Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my last post.)

I have won the game, by some relativistic value of “won” — I needed to check the walkthrough a few times due to communication issues, but also one wildly unfair spot.

I will try my best to convey first what any future potential players might need to have a better chance before getting deep into spoilers. Before any of that, a little more detail on how the game was discovered:

Specifically, this happened on the Sinclair ZX World forums. A user named “willinliv” posted about a set of his father’s collection of “about 30” ZX81 tapes, some of them commercial and some of them hand-made.

One of the tapes from the collection, “GMSave”.

Our tape of particular interest was marked “Jeux 16k” (Games 16k).

I have been trying to get a better capture of the tape ‘Jeux 16k’, which seems to be a collection of software that my Dad traded with a ‘pen pal’ from France. Some of these are pirated copies of mainstream releases but some I kind find any info about or copies online. Unfortunately there are audio drop-outs recorded into the tape, particularly on Side B, and also my expertise is minimal.

Nightmare House was on the side B and did suffer damage. As XavSnap writes…

The wav file is broken and i had to rebuild the Basic file in binary (Bits rotations, bad basic length…).

…also pointing out the source code was explicitly based on the Trevor Toms code.

All objects, conditions and moves are located in the VARs memory segment, but this part don’t match in the P file [that’s the file used by the emulator]

After some significant work after the code was reconstructed. This is important in that it is faintly possible one of the odd behaviors you are about to see was related to the reconstruction, but after thorough enough testing I don’t think so: the game is really meant to be very linear with lots of death options.

If you plan on playing the game yourself, note that:

a.) On the two occasions where there are multiple things — the buttons on the recorder and the three trains — you’re supposed to refer to them by digit. So PUSH 1 or PUSH 2 or ENTER 1 and so forth.

b.) INSERT is used for both putting a thing in another thing as well as for typing.

c.) The way to wait is NOTHING. This might seem rather cryptic from the Apple version which just says “Command?” but the original more explicitly asks “what do you do?” As a conversational response, NOTHING (RIEN) makes sense, but I’ve almost never seen this before in an adventure game, where quite typically there’s an implicit “I WANT TO…” placed before the command; this gets fiddled with on rare occasion (DON’T PANIC from Hitchhiker’s Guide, for instance). The “almost” never is because this command also shows up in Folibus, which I think makes it pretty clear the author was deriving their code directly from Brégeon’s magazine article rather than from the Trevor Toms book.

With that out of the way, here’s the entire map.

Not large, yet somehow it manages many many ways to die. From where I left off last time, I had trouble with an acid bottle (just ignore it) and some trains. As I hinted at earlier, you’re supposed to ENTER one of them; trains 1 and 3 kill you (either by explosion or electrocution). This is hinted at in the previous room, which had an unplugged speaker; if you PLUG SOCKET (not the speaker, and no, the socket isn’t in the room description, even in the French version) you’ll get a hint about “always taking the second”.

With ENTER 2 you enter into darkness and where I got stuck again:

The train here has stopped in darkness. You can’t go any of the cardinal directions, and going down kills you (falling down). This is the moment where you need to do NOTHING.

The train moves along farther and ejects you into the room seen above. There is a beam going from north to south (the little squares in a column), an “electronic eye” next to a door to the west, a “black box”, and exits otherwise to the north and south. Trying to exit either way — at least my first time through — disintegrated me. I checked the verb list and there was nothing along the lines of sliding under the beam or jumping over it (like I did recently in the German game Geheimagent XP-05).

This was the part that I wasn’t stuck on due to the parser, but just being generally unfair. At the very start, there were some tools and a laser gun; you’re not supposed to pick up the gun.

That’s the only difference! You can’t even drop the gun once you’ve arrived at the beam room, you have to have left it behind. There is no indication that the weapon is the issue.

From here, you can go north into a room that looks fairly tantalizing, which has a “hole with a riveted ladder”, and a “window overlooking the sea with a lever”.

You’re supposed to ignore both those things (unless you want to die) and instead pick up the bottle (GOURDE) and cassette (CASSETTE). The bottle can be drunk but there’s a fun death later if you don’t drink it so let’s save that, and take the cassette back to the player at the intersection.

Putting the cassette in the player and using PUSH 2 (again I had to look up the interaction mode here) causes the previously-closed door to the west to open.

Inside is a lamp and a door with a keypad.

There’s also UNE MACHINE QUI RONRONNE, where “ronronne” can be either purring or a hum. I think purring is funnier.

You can’t open the door yet, but you can grab the lamp, turn it on, and jump back on the 2nd train. You will see a code for the keypad in the darkness.

It doesn’t give an explicit number, it just says there is one.

Circling back to the intersection you can then INSERT CODE (or rather, INTRODUIRE CODE) and reach the final room of the game.

There’s a mummy, a lever, a button, and a screen; there’s also a “controller” (or as the Apple game says, “stick”) to the west. The lever, button, and screen are all tantalizing, but again, death maze: push the button and the mummy wakes up and murders you.

If you haven’t drunk the bottle before entering:

You catch the plague. You die.

If you are holding the black box from the room with the beam.

The bomb explodes. You too.

You should ignore everything except for the stick, and pull it:

x

This gives the message

UNE TRAPPE S’OURVRE

VOUS VOUS RETROUVEZ DEHORS. VOUS AVEZ GAGNE.

which translates to

A TRAPDOOR OPENS

YOU FIND YOURSELF OUTSIDE. YOU HAVE WON.

I do want to emphasize that this exact style is fairly specific; we’ve had plenty of games with multiple options to die, but the sheer overwhelming preponderance of death-options here is high enough to form its own mood, akin to a Choose Your Own Adventure where more than half the options lead to a BAD END.

Be an Interplanetary Spy: The Red Rocket, from 1985. Source.

Eventually in 1983 we’ll reach The Manor of Dr. Genius for the Oric, by a known company (Loriciels) but with the same general flavor as Folibus.