Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my last post.)

I have attracted a few readers who are interested in The Dark Crystal (the movie) and maybe don’t know about The Dark Crystal (the game) and are new to this blog. So to clarify for their benefit: I am doing a playthrough where I blog about every step; because this is an adventure game, sometimes I make a lot of progress, sometimes I make very little, but I still find documenting either is important in that it encompasses the real experience of playing adventure games circa 1983. This is still before Sierra had official hint books.

I did not make much progress, but I still have a lot of details to go through and theories.

The first thing I tried was simply to replay from the beginning to see if there were any details I missed. The stones that I ended my post with do have a description…

…and that description is meant to indicate the tree is something important.

I’d like to say I thought through in the same direction as Roberta Williams, but in the end I was simply using my regular adventurer reflexes built over time. While in the cave mucking about with the urSu scene again I tried DIG just in case there was some secret item left over, and the game responded:

USING THE SHALE, JEN DIGS IN THE GROUND FOR AWHILE, BUT FINDS NOTHING.

Huh. Sometimes “you dig around a bit and don’t find anything” is just the author’s way of putting off a common verb, but in this case specifically holding the shale enabled (for me, inadvertently) the act of digging, so that meant digging had to be relevant somewhere. I thus went about digging every single room I had accessible in the game, and as part of that I hit that tree.

The shadow graphics even kind of point at the digging spot.

The flute from the start of the movie! I had been wondering where that ran off to. I do want to emphasize I solved this purely by lawnmowering and only realized a clue was intended after the fact.

I think I’m otherwise finished with the starting area, but I can’t be 100% sure. However, for now I went to the area past and tried DIG and PLAY FLUTE in every single room, with no use at all. Still, I eventually unearthed some interesting spots on the map, which I have marked below.

Blue indicates points of interest. Green marks points of interest where I haven’t gotten anything to happen.

The southmost point is at the lily pad I was suspicious of: “VERY THICK STEMS” where “TRY AS HE MIGHT, JEN CANNOT TEAR ONE OF THE PADS LOOSE.” I realized not long after hitting “send” on my last post that the shale is described as sharp, so I ought to be able to apply it to cut the pad.

This landed a LILY PAD in my inventory that is described as having a “THICK, RUBBERY FEEL”. I thought briefly it might work as a raft on the flowing river but no verb I tried worked, even though FLOAT is an accepted verb.

While I’m at it, I should mention I did create my verb list. The game boots on the first side of the first disk (1A), the early area and the wilderness before the Pod Person town is on the back side of the first disk (1B). The disk swap then requires flipping to 2A (second disk, front side), and I assume 2B has the end parts of the game. I mention this because in Time Zone the verbs were not consistent between the disks, but here I think they might all be from the same set:

I tested every verb on the list; green means they were understood by the parser. The oddball I have marked in blue — UNTIE — seems to be a bug:

JEN SHOUTS, “HELP!” UNFORTUNATELY, HIS CALL IS NOT ANSWERED.

You can get the same result from HELP.

While some of the verbs are clearly “fake” (CRAWL, ENTER, JUMP, and LEAVE all ask what direction, but the game is just steering you to the fact it wants cardinal movement directions) this is still a quite substantial list. Working my way up to where the SLING is just lying on the ground, I went through all the possibilities to try to get the sling to work with the shale, but no dice.

IT LANDS HARMLESSLY SEVERAL YARDS FROM JEN’S FEET

I tried this on the flying eye in particular (which really seemed begging for a good sniping)…

…but I always got the same result. With a little noun-hunting (trying to GET items that aren’t there to see if the parser at least understands them) I found this game has the existence of a PEBBLE, but I have no idea where it is.

(And yes, Jen comes from the Valley of the Stones. No good-sized pebbles around? This is worse than the quest for a ladder in Time Zone; at least in that game, one gets a sense that you have to follow the unspoken “rules of the time machine” for it to operate properly which is why you can’t just swing by a store and pick one up.)

The Village of the Pod People, incidentally, gets a few interesting reactions:

• You can TALK PEOPLE and get the information that the name they call themselves is APOPIAPOIPIDIAPPIDIDIAPIAPOH, which translates into “master gardeners who live in bulging plants”.
• This is the only place I’ve found (so far) DANCE will work. (“WHY NOT? ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKE JEN A DULL GELFLING.”)
• This is the only place I’ve found (so far) SING will work.

Maybe it’s just here for color. Would Roberta Williams do that? (Given the amount of empty space and red herrings in Time Zone, yes she would.)

To the west of the village is a mossy rock, where you can de-moss it (GET MOSS) while holding the sharp shale to reveal an interesting spiral.

Rather cryptically, looking at the spiral then just gets the response that Jen “GLANCES BRIEFLY” at the spiral but “LOOKS AWAY WHEN HE FAILS TO NOTICE ANYTHING SPECIAL ABOUT IT.” The boulder is too heavy to move and you can’t take the spiral with you. Maybe it’s a hint to a direction puzzle later.

Just south of the boulder are the ruins I was having frustration with before. The room seemed significant (including two flat stones) but I couldn’t get any verbs to work. I returned with my full list in green and tried every single one before hitting paydirt with RIDE STONE. Hah! (Yes, SIT STONE works, it just counts as a synonym, but I found RIDE first.)

Examining the hieroglyphics gives mention of a two-pronged flute, a crystal shard, a female Gelfling, a castle, and a triangle in a circle. I suspect the triangle/circle combo will somehow be used later (I am already trying PLAY FLUTE in every single room so if it’s a clue as to where it gets used, I’m going to sweep it up by default anyway).

I got curious if this had an equivalent in the movie, since this seemed like a weirdly specific room. I’m still avoiding spoilers, but I managed via Internet search to hit a page on the official Dark Crystal site that explained:

When the Skeksis began to take Gelfling, as well as Pod People, as slaves, the Gelfling were dismayed. For once they thought of the future. The Gelfling sought to know if the Crystal might be healed and if the Skeksis rule must continue. They lit the fires of prophecy and took counsel from the flames. Seven circles of seven Gelfling lay on the hilltops all night; their faces to the stars. Their dreams were made of stone; the Wall of Destiny still stands.

In a history of game-design sense, I’d like to point out despite this first seemingly the Big Empty Grid passed down from Time Zone, this is much more dense, and in fact I’m started to be reminded more of the layout of the King’s Quest games (which all the way up through I to V had the landscape divided into a grid). Again, we seem to be closing in on the standard point-and-click layout, partly enabled by the use of Henson’s artists allowing for somewhat richer landscapes.

In terms of me being stuck, well, hmmf. I’ve still got the Landstriders who don’t want to be ridden…

The sound at the end is a Garthim barging in. I’ve started to suspect the Garthim attacks are evadable in a real time sense, that is, if you go in a direction fast enough you get away, and if you wait, you won’t. Which is sadly again like King’s Quest 1.

…and the eye that stubbornly refuses to be sniped, and the river that doesn’t want to be crossed, and the chasm, and the spiral (maybe), and the village. I still feel like I’m missing a piece. Even if I summon up the missing PEBBLE, will what I get from shooting down the eye really help with the other puzzles? I need to comb through the rooms again to check if I’m missing a detail.