Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and the ending is truly unusual. My previous posts are needed for context.

Last time I had reached but was stuck at a ravine (see screenshot above). I had available a flask, a breathing apparatus, a shovel, and glass from the glass case where I got the breathing apparatus from. I also was unable to pick up a dog head (due to germs) and in a “Testing Room” there was a rope from a ceiling I couldn’t get and two buttons that awakened a figure in a tank (with a key inside)

You can use the piece of glass to cut the rope. (This is a slight bit of visualization — I imagined the glass piece would be a little less jagged and cut-worthy, but we did cut it with a diamond.) You can then take the rope and THROW ROPE to get it attached to the ceiling at the ravine…

…followed by SWING ROPE.

The inventory limit switches from 6 to 3. (Note: dropping the glass while inventory juggling will cause it to break.) On the other side of the ravine is a room with a locked door to the south (the key is still back at the tank) and a “mutant” blocking the way north.

The being has a dog head so I went back and tried to get the other dog head but it still kept killing me with germs. I experimented with the electricity some more (it turns out the white/black buttons are red herrings, but it’s impossible to know that until the end of the game). I finally went back and tried THROW on random things, and found that the mutant caught them and gobbled them up. I tried everything I had (ferrying over items in small loads over the ravine) but nothing had an effect.

Perhaps you’ve already spotted it: it’s something I even consciously thought about as soon as I noticed the game was heavy on softlocks. Specifically, while puzzle-solving you need to check not only the items that are currently accessible, but the items that were accessible in the past.

I had forgotten I had broken the glass but I didn’t have to!

With that out of the way, it’s possible to go north and find a magnet. It was immediately clear to me what the magnet was for.

With the key, a new area opens up.

Things kick off with … more blood! Blood! It’s horror, it needs buckets of blood, or at least a vat in this case.

To the west are some surgical gloves, and to the south is a progression of rooms leading to a room that is so mossy any items you drop are swallowed up. The room has a GREEN SCUM and I don’t know what it is other than an amorphous blob.

Tiny evil Christmas tree, perhaps?

Using the same strategy as before, I tried throwing things at the “scum” and seeing if anything would cause indigestion. While nothing worked, I realized as I was going that the gloves might help with picking up the dog with the germs, and indeed they did, so I got to type one of the oddest parser commands that I’ve used in a while.

>THROW DOG AT SCUM
Okay, you throw a dog corpse at a green scum.
He rips open the dog and begins to gorge on the entrails. He dies from eating the infected body of the dog.

This clears out the scum but with no obvious result. I kept throwing out various “search” command possibilities until I hit EXAMINE MOSS, revealing a valve.

Turning the valve results in a “gurgling sound from the west wall” so I went back to the vat and found it empty. EXAMINE VAT mentions a drain opens a new exit going down (for a while I was trying GO DRAIN and didn’t notice the change) and down in the resulting hole is a hypodermic needle.

That eliminated everything in the area, so I was stuck considering anything left unsolved on the west side of the ravine. I still had the tank with the electro-buttons but I was starting to guess (correctly) those should just be ignored; I realized there was still a “jellied mass” in one of the rooms that previously just served as a trap.

The end result is a trapdoor you can pull open.

Going down is a one-way trip (remember, the game is not shy about softlocks) and you end up needing to take five specific items (and there’s no way of knowing ahead of time). I managed to guess reasonably well and got four out of five.

Creating a save game where I consolidate all the items at the top of the trapdoor.

You need the candle, flask, butterknife, shovel, and gloves. The flask and butterknife have still not been used; the gloves were used to pick up the dog but they are needed again for another purpose. The first time through I missed the gloves.

This lands you on a railway track system. At the landing point is a bunsen burner, to the west are some timbers and a blocked-off passage, and to the east is a torch and a giant dirt pile. The dirt pile is supposed to signal the use of the shovel.

I didn’t use any logic here. I just had been trying to dig in every room since the start of the game.

The passage leads down to a small area where there’s a barrel (with gunpowder) and a deathly high scream that kills you. We’ll come back here later.

The tracks also have an old switch. Pulling them causes a door to open to the west (where the timbers were) and you have to immediately plunge ahead to go inside before the door closes. On top of all this, a gust of wind blows out your candle if that’s what you are still using, so you need to have done LIGHT TORCH and swapped to that as a light source.

Or as I found out later, drop the candle somewhere safe and do all this in the dark. Except you have to know what’s here first!

This traps the player in a very small area with a fuse (the item that’s the reason to go in) and no apparent way out, although there’s a button that electrocutes you. You’re supposed to be wearing the surgical gloves to survive the electricity, and I admit I had to look that up. (Apparently surgical gloves can resist electricity but it is not entirely safe. However, it isn’t like anything else in the crypt has been safety approved!)

Heading back to the railway, and going south where the junction switch was, there’s a curious scene involving a “lard cake” and a dial. The dial is rusted and won’t move. The lard cake can’t be picked up.

I know this has been continuous through the whole game in terms of resources (and is so normal for adventures it’s like fretting over the realism of moments people start singing in a musical) but I was thrown for a “there’s no way that would have been just left there” moment with the lard cake. This might actually be a “it’s really a test” plot kind of like Zork III but let’s save discussing that for the ending.

Short on items, I eventually landed on CUT CAKE WITH KNIFE (the butterknife) resulting in a SLICE OF LARD CAKE. I then lit the bunsen burner lying around randomly on the tracks, put the slice of lard in the flask, and melted the slice. The parser struggled a bit but at least the steps came intuitively.

This finally results in the flask being filled with GREASE, and after struggling with PUT GREASE ON DIAL, POUR GREASE ON DIAL, etc. I came across GREASE DIAL as what the parser was fishing for. This causes the dial to spin and opens the passage up to the last part of the game.

Ahead and to the south there is a “trench”.

YOU ARE AT THE NORTH END OF A LONG DIRT ROOM. AN EVIL-SMELLING MUD TRENCH LIES IN THE CENTER OF THE ROOM. PUDDLES OF BLOOD LIE ON THE GROUND HERE.

Weirdly, the game doesn’t let you try to jump the trench or enter the mud, I was expecting a colorful death. It just doesn’t recognize any of the words used in the description as nouns for the parser. With this condition (and my eye on a verb list from the manual) I realized while holding the timbers I could BUILD BRIDGE.

This leads to a dead-end with a dead mole and earplugs. I don’t know why the mole is there other than for gross-out factor; it almost feels like the authors were running out of ways to describe blood and gore so they just tossed it in there.

The earplugs go to the screaming room, so you can get the barrel of gunpowder. There’s also an inscription but examining it kills you.

Note the comment about being not “worthy”.

Trying to get the fuse and barrel together was again a bit of a struggle but MAKE BOMB works; to repeat a point I’ve made whenever a lot of BUILD commands come up, it is always tricky to come up with a noun that doesn’t get mentioned in the text. (Maybe you’ll think of it as an “explosive”? I personally never thought of it as “making” something, just rigging the gunpowder barrel to explode without dying immediately, I didn’t have a name for that until the parser forced me to.)

Going back to where the bridge was, and heading west, there’s an axe. North there’s a steel door.

BODIES OF MEN ARE SMEARED PAPER-THIN AGAINST THE WALLS.

The problem is the bomb kept exploding right when I lit it, but I couldn’t find any way to extend the fuse, so I had to check for hints again. It turns out this section happens in real time (nothing else in the game does). So you LIGHT BOMB, DROP BOMB, GO SOUTH as fast as you can with the emulator speed set on “normal” rather than “maximum”.

There’s a wooden door after, but given the axe nearby is the only unused item, CHOP DOOR USE AXE came to me quickly.

And we can escape! Kind of. Finally we meet Medea in person.

If you say no, “Medea kills you for your stupidity.” If you say yes, you “have successfully escaped. Your game is now over.”

Weirdly, you’re still in the shallow grave, but I think this is an error along the lines of Mission: Asteroid having the asteroid still crash after you destroy it.

— so we escaped? By giving up our soul? Is that really escape?

I suppose if you’re cool with the “murdering her children because of her cheating husband” thing. And also all the dead people and deathtraps. 1887 painting of Medea by Germán Hernández Amores.

It does make for a twist I appreciated more than just battling Medea in combat. Perhaps horror as a genre lends itself to the “ambiguous ending” which makes it easier to have something that feels satisfyingly narrative-appropriate without having to do a denouement sequence like A Mind Forever Voyaging.

Despite the wobbly parser, I enjoyed myself in general. The structure lent itself to focus on one or two puzzles at a time without feeling too linear. The “horror” aspect was over the top in a teenager-writes-gore sense, none of the prose approached the kind from a serious author, and the art was mid-range for an Apple II game, but the whole package still felt satisfyingly “professional” in a way that many games of this time fumbled.

Two missing points to cover:

1.) This game has sound, which I haven’t discussed: especially unusual is it supports the Mockingboard hardware and you can flip an option to have the game read all text out loud. This video demonstrates the feature in action:

As far as I know this is the first adventure we’ve reached with an option to have this done with the text in general. (As opposed to having small voice clips in assorted spots.)

2.) Arthur Britto has a credit on Wizardry III: Legacy of Llylgamyn.

Title Page Digitized by: Arthur Britto.

It came out the same year as Crypt of Medea. While he does not have credits for Sir-Tech in years after, I do wonder if he did some more of their copy protection. (I can confirm that the broken aspect to early Crypt of Medea dumps was purely due to a faulty break of copy protection. 4am’s version is correct.) It probably would be possible to compare the Medea protection with other Sir-Tech games and see if there’s any similarity in code, indicating Britto was still working for them as an independent contractor, just uncredited (which would not be unusual for this kind of work).

Coming up: two games for children — seems like a good contrast from gore — followed by a game that I’d previously marked as “lost” which I now have a copy of.