(Continued from my previous post.)
I promised last time to create my verb list. Since it’s been a while since I’ve explained: over the years I have collected verbs that are quite common in adventure games in this era, all the way to verbs that are rare, and I made a list. I then go through each verb on the list testing to see if that verb is accepted or not.
Some games have parsers which give almost no feedback so this trick doesn’t work (like, for example, “HUH?” for anything that isn’t interpreted) but as long as you give a verb and a noun this game not only gives feedback if a verb is misunderstood it displays the word flashing.
Just like Sierra On-Line games and others at this time, hitting ENTER will turn off the graphics temporarily and just show text.
By doing this, I’m able to get an idea of what kind of commands I should be focused on. Understood words are in green:
Just to give the reference in text form:
DIG, CLIMB, READ, BREAK, OPEN, DRINK, EAT, KILL, THROW, HIT, UNLOCK, SHAKE, POUR, SMASH, JUMP, TURN, MOVE, YELL, MAKE, SAY, CLEAN, WEAR, GIVE, EXAMINE, KICK, SMELL, PLAY, DRAW, OFFER, LIFT, FIX, BUILD, LOWER, SNIFF, EMPTY, START, RAISE, ATTACH
DRAW incidentally goes with DRAW MAP but the game says you need to make your own (weirdly enough, this isn’t quite true — I’ll explain in a moment). YELL and SAY both have “open” nouns meaning you can yell or say any text and it will be repeated back, indicating some possible future code word puzzle. SMELL working is notable (and not the sort of thing I’d automatically check), BUILD and MAKE are in (meaning we likely have at least one instance of combining together things into a new thing where we have to guess the noun) and START is probably the rarest verb on there. It’s also been a while since I’ve seen CLEAN.
None of these really suggested to me what the strange item was last time, but I first need to clarify that I was confused, as CASE and BOX are treated in the game as synonyms.
So when I did OPEN BOX, the game actually dropped the violin, and that picture to the left is a smashed violin. You can pick the violin up and see it described in textual form. That means that the real mystery is the “box object” which isn’t a box.
The game does not have GET ALL or LOOK FLOOR or any of the other types of commands you might think would reveal nearby objects. I did go ahead and test all the other one-letter possibilities past L (turn left), R (turn right), F (move forward), and A (turn around) and on top of the usual I (inventory) I came across two more. Z full on quits the game, which at the very least allows LISTing the BASIC code if I ever need to go there.
M shows the map as visited so far with a message about how “the dim light really hurts my eyes”. The map only shows temporarily before disappearing, although you can see what is most likely the exit in the process:
If the same object density keeps up, filling this in could represent the entire territory of the game. Or maybe there’s a second level and this game’s going to stick around a while.
Bizarrely, using the feature again repeats drawing a map but makes it smaller.
The map keeps getting tinier and tinier, down to just being a squiggle in the corner. I guess this is meant to simulate the dim light, but also in a game sense, discourage too much use of the automap. I’m needing to make a map in order to keep a track of objects anyway, but still, it’s wildly unusual to put the effort into making a feature but also yank it away. Just as a reminder:
With that sideline done, and no helpful commands found, it was time to crack on getting that word figured out. I wanted to try some more generalized crowdsourcing, so I made posts on both Mastodon and Bluesky.
Other tries were JOURNAL, PARCEL, BRICK, SUITCASE, and INTERNET (??). One of the guessers (@ericgerhardt.com) took it upon themselves to find and download the game to try things out themselves, and they discovered that HELP is contextual.
A METALLIC VOICE ECHOES DOWN THE HALL: IT SAYS ‘REG. PENNA. DEPT. AGR.’ THINK IT THROUGH
I admit I had found HELP was acknowledged, but I wasn’t thinking of using it here as I wasn’t considering this to be a puzzle but rather a user-interface frustration. However, based on the fact that even HELP is cryptic here, the author was clearly thinking “figure out what the object is so you can pick it up” was a genuine puzzle!
The Department of Agriculture reference means this is a food. These are CRACKERS.
Via eBay. The diagonal marking is the logo.
As Eric points out there’s cheese (from the trap) and apparently there’s wine later, but still–
As Carl Muckenhoupt pointed out in discussion later:
It’s a good example of how (as I’ve put it before) early adventure game authors didn’t fully distinguish between difficult to solve and difficult to play
That is, while realizing what you’re looking at in order to pick it up would be considered by most modern standards a bug — but what logical reason would you not be able to grab the thing otherwise — with this game the author genuinely blithely ignores the meta-narrative confusion of the whole thing and makes it a puzzle. The most comparable puzzle I can think of is The Sands of Egypt which made guess-the-verb into a puzzle and also gave a hint whilst trying to get off a camel that was slightly indirect.
The hint was “The opposite of mount is?” You’re supposed to type DISMOUNT.
More actual progress next time! I hope! The Beast doesn’t like crackers, though:
I’d guess it’s really a “giant rat” given the context and I need the cheese, but I haven’t figured out the trap yet, and none of the verbs — and I tried all of them — were helpful.
Renga in Blue 
Hi Jason, thanks for the shoutout. It’s been interesting revisiting this sort of game, very different design aesthetics, as you and Carl have pointed out. One thing I’d forgotten about is how it used to be en vogue for game devs to include several surprise “gotchas”, actions or events that would either end your run immediately or make it impossible to progress, and The Maze does not disappoint here, I’ve found several so far. I think that style continued until the mid-80s, I remember the Space Quest devs continuing it but clearly lampshading it, and luckily it was mostly passe by 1990 when games like Monkey Island demonstrated devs were finally prioritizing fun over cleverness.
I’m significantly further along in The Maze but haven’t finished it yet, stuck on a guess-the-verb situation, but I’ll try your list and see if it helps. Hit me up on bsky if you’d like to compare notes.
Incidentally there’s a minor labeling error in your map above, and resolving it will fetch you an item you’ll need shortly.
just so you know, I did get past the beast and get the two items after but I still haven’t got past the snob
the eyeglasses are really weird, it stops the effect of having the map be shrinking but also kills displaying everything except what’s near
Yeah the map mechanics are really odd, I’ve never seen this approach and I don’t know how much is design choice and how much is just “it was 1981”.
For kicks, try walking into a wall with and without the eyeglasses. (Save first.)
The map mechanics are weird for 1981.
(I can say this with some decent certainty as I’ve played every adventure games up to 1982 now and written about them on this blog, with some scattered exceptions like newly found games.) Link for the archive.
Finally, another Apple ][ adventure :)
Discovering obscure Apple games like this are the reason I love your blog. I’d never heard of this one before.
The CRACKERS “puzzle” is utter nonsense. From within an in-game world context you would see the full packaging and understand they were crackers. If not, the game should be telling you the label is worn away or unrecognizable, but by that logic it should allow GET BOX or GET PACKAGE. This is also a really good example of the terrible precedent that mystery house set, where terribly drawn objects replace what would have been a simple text description in earlier text-only games. I can think of clever exceptions like “there is a fork in the road/GET FORK” which is objectively a clever puzzle, not relying upon the awful graphics to obscure what should be an obvious and easy task.
>I’d never heard of this one before.
Hoping someone eventually arrives who has a copy! The super-generic title doesn’t help.
Personal opinion: A physical copy is unlikely to exist. I have a strong suspicion that this was originally distributed by one of the many ridiculously-acronymed local users groups (“K.R.A.P.P.L.E. – The Kalamazoo Regional Apple II Users Group!”) that existed at the time, whose newsletters and software library disks have long since vanished, and then made its way to some of the warez-oriented Apple II BBSes. The contents of the collection that it was originally uploaded from and the fact that not a single print reference has ever been found (and I have access to quite a few era-specific magazines and newsletters that aren’t online) all point in that direction, IMHO.
I’ll bet that the person who guessed “Internet” was thinking of a modem, especially one of those big old dial-up ones. While we’re at least a decade too early, I can see something in the 90s like Ditch Day Drifter, Cosmoserve, or The Legend Lives having an item like that. I’ve actually beaten the latter and I’m actually quite surprised there wasn’t an item like that.
1982 isn’t a decade too early for a modem! Before the sort of external modem of the late 80s or early 90s you’re probably thinking of, acoustic couplers (a device you sat the phone handset into) were available in the late 1960s and fairly widespread in the early 1980s. Around 1984 or 1985 we had a modem in the form of a cartridge that plugged into our Commodore 64. It’s not even too early for the word “Internet” itself, coined in the early 1970s. But all in all, no, there’s basically no way the person designing this would have been thinking of representing the internet as a physical object and decide to depict it as a modem-type device.