Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

This is the follow-up to Herrick Venture #1: Escape.

Unfortunately, I have not found any more historical material since last time, so I generally just have to hope Richard E. Herrick Jr. is alive and tries to Google himself sometime (which has happened before with other authors!) Unlike the first game, this only has a BASIC source version, and while Escape slightly broke the 16k limit (18337 bytes) Land of Odysseys busts it entirely, at 25859 bytes. The game is still stylized around Scott Adams; Adams went with his particular style for technical reasons, but even with more memory space the author is choosing to stick with it. (This sort of “legacy started for technical reasons but held after even when those reasons went away” applies elsewhere in game design history, like pixel art, although 32K still isn’t that generous.)

Source.

Escape involved getting out of a house alive. This game clings back hard to the roots of Scott Adams and Adventureland, with the goal of collecting treasures and returning them to a starting location.

The temple has a mirror which hints at “Alice”, indicating it can be entered, Through-the-Looking-Glass style.

I AM IN A SECRET ROOM. VISIBLE ITEMS:

LARGE MIRROR. VIAL FILLED WITH A WEIRD POTION. *MAGIC WAND*

The vial is another Alice in Wonderland reference, which we’ll see payoff in a moment.

Going just outside the temple lands you in a “forest” with a “large rock”. Looking at the rock and then moving it reveals a DARK HOLE.

The dark hole has a *PEARL NECKLACE* (the second treasure, after the magic wand) and a piece of paper which reads “trolls are afraid of magic”.

Heading west of the forest leads to a tiny door with a DRINK ME sound, and you do the predictable thing:

Predictable, but still enjoyable enough. The game does get harder later.

Inside the door is a “small room” that has a troll, a book of magic words, and a golden medallion (treasure 3). Oddly, the troll’s fear of magic extends to the book that is in his lurking place, and trying to pick the book up is enough to scare it away.

The book mentions “hocus-pocus”, “open-sesame”, “abracadabra”, and “presto”, all which will show use in a little while. This is like getting the book of spells in Enchanter but you have to randomly guess what each one does. The game is tight enough it isn’t that frustrating but — let’s get to their use in context.

First off, you may notice the small room has no exits.

>SAY HOCUS

OK

HOCUS

******PUFF!******

This teleports the player out back to the path, where they can pick back up all their stuff like their magic wand which maintained normal size as they were shrunk down.

To the east of the temple/forest is a “swamp” with strange gas and a pool of oil; I haven’t used the oil for anything but the gas will come in handy later (you can GET GAS while holding the vial that used to have potion in it). From there you can exit north and south, both which represent magic word puzzles:

North is simply quicksand you can get out of by using the PRESTO word. There’s a *BAG OF RUBIES* there to add to the collection.

South is a log cabin guarded by snakes. For whatever reason — in practice, just experiment with all four magic words whenever there’s a puzzle — ABRACADABRA is effective against snakes.

The log cabin has a “piece of steel” and a “shovel”. The shovel can be used to dig up a random room (between the starting forest and the tiny door) which has “flintrock”; these can then be used to LIGHT the LAMP found in the starting room.

Speaking of the lamp, you can also — taking a cue from Adventureland — RUB it to get another treasure. Unlike Adventureland you can’t rub it twice to get a second treasure.

The room above incidentally has the first thing in the game I have not resolved yet: the winged horse. You can untie it from the tree, and sit on it, but none of the words I’ve tried or actions I’ve attempted have gotten the horse to take off. There are puzzles not resolved by just using magic words!

Or maybe I just haven’t found the right magic word yet.

East of everything is a mountain with a suspicious crack. OPEN SESAME reveals a cave (ever since King’s Quest V I’ve been paranoid that this leads to a timed puzzle where the cave will close behind me, but the cave seems to be permanent).

On to the cave, where I’ve got three open obstacles.

To the north is a sign that says “DRAGON SLEEP” which is a hint for dealing with the actual dragon to the south. Suspicious, I went back to the gas out in the swamp and did SNIFF GAS, which worked (!) and let me know it made me feel slightly sleepy. Since I had some gas in my vial, I could throw it:

Unfortunately, trying to walk by wakes the dragon up briefly and it inadvertently fries you. I’m not sure if the goal is to tiptoe softer or if there’s a method of doing away with the dragon for good.

Heading back to the cave entrance and going due east, there’s a chasm blocking the way, easily resolved by doing WAVE WAND (I’d been carting the wand around this whole time waiting for it to get applied somewhere).

Further east are some corpses and a shiny chalice. Taking the chalice does not go well.

I was hoping maybe I could get the dragon together with the zombies and have them cancel each other out, but no dice yet.

The third unresolved obstacle is a minotaur, in a “labyrinth” to the north.

In the rooms marked Labyrinth they include all exits N/S/E/W/U/D and any not on the map are just loops. It’s like one of the old Greg Hassett mazes.

The minotaur doesn’t kill the player right away but they can chase. I have yet to get anything good to come out of that but I also have yet to experiment; I felt it was a good time to come in and report.

The minotaur is guarding a Persian rug, but I have to deal with this problem first.

So to summarize, I have a winged horse, dragon, minotaur, and set of zombies to deal with. I need to re-check my magic words (I used them, but maybe I mis-spelled them or need to use a different timing) and then get more creative from there.

I will say I’m finding this more pleasant than Herrick Venture 1, despite that game being more strictly mechanical (not fantasy puzzles). The general implied narrative of Herrick Venture 2 has been more colorful and I’ve found it more interesting — at least from the author’s minimalist style — to get surrounded by zombies or chased down by a minotaur than run over by a car.