Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and my previous posts are needed for context.

I finished on the Amstrad version, which runs a little faster and does seem to be nearly identical (comparing against the walkthrough by Garry Francis). Even that ancient manuscript I mentioned counted for essentially nil: there are no glasses to read it. I’m not sure why the author even added it in, other than a general love of red herrings; the dog, hammer, dynamite, bulldozer, and rubbish bin all signify nothing other than the debris of the British countryside.

Cover of the magazine the game first appeared in, via eBay.

My two issues (the missing treasure, and the heavy lid I suspected hid a treasure) both had their solution nearby. The lid straightforwardly opened with the “sharp sword” at the mansion, no hammer or dynamite needed.

I don’t know what the “sorry” is about, sometimes the parser printed that randomly.

I mentioned mushrooms I was not able to pick up last time. This is an Amstrad-specific bug. The game does not let you type GET MUSHROOMS or even GET MUSHROOM (it just re-displays the room over again). You need to type GET MUSH or GET MUSHR. I assume there’s some length limit I’m hitting. (The Oric does not have this problem! I’d consequently say the Oric is less buggy but Garry may have fixed the mushroom while he was busy fixing the general can’t-pick-anything-up bug. It’s all just a mess, let’s just leave it at that.)

With the mushrooms, er, MUSH in hand, you can deliver them to the gamekeeper nearby. Again, GIVE MUSHROOMS fails, it needs to be GIVE MUSH.

This is the only place a spacesuit is mentioned. I don’t know how the kissing worked.

That puts us at a full list, now it’s just a matter of getting all the objects over in one save file. This was slightly tedious but made somewhat less so by the discovery that PRAY rotates through locations a bit at random; after making a delivery I did PRAY until I was close to my next targets. I did still have to tote a BOAT all over the map twice.

Item pile in progress.

I didn’t even get to drop my last treasure, this displayed with the camera still in my inventory. I wonder if the game is bugged so you leave one treasure behind you can still win the game.

There’s no puzzle for entering the spaceship. I suppose the power of friendship was within us all along.

This was a lot of words for a type-in (mind you, that’s the style of this blog) but it’s worth a close look for if nothing else not only did Steve Lucas publish many games, he published at least two “how to write adventure games” books, one for MSX and one for Amstrad. If his style evolves over time we need his starting point accounted for. I’m hoping over the process I can shake a few more biographical details loose (what was his past background? what happened to him during the 90s?)

But for now: our first Japanese game for 1983, one considered a landmark work.