Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’ve finished the game. This was far more elaborate than I expected and it might verge into a “good” game if some of the dodgier design choices were tweaked. It certainly is not the game a child would likely solve on their own (despite it being positioned as a children’s game by Molimerx).

Basic adventure mainly aimed at the kids but for all the family! Uses a scenario of nursery rhymes and fairytales within which to find the treasures.

Last time I was stuck with the palace/parlour and trying to get the pie to do something, and planting a “ruby seed”. I ended up making progress not being thinking of the goals but thinking of the verbs and objects I had available I hadn’t used yet.

CUT, DIG, READ, DRINK, EAT, LOCK, TIE, POUR, PULL, MOVE, MAKE, WEAR, GIVE, EXAMINE, BUY, KISS, PLAY, COOK, FOLLOW, CHOP, PLANT

Of the verbs, TIE came to mind as notably unused (and there’s no equivalent UNTIE to match). I still had a “line” from the maid which previously had laundry, and I had a and I thought where a rope might go, and I faintly remembered that at the dog/cat/moon/etc. scene when the cow appears, you can try to take it, but it give the message “it keeps escaping”. On something else (like the moon) the game just says you can’t do that; I had mentally shelved the two things together but that was a mistake. It is possible to TIE COW.

Now the cow is portable! Or at least it takes as much inventory space as a piece of toffee does. But what to do with a cow?

I admit getting distracted for a while thinking of the spiders back in the shed, and maybe somehow re-creating the curds/whey scene, but none of them are giant spiders (in fact, the spiders are entirely a red herring).

The cow instead goes to the pedlar…

…and it was only after this moment I remembered Jack in the story traded a cow for beans, rather than money. I perceived the “ruby” part of the bean earlier as just a modification of the story, but there are instead two beans, the ruby one and the regular one.

You might incidentally notice the pedlar has disappeared; he just has moved to a new place, outside the hut (where the murder of an old lady happened). So you can also give over the money to get a ruby bean too and that just counts as a treasure in itself. (There’s some maybe-softlocks here, as forewarned by Voltgloss in the comments. If you get the ruby bean first the pedlar doesn’t move, and then if you get the regular bean after he moves and the ruby bean moves. I eventually found the ruby bean back at the pedlar sign even though I had it stashed at the candy-house. Something went awry in the coding here.)

Now that I had the right seed, I almost had enough to plant the seed, but I still was missing a parser command, because straight PLANT SEED doesn’t work. You need to first DIG HOLE (a noun not appearing in the game, you just need to come up with it), followed by PLANT SEED, DROP MANURE, and POUR WATER.

Predictably, this makes a beanstalk you can climb up…

…but I’m going to wait on going inside and meeting the giant, because I solved the puzzle inside last.

Rather than puzzle-solving or verb-solving I switched to item-solving and thought about what I had left I hadn’t used. The plastic mac (“raincoat”) in particular was prominent and unused and almost certainly had to go somewhere, yet I had only found water in one place.

I maybe was deceived by playing the illustrated version of the game; this doesn’t look like the sort of waterfall with a secret cave, but it is absolutely the kind of waterfall with a secret cave. One GO CAVE while wearing the mac later:

Going west kills you from here and the game is never clear why.

MOVE ROCK opens a passage, which you can go through to find a cottage.

The honey and pliers are two other items I hadn’t used yet, which is why I was holding them at this moment.

Notice the knife! I’ll refer to it later.

Combining comments from Voltgloss and arcanetrivia helped here. Voltgloss mentioned that Saucepanman will take other gifts other than just oats (I used the sugar from candy-house in the end) and arcanetrivia suggested making porridge out of oats. It was messy to work out still, because you need to GRIND OATS first (mortal and pestle, which ground the bones last time) and then MAKE PORRIDGE while holding a saucepan with water.

Or as I’ve typed here, MAKE PORR, as the game only looks at the first three letters of each word.

Heading back west, you can POUR (PORR)IDGE and make some bears happy…

…but now Goldilocks is sad. (It’s funny how in the Red Riding Hood story you just see the aftermath, and here you instigate the whole thing.) I had been toting around the honey; dropping the honey first distracts the bears, so Goldilocks can get some of the porridge and give a GOLDEN LOCK as a prize.

Drawn here as a literal padlock.

That’s everything for that side-story (the lock goes with the treasures), but the knife is useful! I had tried to CUT PIE at one point and the game crashed, which suggests right-action-wrong-conditions. Cutting a pie with an axe might be considered a bit much, but what about a knife?

The amber claw that’s in the room description is the result, the birds aren’t useful for anything.

I was then on the last puzzle of the game, the giant.

The giant starts non-aggressive but wide awake. I puzzled out that getting the tooth was needed, and the pliers (of my unused objects) would come in handy, but it was impossible to just yank right away.

I thought this was the best puzzle of the game, but as I’ve already mentioned, I like the cross-lore puzzles. Jack deals with a sleeping giant, but in this case we need to make the giant sleeping. What have we already seen that might help cause sleepiness?

The needle that pricked Sleeping Beauty! It counts as a treasure so I had it stashed. With the giant asleep you can now PULL TOOTH (which counts as a treasure) but that wakes the giant up, who is now definitely not peaceful. You can at least run away, and can even go back down the beanstalk, but eventually the giant gets you and you die.

Again, cross-lore works here.

The axe that was used at the Battle of Grandma’s House strikes again! It took down both a Big Bad Wolf and a Giant. Get it framed.

The moment before I realized the ruby had moved from the candy-house to the place where the pedlar had been.

As I started with, this verged near to a “good” game, ruined by some unfair elements. I especially liked the items being passed around the stories, and I made a chart of the more iconic items and how they get shuffled.

That’s genuinely clever design and I’d love to try Keith Campbell’s next two games to see if he shakes off doing so many softlocks, but neither is available in any form. Stott also wrote Goblin Adventure in 1990 along with his ports but it’s an original game. So Wonderland and Dreamworld will have to wait and see if either the BBC Micro or TRS-80 versions turn up somewhere. We still have three more of his games to go: a demo game from his book published with Melbourne House (The Computer & Video Games Book Of Adventure) followed by two games in 1984, The Vespozian Incident and The Pen And The Dark.

Coming up: a previously lost game.