Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post.)

I have seen all seven parchments put together and even solved the puzzle, but I don’t quite have them all permanently yet.

Strident mentioned the prog band in the comments: The Speedy Bears. Pete Cooke on keyboard. Source.

Progress was mainly a matter of getting comfortable with the game’s norms. For example: last time I mentioned the canary I hadn’t tested yet. Bringing the canary in the “coal mine” (not actually a mine) the canary fell over dead after two steps.

This reflects the “you can’t breath” rooms, but is this letting us know about a potential timed danger, or is there a further puzzle here where we have to make it to place X with the canary surviving? With one of the “every item matters” games like from the Cambridge mainframe (Hezarin, Avon, Quondam, etc.) I would be on red alert until there was further resolution; with this game, the canary is just meant to give the information above, and then you can move on.

Similarly, there’s a part with a “native”; I found that if you pick up the skull and bring it to the same room, a group starts to gather and attack. In some games, this would indicate you’re supposed to find a sneaky way to get the skull by, or eliminate the threat; here, the norms are such that not only is the skull meant as a “trap” (like the stones over the bridge) but the native no longer needs to be considered as a puzzle element (I don’t need to sit around using GIVE on every item in the game or trying other verbs.)

In a more practical sense, I’ve discovered that while the parser is mostly two-word, there’s spots like right here you need four words: use WITH SWORD at the end is how you avoid just using your fists to fight.

Additionally, I was thinking there was going to be more map, but what I had last time was nearly all of it. I have marked the positions, and the six new rooms are in the upper right corner.

The first parchment and second parchment I had already found, in the underground area (SW) and island (NW) respectively. I had made a guess about the chest with the snake and the green potion that turned out to be correct: after drinking the green potion the snake’s bite has no effect (it doesn’t say “you feel cured”, you just don’t die); in addition to the trap the chest has the third parchment.

This is just the piece from the chest. After picking up multiple parchments, they automatically merge together, so you don’t need to visualize cutting and pasting.

The fourth parchment I was very close to having, with both a box I was not strong enough to open and an axe. I even tried BREAK BOX (“what with? your bare hands?”) and tested a follow-up WITH AXE on its own parser line. This was before I realized sometimes the parser wanted four words, so BREAK BOX WITH AXE all together does the trick.

I had mentioned the pits before, where one of them is fatal to enter. I hadn’t gotten around to testing the other two yet; both act entirely differently. One is fatal in an identical way…

…but the third reveals the fifth parchment straight off the bat.

Some games would have the norm that similar looking pits would have similar rules (see Probe One: The Transmitter for an example) but here all three pits are different.

My last bit of confusion involves the second fatal pit, two screenshots back. The game specifies you can go “down” and I somehow interpreted that as the same as entering the pit; in reality that’s just an area I missed.

With the anorak from the camp it is possible to climb a mountain and get the sixth parchment from the top without freezing from the cold.

Death soon after. I knew instantly what object I needed but I was curious what would happen if I moved on. This is a “death preview” moment and we’ll see another of its type shortly. See Burglar’s Adventure for more discussion of this idea.

Past the mountain is a pagoda; it is locked with a red key (which is just out in the open from the temple earlier).

The wild thing about the encounter in the pagoda is you can kill the native (with the sword) and get the seventh parchment. The death doesn’t happen until a few turns later, long enough to view the unified seven parchments altogether.

This is a cryptogram. Avoiding the automatic solvers on the Internet, I went to a site that has tools for playing them on a computer (I like them, but find them a pain to keep track of on paper). I swapped unused letters for symbols to get:

UFTL RFT NCET GQ AMKNJTRT JMMI CLB WMSXJJ DGLB, UTQR MD RFT QSL CLB RFT CLAGTLR RTKNJT,CKMLEQR RFT ZMLTQ MD MSP CLATQRMPQ

The puzzle fortunately falls fairly easily to “the most common letter is E” and “the second word is probably THE” as a start.

when the page is complete look and you’ll find, west of the sun and the ancient temple,amongst the bones of our ancestors

I assume this is back at the skull, but since all parchments are needed for the final area (at least according to the decipherment) I still need to figure out the legit way of getting the final parchment piece from the pagoda. I expect it will be either the last puzzle remaining (if finding the treasure is just a glorious “you win” section) or the second to last (if getting out after finding the treasure is still going to be a problem, like in Calixto Island).