Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed to understand this one.

From the 1983 Sierra Hi-Res Adventure catalog, via Sierra Chest. The Dark Crystal is the last of the series.

Last time I had jumped into the chasm/the last disk side of the game.

I’ve also watched the movie now, so I can compare a little: figuring out to jump here would have been easier from the movie. There was a vague hint in the game about the wings from the prophecy wall, but the graphics didn’t make it super clear; I had originally just thought it would end in a “you landed on X fantasy critter which let you fall safely” result. It’s not much better in the movie, though! The wings appear for the first time in the falling scene, and when Jen asks about why he doesn’t have wings and Kira does, Kira points out of course he doesn’t, he’s a boy. And that’s the only time the wings appear and that’s all that is said about them. (I’m jumping ahead a little, but by the end I wasn’t thrilled with the game generally, and while I think while some of this is the fault of Sierra, some is the fact that the movie they’re adapting often just has things happen. It’s non-optimal for an adventure conversion where understanding the circumstances is key to figuring out puzzles.)

The movie’s design had unexpected lore pop up whenever it was needed. It’s fair to treat this as a stylistic choice, but it’s hard to cope with in adventure game form.

Landing, Jen and Kira are at a stone face. You can circle around the castle (east or west) to find a second stone face. The choice of face is simply based on the symbol seen on the prophecy panel.

Wrong.

Right. Just differentiating a binary choice doesn’t make for a great puzzle.

Things get worse from here, as there’s a locked door that can’t be reached because of some bars.

THE “TEETH” OF THE STONE MONSTER ARE ACTUALLY THE METAL BARS OF A GATE. JUST OUT OF REACH BEHIND THE BARS IS A CLOSED DOOR.

This is the worst puzzle in the game. At least conceptually I got what to do next: we can’t reach through the bars, but we’re holding someone small (Fizzgig) so they should go through instead. However, no command I attempted worked to try to get Fizzgig in (see the growling on my second screenshot). I finally gave up and checked hints again, and found the right command was SEND FIZZGIG.

Argh! Again we have an “isolate”, a verb I’ve never seen before in an adventure and there’s a fair chance I will never see it again. The troubles aren’t over yet, though.

WHERE DOES JEN WANT TO SEND HIM?

You can’t type IN BARS (like the manual specifies) or BARS. You have to instead type SEND BARS. This is the most absurd parser command in the entire Hi-Res Adventure catalog. It’s not over yet, though! Fizzgig comes back with a key, but the door is described as “just out of reach”. UNLOCK DOOR? No. UNLOCK BARS? No. You need to USE KEY, then OPEN BARS.

This is followed by a set of tunnels that serve no purpose other than filling space.

This was fairly standard for Time Zone — and sometimes even kind of worked to give a sense of atmosphere — but here, despite the graphic quality, this really comes off as designed for a different game.

Expressive hand-drawn characters encountering a dead end.

Once in the right spot, things are back on track with the movie as the Chamberlain appears, who drops rubble on Jen and takes Kira.

Heading south (now alone) again follows the movie as Jen encounters a Garthim nest.

Again, the parser is highly irritating here. I tried all possible directions (N/S/E/W/U/D) and failed to escape. I finally broke down and checked hints again (my resistance being much lighter by now) and found out RUN is now suddenly special, and is given without specifying a direction. (I want to emphasize RUN otherwise says IN WHICH DIRECTION DOES JEN WISH TO GO?, strongly implying it isn’t really understanding the word.) The Garthim smash a hole that Jen can then escape out of (GO HOLE).

In the movie, while all this is happening, SkekNa, the Skeksis slave master, is trying to drawn Kira’s life essence in a room full of caged animals; Aughra is in the same room (also caged up) and encourages her to talk to the animals, who escape and attack, eventually causing the downfall of SkekNa. By my subjective opinion (just rewatching it yesterday) it is the best moment of the movie, having one of the characters (Kira) use an ability that was fully introduced earlier (talking to animals) combined with help from another character.

None of this happens in the game. Aughra is tied up and Jen can untie her, but there’s no particular drama here:

Again, to be fair, Jen doesn’t do much other than run from things, so with the game switched to his perspective only, that’s about all that’s possible. Past Aughra is another scene where you need to RUN…

…and after a couple more steps evading Skeksis, you can come across a SCEPTER which will be useful shortly…

..and the Skeksis, eating food.

GO CURTAIN (fortunately strongly implied) lets Jen get close enough to hear, where for some reason they talk about a secret passage in a tower. The tower in question is not that far away, and as long as you’ve heard the conversation, a panel will be available. In order to reach it, you need to LOOK SCEPTER, then refer specifically to the HOOK, because why not put yet another parser headache in at the end of the game.

USE HOOK reveals a passage to the Great Conjunction ritual with the Skeksis and Kira.

Following the movie (and fortunately clear even just playing the game) the right command is JUMP. Ads for the game even show Jen sitting on the crystal so it is a fairly iconic pose.

The crystal goes flying, and Kira goes to throw it back, but the RITUAL-MASTER warns Kira she will die if she throws it.

The right response here is to say NO. Kira throws the crystal to Jen, gets stabbed, and Jen can now insert the crystal…

…causing the Skeksis to transform into the urSkeks, and Kira is dead, or well, “dead”. The final command to win is KISS KIRA.

In the movie, things make a little more sense: early on, the Mystics all travel together slowly to the castle, clearly driven by some sense of ritual. They arrive right at the Great Conjunction and when the crystal is healed they merge back into the Skeksis, which is how the urSkeks get made.

From the Dark Crystal Wiki.

The two races have been separated since the damage to the stone, the Mystics (the urSu) moving to the Valley of the Stones to seal themselves in safety for a thousand years. I have some issues with the movie but this cycle ends up being suitably epic; it’s hard to understand what’s going on with the game without the context.

This isn’t quite the weakest of the Hi-Res games, but I think it is the weakest of the ones designed by Roberta Williams. Her style really lends itself to a more exploratory structure, and the part of the game I enjoyed myself most was the middle section where I was discovering new things in the landscape; with the highly linear series of events loosely following the movie, it most ran head-first into the twin issues of boring puzzles and the bad parser. There were some high aspirations; Cerf called the player both the “hero” and “a kind of movie director”. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough flexibility for that to really hold out, and I struggled to find any extra “fun” actions or extra routes to take.

The only moment I could find in the later part of the game.

I don’t think the movie adventure-game concept is untenable; Lucasarts with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade did a serviceable (even excellent) job of it, but Indiana Jones is full of both action and the possibility of alternate routes. When Indy fails to bluff the butler at the castle and punches him instead (movie version) you can do the bluff successfully. When Hitler signs the Grail diary (in movie), in game you can trick him into signing a travel pass instead making later parts of the game easier. It’s possible to get the Grail back to the Grail Knight at the end without any destruction. I don’t think Roberta Williams would have knocked things out of the park given easier-to-work with source material (not Jen Runs Away From Things: The Movie), but The Dark Crystal may have been just the wrong outlet for a movie game (or at least following the script — maybe a prequel would be better, along the lines of the recent Age of Resistance series on Netflix).

While The Dark Crystal was being wrapped up, IBM was already in contact with Sierra and work was starting for a new project for the upcoming PCjr computer: King’s Quest. Not long after, Sierra would take another whack at a movie game (The Black Cauldron) so we’ll see if King’s Quest’s environmental style makes for a more compelling delivery method.

The front door of the Williams’s custom-built house made around the time of the game. I’m not sure it’s accurate to say they were apathetic about it given the stained glass. Source.