Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post. And fair warning, lots of bloody Apple II graphics upcoming.)

Before getting into today’s bout with puzzles and mayhem, a brief comparison of two pictures, one from the Wizardry 1 manual and one from the Crypt of Medea manual.

The image above is from the cartoonist Will McLean, famous for drawing cartoons in the Dragon Master’s Guide of Dungeons and Dragons; his art in the Wizardry manual gave it a general aura of D&D. Rick Austin, as I mentioned in my last post, did the iconic dragon cover, which is even used in the modern Steam port.

Now, an image from the Crypt of Medea manual (this represents the starting room, and what I assume is the player character):

The manual art was done by Rick Austin, not McLean. Austin clearly has a different approach to the character, but the way the background wall line meanders clearly invokes the cartoony style of McLean. So it’s as if McLean established a “house style” connecting D&D to Wizardry that was subsequently used here. (I might follow with “even though it doesn’t have anything to do with D&D”, but the game’s score is given as “experience points”. While I’ve played adventures with experience points before I’ve never played one that was a traditional adventure that just used it as a substitute for “score”.)

Getting back into the gameplay…

The lab we left off on, with an empty vial and table.

…I’ve got a strong feel at least the general pattern, which isn’t exactly a “deathtrap maze” like Cauchemard-House but pretty close. You have access to a small set of rooms with lots of ways to die, but one of the ways to die has a solution, opening up a new place / getting a new item that will allow reckoning with another place that normally is fatal, and so on. I’m not far enough in to know if the pattern holds the whole game.

From here, you can allegedly exit west (back to the mausoleum with the glass case we still haven’t opened), south, or east. East is an arbitrary deathtrap:

Spikes pop out of the walls of the room you have entered. The walls begin to squeeze shut…
The spikes begin to pierce your body. They penetrate the temples of your head and enter your brain. You are dead.

There’s no warning: the whole idea is to spring the trap first, then use that foreknowledge on your next life. For now, let’s go south instead.

That’s a “corpse”, a “severed head”, and also an “orange button” which we’ll get to shortly. I ran here into an issue I neatly evaded recently with Leopard Lord but faceplanted into here. Namely: EXAMINE and SEARCH are considered different verbs. If you “examine” the corpse you find out it “has been badly mangled”; if you do the same on the head you’ll find it is skewered through a steel rod and there’s an ID card underneath.

Remember, the game is still updating graphics every time something changes; by finding the ID card it is now listed in the room and you can pick it up.

It was rather a bit later I tried to see if SEARCH was different and I found the body had something too, a vial with a sweet smell.

The passage continues south but first let me show off a side room you can open by pressing the orange button.

It has a light from above (which will later be important), a blue button, and a violet button. The blue button does nothing (for now) and the violet button fills the room with blood and you choke and die.

The wall slides closed behind you and warm blood spurts from small holes in the floor. The blood travels slowly up your body.
You choke to death on warm blood!

Going back to the land of the living (relatively speaking) and heading south, there’s a tape player and a dead dog…

…and the dead dog has germs that will leap up and kill you if you approach; you can take the tape player safely, though.

East then is a web blocking further passage:

Trying to cut the web (with that butterknife from earlier) predictably kills you. I was stumped a while until I fixed my SEARCH problem earlier at the corpse and found the vial. This is where the vial goes:

Moving farther east is a dead end with a “tape” and a “jellied mass”. Do I even need to explain what happens if you touch the mass?

If you put the tape player and tape together and play:

A click is heard in a distance room… then another click.

This is a softlock. You need to rewind to play the tape again, but the rewind button breaks when you try to push it. You need to find the right room to use the player in, and there’s no logic; you’re just supposed to SAVE/RESTORE and try every room. Not so onerous on an emulator, probably a pain on real hardware.

The room it’s supposed to go in is the lab. Playing the tape opens a small slot. You can then put the ID in the slot, which opens a “small cache” revealing a diamond.

Diamonds have a pretty standard use in adventures (especially when there’s no treasure-tracking): cutting things. You can go back to the glass case at the start and cut it open, revealing a “breathing apparatus”.

I immediately remembered the blood choking and tried it out in the “warm blood” room. It turns out you want to leave the candle in the room adjacent; the blood puts out the candle, and while the box of matches appears like you ought to be able to use more, the remaining matches are duds (so when the candle goes out, the game softlocks).

If you press the violet button and survive, you can go east, swimming through blood, and find a new room.

There’s a long rod, a yellow button, and an orange button. The yellow button makes a noise as if something distant opened; the orange button opens the “blood elevator” back up. You can use the previously non-working blue button to return to the top, with a very nasty dry cleaning budget.

The yellow button opens up a “testing room” next to the lab. There’s a tank with a humanoid figure, black and white buttons, and a rope attached to the ceiling. Pulling the rope, predictably, brings the ceiling down on you; I can’t cut the rope either (the butterknife is too dull, and that’s not really a diamond-cutting job).

The interior of the tank has a key, and trying to get the key gives a hint you need to USE XXXX; I assume it’s the rope, just I need to get it first. In the meantime, you can get yourself killed by pushing either the black or white button twice (in any combination).

That long rod from the bloody room also helps with the spikes, and will automatically jam up the trap if you’re holding it.

Further east is a ravine, although I’m stopped here for now. I figured it was a good moment to report in.

I’ll take creative ideas from the peanut gallery on the figure with the electricity, although that may just be a trap that needs to be ignored. Otherwise I’m still fine without hints (the manual comes with some, anyway, should I truly get stuck).