Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post.)

“Toffee!” said every one in surprise, “What do you want toffee for?”

“To eat, of course,” said Moon-Face. “I just thought if you had any toffee to give me I’d let you slide down my slippery-slip — you get down to the bottom very quickly that way, you know.”

“A slide all the way down the Faraway Tree!” cried Jo, hardly believing his ears. “Good gracious! Whoever would have thought of that!”

“I thought of it!” said Moon-Face, beaming again just like a full moon. “I let people use it if they pay me toffee.”

— From The Enchanted Wood

The Folio Society version of The Enchanted Wood. That’s Moon-Face on the center bottom, a little less sinister-looking than in the original art.

Fairytale has the relatively unique condition of being not only a private game for family and friends, but one meant to be played under very particular conditions with groups; it only occurred to the author to publish later. This means that the author (who originally played Adventureland with his family) knew a reference to The Enchanted Forest would be understood and the puzzle of dealing with Moon-Face by using the exact moment from the book (see the top) was not only reasonable but a nice gesture at shared knowledge. As I already mentioned, I tried giving items to Moon-Face and he simply took each one (softlocking the game in the process) but my next step was to try every item available, and that included the candy items from outside the house (toffee, sugar barley, marzipan). So it was technically solvable but still unfortunate design; making it so giving the wrong item is a softlock combined with the book knowledge (pointed out by Matt W. in the comments) is certainly not polite.

To end on a compliment, I do find satisfying “cross-lore” type of puzzles, in this case where a piece of candy from Hansel and Gretel is used to satisfy a character from The Enchanted Wood. They’re both just stories, there’s no reason one can’t be a walk-on extra on the other.

Before plowing ahead with the next big obstacle I resolved, I should point out that one of the other items from candy-house (the marzipan) is special. If you just examine it while first encountering it the game just says “you see nothing special”, but if you examine it while the item is being held you find out it is really an emerald.

Just like how in Leopard Lord and in Crypt of Medea the mechanic that EXAMINE and SEARCH are treated differently is important to notice (and not something at all consistent between adventure games!), here, the fact you see something different when an item is being held vs. not-held is important (and again, not consistent between adventure games). The CRPG Addict recently had a post where he examined a set of standard things to look for in Ultima clones (how do secret doors work? do guards care if you steal things?) and it reminded me of that: while these adventure games are all “clones” in a sense, there are small important differences where it can be easy to be tripped up, and just like with Ultima clones you might go 5 games in a row where secret doors are either non-existent or “illusionary walls” but get tripped up by number 6 which goes back to a system where you have to hit the Search key in every suspicious tile.

By which I mean, I know I’ve played adventures where items have different results of EXAMINE when held and not-held, but it’s been a while.

Just to the east of candy-house is the empty chest: this is where the treasures go.

Once I had confirmed that GIVE ITEM really does help somewhere and doesn’t just swallow up all your inventory, I decided to try that with every inventory item on every other character. Fortunately the connections aren’t too obscure, although the first one I found was truly arbitrary.

Jo shook his head. “No, Saucepan isn’t mad. He’s just deaf. His saucepans make such a clanking all the time that the noise gets into his ears, and he can’t hear properly. So he keeps making mistakes.”

Saucepanman came from even before The Enchanted Wood, as he makes an appearance in The Book of Brownies from 1926. His main attribute is misunderstanding what people say (see above) and in Fairytale he’s on the lower level of the Faraway Tree, below Moon-Face.

He wants the oats. I just started handing over everything until I found the response above. HELP in the game (which I checked after solving the puzzle) just says that he “likes gifts”. I searched about the text and couldn’t find a connection with the character that made this work. I also searched about in adjacent rhymes/fairy tales but no luck, so I’m open to suggestions from the audience.

(The saucepan you can get from all this will be helpful later.)

Fortunately, my next discovery was a little less obtuse:

The witch wants the dead bat that was just lying around the forest. I admit I had this on my list to try before I started even rapid firing items. This opens up multiple things: a.) you can GO CAVE now while in this location; b.) you won’t get locked in the oven any more in the candy-house, so you can grab the silver key from within; c.) you can access the cauldron, although it is initially too hot and you have to take care of that first. We’ll tackle the items in that order, starting with the cave:

The book is an ad for either DRAGONQUEST ADVENTURE (if you’re playing the BBC version) or GOBLIN ADVENTURE (if you’re playing Stott’s Archimedes port). It just counts as a treasure, alas. The mortar and pestle get stored along with the saucepan for use later.

From the oven you can now grab the silver key…

…and then use it to unlock the hut to the southeast of the map, finding a grisly scene within.

I like the detail the axe is a “bloody” axe and remains that way for the rest of the game. Both get stored along with the saucepan and mortar/pestle, although I admit I haven’t found where the pliers get used yet.

The axe, on the other hand, I could use right away. To the west of the hut is an annoying prickly bush, so I immediately tried CHOP BUSH.

This opens a secret path over to a waterfall.

With the saucepan you can GET WATER while at the waterfall, then take it over to the cauldron and put it out. This lets you find some ancient bones within.

If you’re wondering about the varying inventory items, some of it is juggling to keep under the limit of 5, some of it is because I made multiple runs through the game trying to put everything together.

I made the discovery rather later (but I’ll disclose now) that you can be holding the mortar/pestle and bones and type GRIND BONES, getting “bone manure”.

The manure suggests some sort of planting-type use, so I’m going to jump over to another GIVE puzzle: the pedlar. I had him next on my list of “try GIVE on everything” people but quickly found the money (from the king in the palace and the pie) worked, and he handed over a ruby seed.

With ruby seed, garden trowel, bone manure, and some more water from the waterfall, it seems like I ought to be able to plant the seed. I even found the right place to do it: by the shed (with the spiders inside), where HELP says

Maybe the ground is too dry or infertile.

suggesting an optimal planting place. However, all my attempts at PLANT SEED or the like have failed; the game responds I can’t do that yet. I admit this might be a case where items X and Y need to be on the ground and A and B need to be held, in some confusing combination, but I haven’t tried all possibilities yet. I also may simply be using the wrong verb.

Rotating around the next character, the northeast corner has the castle with the sleeping girl at the spinning wheel. I realized even though I was actively thinking of Sleeping Beauty I hadn’t tried the Sleeping Beauty specific action:

I’m pretty sure the silver needle is just a treasure and that’s that; I can’t get anything from the spinning wheel. Given I haven’t finished the game yet anything is possible.

Finally we can rotate back to the Faraway Tree and the two “worlds” that you can visit by going UP from Moon-Face, the moon/bowl/spoon etc. scene and the palace. The choice of place is entirely a coin-flip and sometimes I went to the same place 6 or 7 times in a row (RNG strikes again); I could easily see someone simply not realizing there’s another destination there! (Maybe there’s a third place to go with some specific parameters?)

So with the scene above, I had observed you could nab nearly everything but the moon. What I hadn’t tried is simply taking the fiddle and playing it without picking up anything. The idea is to set up the whole Hey Diddle Diddle rhyme:

Hey diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed
To see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.

I had played the fiddle but had already picked up the dish and spoon so they couldn’t do the “ran away” line, messing up the whole scenario. This idea of creating the conditions to re-enact the rhyme will come up again.

The whole purpose seems to be to get the “fiddle” to turn into a “Stratovarius” which is a treasure, but the cow might also be useful too.

Now on to the other destination:

I don’t have this fully worked out, but at least I got one of the really wild (in a game-design sense) parts. Let me give the entire relevant nursery rhyme, which I admit I had only partly remembered.

Sing a song of sixpence,
A pocket full of rye.
Four and twenty blackbirds
Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,
The birds began to sing.
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
To set before the king?

The king was in his counting house,
Counting out his money.
The queen was in the parlour,
Eating bread and honey.

The maid was in the garden,
Hanging out the clothes,
When down came a blackbird
And pecked off her nose.

I kept trying to do things with the pie at the king. I admit I still have had no luck. EAT PIE lets you just consume it, no birds. OPEN PIE just says the word “open” isn’t even recognized.

My suspicion is that the birds aren’t even in the pie yet and we’re supposed to put them there. If you recall from way back at the start you can see “blackbirds” in the tree, so somehow they combine with the pie? (I tried a bunch of verbs with the pie in the location, no dice.)

Even without that there’s a secret, though. The room just says you can go OUT, but if you study the rhyme, it mentions “The queen was in the parlour”. What parlour? Well, you can just GO PARLOUR and find it.

This is outrageous at a level I don’t have much comparison with; maybe the book references of Ring Quest where you could ask an elf (who wasn’t even visible in the room) for a ring, only guessing they have to be there and making a leap of faith.

You can’t take the bread or interact with the Queen (that I could find). You can take the honey but I don’t know where that is useful.

Oh, one last thing: back at the maid, you can look at the laundry to find an “ebony clothes pin” which counts as a treasure, and you have wet trousers left over. Not sure if they’re useful for anything.

King and blackbirds, from an 1877 Mother Goose collection.

To summarize:

• I’m still likely missing some action in the palace/parlour akin to what happened with the fiddle, although maybe the whole purpose is to take the items. I still suspect you need to make a “scene” with the pie by somehow stuffing birds into it, but while you can see the birds from the top of the opening tree I don’t know where to get at them.
• I still can’t plant the ruby seed, even though it seems like I have everything I need to do so. This may just be parser-struggle.
• I haven’t done anything with: pliers, the spinning wheel, or some of the treasures (like the silver needle) although of course the treasures I haven’t “used” may simply be points.
• It is possible I’m still missing a one-shot secret kind of treasure like the marzipan/emerald one unrelated to the larger puzzles. I am missing 3 treasures. The ruby seed counts as one, so I suspect after using it to grow a beanstalk (probably beanstalk, right?) it will be retrievable.

Given the need to know external references I’m happy to field any suggestions to try to get this to the end. Maybe there’s a nursery rhyme I blithely skipped over without realizing it?