Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Scarthorpe is the sort of town where even the dogs carry flick knives, where there’s only one road in, and it’s a one way street!!!

This is the second adventure game by Pete Cooke, after Invincible Island, again for ZX Spectrum (although a C64 port came out too).

I just thought there’s no point doing a fantasy setting like everyone else was. It did quite well, I made some money.

— From the Pete Cooke Retro Gamer interview

We’ve now seen three games (Pythonesque, Mad Martha, On the Way to the Interview) that have a sort of “satirical urban magical realism” aspect to them, and they’ve all been British.

While we’ve had comparable satire from the United States, it hasn’t been couched in quite the same terms (battling old ladies in the streets, getting run over by a bus literally anywhere including inside houses, husbands being chased down by their wives with an axe). Some of the same flavor can be found in Asylum II but the setting is very much not urban. The closest comparison I can think of is the various “naughty games” like City Adventure and the first two Misadventure games, but they still don’t strike me as inherently focused on urban sleaze, just sleaze in general.

The other term I’ve used for the genre is “British degenerate” game and it fits here too.

I’m not keen on “cultural zeitgeist” theories why certain trends happen; they tend to lead to of-the-cuff speculation:– when Tolkien became popular with the counterculture of the United States there was the rumor Tolkien wrote the books while on drugs, and an article in the Ladies Home Journal claimed

No youngster is going to believe in a beautiful knight on a white charger whose strength is as the strength of 10 because his heart is pure. He knows too much history and/or sociology, alas, to find knighthood enchanting in its feudal backgrounds and to dream of Greek heroes and of gods who walked the earth. But give him hobbits and he can escape to a never-never world that satisfies his 20th century mind.

which seems comedically off the mark; Tolkien’s sources were also quite old.

Still, there was something particular to culture in the UK both in their humour and in their politics that led to these sorts of “urban satire” games; certainly, given the literal title of one of the games, Monty Python (and by extension, The Goon Show) deserves some credit; Not the Nine O’ Clock also could be an influence. I have a theory regarding the ZX Spectrum in particular but I’ll save that for when I’m done with the game.

Urban Upstart is explicitly an “escape from 20th century suburbia”.

Via eBay UK.

We are literally trapped in the city and need to escape. Choice of time: 3 o’clock in the morning.

Incidentally, if you don’t put the dungarees on, after you get out of the starting house you get arrested for indecent exposure.

The opening house has some scissors and a lager in the fridge, as well as a large key for unlocking the front door (which is locked from both ways?) After some fiddling about with the parser trying to leave the house (just the word LEAVE alone or LEAVE HOUSE works, don’t try to ENTER DOOR, GO DOOR, etc.) we’re out on the town.

The bookstore is enterable (!) and has only one book, on How to Fly, suggesting our final exit may be via aeronautical vehicle.

There are “dustbins” in the back of the house but neither OPEN nor EMPTY work and I’m not sure if they’re there for anything else other than flavor (there’s a lot of dead ends and “urban debris” type rooms, so it might just be atmosphere). What you can find is an umbrella lying about a bus stop, and food and cheese in a park. Park cheese, delicious.

The park is adjacent to a church with a graveyard. The tombstone says John Smith.

Just past the bookshop is an alley near a Football Ground, and a grumpy football fan past that (hanging near a rat trap, for some reason).

I haven’t tried giving him the lager yet.

The fan pounds you if you try to pass (or don’t, even) and you end up landing in a hospital in a different part of the map. There are multiple ways to get sent to the hospital but let’s follow the path there next.

You land in an unsupervised hospital bed in a straightforward maze, but if you try to walk out of the hospital, a doctor escorts you back to the bed.

The maze includes a white coat, so the way to get out is to simply wear the white coat over your dungarees and sneak out the entrance.

To the west is a hill with some red tape on the top — that’ll be useful in a moment — and going back east passes by a sign (“Keep Britain Tidy”), a car abandoned in the road (can’t enter or drive), and a red scarf.

Incidentally, the police are quite serious about keeping Britain tidy, and if you drop an item while juggling inventory onto the street, you will immediately get arrested.

Looking at the north part of town…

…there’s more civic grime (on “Civic Street”), a phone box (with a working phone, I don’t know who to call), a very serious roadblock at the far north…

This is the kind of parser which insults the player. It does fit the theming.

…and a “wasteland” nearby which has an “old hat”.

At the end of Civic Street is a Town Hall which you normally can’t enter, but I thought to bring over the “red tape” and I got in. I get the perception this game may not be 100% looking for realism in puzzle solutions. In the Town Hall you can find “official documents” which I haven’t used yet.

The last obstacles are around a turn at “muck alley”. One involves an area that mysteriously rains; I’m sure nabbing the umbrella will help, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet (or rather, when I went to get the umbrella and needed to trade inventory, that’s when I discovered the town policy on litter so haven’t bothered to go back around yet). As a side path off of that is a “wet and muddy” building site which describes you sinking, and if you are there too long you get trapped in the mud and sent to the hospital.

Continuing the theme of not wanting to fiddle with inventory yet, I think getting through here may involve simply dumping my inventory elsewhere (the author’s last game, Invincible Island, had something similar). To summarize, I’ve found scissors, a lager, a key, dungarees, an umbrella, some food, some cheese, a red scarf, a white coat, some red tape, and some official papers. In terms of active obstacles I still need to take the umbrella through the rain, get through the building site, and get past the football fan; optionally there might be a way to get out of the police station. (If you just walk in the station you get trapped in, just like if you were arrested. LEAVE doesn’t work. This might even be a parser issue!) However, it is quite possible I’m simply missing some spots due to the parser being finicky.