Renga in Blue 
Leave a comment