Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.

From a 1983 Acornsoft leaflet.

Last time I had left off being stuck on a volcano chimney, with a subsidiary issue of radiation sickness. Rather than obstacle-oriented thinking, the best approach was item-oriented thinking: what hasn’t been used yet? Everything had a clear purpose so far except for the space suit. That is, it was better to simply focus on: What does the space suit get used for?

Mind you, it was still tricky to work out what to do even when asking the right question. It’s an interesting enough puzzle I’m going to pause for a moment for anyone wants to try to think it out.

Via eBay.

The very first puzzle I had solved (by accident) was going past a swamp, and if you fail to step safely, the message is…

You gingerly step out onto the swamp. There is a rich gurgling noise as the swamp gives way beneath you. In moments it is over your head
Lacking any air, you choke to death

Rather than the game outright jumping to death, it gives the condition “lacking any air”. That means if we did have air, by, say, wearing a space suit, it would be safe to go in!

You gingerly step out onto the swamp There is a rich gurgling noise as the swamp gives way beneath you. In moments it is over your head.
To your delight, the oxygen in your suit works. You drop slowly through the swamp, and then come to a stop
You’ re at the bottom of the swamp, on firm ground. You can’t see anything but swamp, of course

This is quite an unusual design finesse — a previous failure state is being leveraged for a new location. Going in any direction drops the player into darkness which is yet another maze.

What you see above is an incomplete map. This time you can drop items to map the rooms out, just it is dark so you can’t see what’s there. Fortunately, the game’s command GET (with no noun) will get whatever happens to be in the room (we saw this trick with Brand X / Philosopher’s Quest). This allows somewhat slow mapping, and after not too long I had found a life support machine, a medikit (picking it up cleanses the radiation sickness) and the exit.

I already knew offhand that finding these two items brought my total up to twelve (six repair items, six treasures) so I decided to gun it for the exit and hope I was done with the maze (I was).

There are four exits from the room with the beeping machine above. All four lead up a chimney to the surface of the volcano (in other words, the solution to that puzzle was: it’s an exit you use from the other side). However, three of the exits are deadly.

Now, given modern save states it is possible to save-reload your way to the right answer, but I started to catch on that the number of beeps counted 3, 6, 9, or 12; if you interpret the number as if on a clock, then the direction given is the “safe” one. So 6 beeps go towards 6 on a clock, or south. 9 beeps means go towards 9 on a clock, or west.

That’s the last of the treasures! I didn’t have everything in one “run” yet but it didn’t take me too long to put together a sequence (I started with a save file that made a beeline for the dome first and defeated that) and I had a decently roomy number of moves left, somewhere in the 70s. I did not make a walkthrough this time but this game was shorter than the “remix” version.

In the end, I was quite satisfied: this is in the upper tier of the Cambridge games I’ve played. Despite it having similar attributes of cruelty to Brand X and Acheton on a surface level, the game nevertheless felt more “fair” and solvable.

To be more specific, there’s violations aplenty of the venerable Bill of Player’s Rights. I’ve marked in bold the offenders.

1. Not to be killed without warning
2. Not to be given horribly unclear hints
3. To be able to win without experience of past lives
4. To be able to win without knowledge of future events
5. Not to have the game closed off without warning
6. Not to need to do unlikely things
7. Not to need to do boring things for the sake of it
8. Not to have to type exactly the right verb
9. To be allowed reasonable synonyms
10. To have a decent parser
11. To have reasonable freedom of action
12. Not to depend much on luck
13. To be able to understand a problem once it is solved
14. Not to be given too many red herrings
15. To have a good reason why something is impossible
16. Not to need to be American to understand hints
17. To know how the game is getting on

Yes, this list is getting on in years considering Graham Nelson first posted it in 1993 (more recent discussion here and here about the datedness, and the lack of accounting for a game like Outer Wilds) but what I want to focus on here is despite the strong violations of rules 1, 3, 4, and 5 (and light violations of 8 through 10) this game was much more playable than many other rules-violators.

The very first door kills you if you try to pull it. The platform that falls after five turns: there is no way to know that this will be the exact move count without experimenting. It’s fairly easy to do things in the wrong order and get your game closed off (you need the acid can before the desert if you want the diamond, and you can only go through once). Yet: I was playing in a different mode of thought, one where I knew I had many clone duplicates running around the world gathering information. Within the norms of this condition, the game played it fair; for example, the fact the floating platform gives the ghost up after a specific amount of movement is heavily implied by the text.

I think the key here is point 2 (unclear hints), which the game deftly avoided: despite minimalist text imposed by technical requirements (even highly compressed this just barely fits on the goal computer), there really is enough text to figure out everything. This wasn’t the case with Brand X, which had (for example) a moment where if you don’t get an item from the starting zone, it will show up later; there’s no reason to suspect this! Contrast also with the ningy of Acheton, which had a weird and ambiguous message if you did things wrong and made the game unwinnable; there’s no such moment on Countdown to Doom.

A hideous mocking voice sneers: “I suppose you think you’re clever, don’t you!”

(That’s all Acheton says! You can get very deep into the game before realizing this message means “you made a mistake”.)

I have heard Castle of Riddles — which Killworth wrote right before this game — is not so fair. We’ll arrive there eventually in our 1983 sequence and reassess.

Coming up: my evaluation concluding 1982.