Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post.)

I’ve managed to ride a sandworm and do some time travel.

Cover from the late-80s Topologika release of the game, via Acorn Electron World.

Out of the various obstacles I had left (desert, monster, volcano tube, blob, hover-platform, cube) the hover-platform turned out to be the simplest to resolve.

>PULL LEVER
The metal platform whines and lifts off the ground slightly. It must be an old antigrav device!

>U
The motor unit and platform follow you obediently
You’re on the burnt ground
There is a motor unit here, far too heavy to carry. It is resting on a metal platform of some kind!
On the side of the platform is a large lever

I had experimented with various methods of fiddling with the lever trying not to break it, but I eventually discovered the simple fact that the platform will run out of juice after taking six moves. If you make a beeline for the cargo hold/engine room you’ll take five moves, so this is out of parity; that is, if you try to stall by going back and forth, you’ll reach seven moves, and the platform will land in the wrong spot. You can squeeze in an extra turn by taking a detour down the one-way “slide” from the Mountain Pass to North of the Desert.

Voilà, one motor unit. I’m not sure how the installation is going to work. Just in a structural solving sense, the presence of the one-way exit in the path (which otherwise doesn’t seem to serve much purpose) indicates to me a 98% chance this is the solution.

The blob, monster and cube turned out to be dependent on working out the desert, so that needs to come next.

You are in a valley north of a desert of green sand. There is a unclimbable slide leading up, and a path going north. You feel you should be quiet around here

>S
It is rather warm
You’ re in the desert, with a sandstorm blowing, and your compass spinning like a top
A long-handled fishing net lies here

I wish I had some magical insight here, but I mainly got this via brute force. The verb list I had gotten from my previous “try all the standard verbs” procedure was

CLIMB, BREAK, OPEN, WAIT, KILL, LIGHT, THROW, JUMP, PRESS, PUSH, PULL, MOVE, SAY, WEAR, SHOUT, LIFT, SWING, ATTACH

so going through the possibilities there wasn’t much to try other than to SHOUT. This summons a “giant sandworm” that takes you to a “city square”.

The mention of being quiet to the north of the desert was a lateral hint; the fact nothing happened with SHOUT was still indicating that SHOUT might do something nearby. For an extremely lateral solving method, the inspirational drugs I had obtained last time did signal a Dune-esque type of universe, so making noise in a desert could count as solving by reference (except I didn’t make that connection until after the fact).

Moving on:

You can technically head back into the desert but this just kills you so I’ve left it off the map.

The southeast just has a hint to a puzzle I’ve already solved (“say flezz to robot” which required writing the letters in a grid):

You’re at an open space in the rubble, with a path back the way you came.
The wall of one building has a square pattern of dots, five on a side, printed on it

(Is there a word to the phenomenon of finding hints to puzzles you’ve already solved? Should there be?)

To the south of town is an entirely different issue, a pit that dissolves the player.

We’ve seen a similar obstacle recently with Scott Morgan’s Fun House, but this time the science needed to solve the puzzle is less dodgy. Remember we had a can full of acid from back in the swamp; here is where we can THROW CAN.

You hurl the can into the pool. The alkali dissolves the can, and there is a violent fizzing as the acid and alkali neutralise each other

The pool has a “cubic foot of pure diamond” so that’s another treasure racked up.

Heading west from the city leads to a jungle — the same jungle as the maze — but we end up at the west side of the river, the river which had thermal goggles on the right side. There’s a vine and you can just CLIMB VINE and it will initiate swinging back over to the main part of the map.

The path here (optimizing for shortest moves, we still have 220 turns to beat the game) makes it tempting to wait on getting the thermal goggles. However, to get the can of acid (needed to get the diamond) the thermal goggles are meant to be needed to get through the swamp … unless you’re like me and lucked out at the very start of the game and didn’t need the goggles at all. Optimization by random chance, huzzah!

From the desert there was a fishing net; now is when it gets used. I figured out most of this puzzle quite quickly, except I went over to the blob falling off a cliff and did THROW NET which just gets a default response. It was only later (after pointlessly trying to outwit the monster and futilely banging on the cube) I found I was using the wrong parser command.

Fortunately, using the net on the blob about to fall off the cliff was irresistible; I thought maybe it was a timing issue, but I also inadvertently tried out a few extra verbs in the process, coming across CATCH.

There’s no deep descriptions while back in time. You’re on the same map you were before, more or less. I tested the “ancient phaser” and it’s still ancient even given we’re doing time travel:

What’s deeply weird is if you take an object from the future and drop it somewhere, it appears in that spot in the past! If I were trying to rationalize this I’d say the planet has some time-loop weirdness going on, which wouldn’t be out of character, but in truth I think the author just didn’t bother to go that far with the coding.

This did suggest a hint for what you’re actually supposed to do, which is go up to the area with the navigation box (previously described as “non-functional”) and the space suit (described as “highly decrepit”). They are both still in the same places but in rather better shape.

The time travel is on a set timer, but making a beeline for these items still leaves some time left. I decided to check out the monster nearby, and it was also affected by the time travel:

You re halfway along the crevasse
There is a handful of dilithium crystals here!
A tiny baby six-headed monster is floundering around on the ground
You’re back in time

The monster was previously gigantic and deadly. The monster is still deadly (KILL MONSTER leads to the player’s demise) but fortunately the creature is small enough now to be ignored. You can run to the west and grab some “rare spices”, and also get the dilithium crystals that are just sitting there. The crystals have their own issue, though.

With some careful timing I can get the crystals on the last turn right before moving back forwards in time (still carrying the new navigator box, functional space suit, and rare spices) and this gives enough time for you tote the crystals all the way over to the ship and drop them off without immediate death. Unfortunately future death is suggested because “you’re feeling queasy” is mentioned over and over, just without the death; I am guessing I’m missing an item to deal with that. Or maybe you can win even with the radiation sickness? (That would go well with the now-tiny escapee of Mysterious Mansion and the permanently-blue survivor of The House of Professor Folibus.)

That nearly takes care of everything!

desert
monster
volcano tube
blob
hover-platform
cube

All that’s left is the volcano tube. In addition to the various ship supplies and treasures (navigation box, portable nuclear reactor, motor unit, dilithium crystals, tiny black hole, perfect conductor, magnetic monopole generator, cubic foot of pure diamond, visionary drugs, rare spices) I still have a space suit, sword, thermal goggles, and fishing net. I have not been able to get help from any of them.

You can throw things (“something clatters down the chimney”) but none of the items I’ve tried have helped (I don’t think I’ve comprehensively tried every single one, but I know I’ve tried the tiny black hole which seemed the most suggestive). I’ve also tried using WAIT for many turns both above the chimney and inside and with no help, just the occasional “ship collapse” message.

Still, given there’s only six ship parts and six treasures, I must be very close to the end.