Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post.)

I have only made a little progress, but I thought I’d at least give an update.

I went through my verb list and found only a very small list…

READ, OPEN, DRINK, EAT, WAIT, KILL, UNLOCK, PUT, WEAR, GIVE, EXAMINE, INSERT, ENTER, LEAVE, LISTEN, CROSS

…and the only two of note are LISTEN and CROSS, neither which would be obvious things to try in a limited parser. (Keep in mind that there is always the possibility of a rare verb that I don’t have listed, so this isn’t guaranteed to be everything.)

Regarding the football fan from last time: they are indeed, as I theorized while typing my last post, a fan of lager. GIVE LAGER TO FAN works. (GIVE LAGER results in you getting completely pounded, with no indication the parser simply didn’t know what you meant, but I had already been trained by Invincible Island to watch for this issue.) Handing the lager over gives enough time to pick up the rat trap nearby.

The game accepts PUT CHEESE IN TRAP but I have not managed to get any farther than that (I could try dropping the trap in every single room hoping for a hit, but I haven’t gotten that desperate yet).

In more ordinary Me Missing Things, I missed that the fish and chips shop is enterable (with plain ENTER, the game doesn’t understand SHOP). There’s nothing in there although there’s some sounds from the back, where the magic LISTEN verb works. RADIO isn’t an understood noun so I don’t know if this is supposed to be meaningful.

The shop also has a “red herring” which causes a herd of cats to appear following the player. I suspect this is a red herring in both the literal and figurative sense, because authors find this joke irresistible, but maybe this will finally be the game that bucks the trend.

The chip shop is helpfully centrally located (and remember the police are zealous and will nab you if you drop things on the road) so I’ve been using it as my base of operations.

New rooms are in yelllow.

Heading a bit southwest is the red scarf I mentioned quite briefly last time. What I neglected to get into is that there is the sound of heavy boots when you pick the scarf up, and after a certain amount of time you get stomped by someone who doesn’t appreciate the scarf. I assume this is a football hooligan reference. There’s enough time between picking up the scarf and getting sent to the hospital that I assume there’s a puzzle that involves unloading the scarf somehow.

Northwest from the shop is the building site (where I still end up sinking, even after dropping all items) and the small area of rain that requires the umbrella.

Just past the rain is a canal with a bridge; here CROSS is needed (and is the only way I can find to use the bridge, yay for the verb list). This leads to a building with a rusty door I have been unable to break into.

Just south is a car park with “some milk”, one of my only two new items. The other new item comes from back at the dustbins that couldn’t be OPENed because the game wants EXAMINE. Grr. (EXAMINE works on almost nothing in the game. Of takeable objects, the only one that it has worked on is the papers from the Town Hall, described as being written in Greek.)

Here is where things get cryptic and where I am happy to field explanations. I went over to the phone box and dialed the number and got as second number (1001) and when I dialed that number I got yet more numbers:

I’m not sure how to interpret this information or what it gets used on. Other than sinking at the building site and the rusty door I’m out of obstacles to whack at. Optionally it may be possible to deal with the police sergeant somehow upon being arrested but that may also simply be a dead end.

(You can try giving him items, but he just says no bribes.)

There’s always the possibility of “hidden puzzles”; a number of locations didn’t seem to have anything active going on (like the church and graveyard), or a random yellow wall in the middle of town but may reveal something with the right action. I still am not sure which way my character should even be aiming to escape; I’m imagining the big road block is not the route we are going to use, and nothing else suggests a pathway out.