Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts on Madhouse.)

I’m likely not far from the end, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be easy to get there.

Via an Asylum II ad in 80 Microcomputing Magazine, May 1982.

Last time I left off on the very simple problem of being able to press a button on a wall. (LOOK BUTTON says there is no button here, so I wasn’t even sure if it was a button.)

PRESS BUTTON and PUSH BUTTON did not work. I did discover while fiddling that VOCABULARY works just like Asylum so you can get a full list of verbs and nouns.

open, run, throw, take, chop, scream, put, insert, ignite, fart, push, help, shout, remove, lock, shut, look, charge, press, knock, drop, unlock, fill, eat, give, get, yell, leave, light, close

box, mirror, fuse, inmate, door, cord, wall, coin, Glass wall, button, guard, apple, gold, red, blue, magic map, contact mine, speak and spell, firework rocket, fluid, passkey, silver key, green key, cube, map, mine, gun powder, rocket, golden lighter, pass, silv, gree, gold coins, truncheon, transporter, new fuse, bottle, lighter, gold key, blue key, red key, coins, geranium, trans, blown fuse, lighter fluid

Even with this list I was having no luck (I went as far as guessing it was a HOLE instead of a button and trying things like INSERT GREEN KEY IN HOLE). Fortunately, Gus Brasil, who seemingly gravitates to the really obscure stuff I play, picked up the game and played all the way to the end. He let me know the right syntax is PUSH BUTTON ON WALL. Argh!

The syntax becomes relevant again shortly.

I was thus able to enact my plan: light a rocket, drop it at the guard, run to the steel walls, survive the explosion, and get past the guard to a new area.

The box the guard leaves behind has a rubber truncheon. You can also go all the way to the end of the four doors and use the green key to find a purse with some gold coins.

I already suspected the truncheon went to the mined area (either smashing a glass wall or a mirror) but I’ll save that for later and deal with the gold coins first, which directly go to an inmate near the start who wanted to trade them for a fuse.

Again, every character that isn’t a guard can be referred to as an INMATE.

With this, I was able to go to the transporter and … still not operate it. It was described as having a button on it, it had a fuse in a “fuseholder”, and it was too heavy to cart around (you can pick it up, but you have to drop it in place). The key turned out to be the highly (highly) unusual syntax which has you PUSH BUTTON ON TRANSPORTER.

Doing this fries the fuse, which is why we needed the New Fuse in the first place (I had originally thought the lack of working was the fuse, not the parser being finicky). This was followed by an incredibly long struggle with the parser to try to take the “Blown Fuse” out, and put the “New Fuse” in. GET BLOWN FUSE doesn’t work, nor did most of the variants I tried. (“GET BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANSPORTER”: “You can’t do that”.) The big issue on top of everything else is that the parser has a character limit so you can’t type in anything you want. If you try to TAKE BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANSPORTER you get stuck by not being able to type in the “R”. Trying to use REMOVE (off the verb list) is even worse:

This is the first time I’ve ever had difficulty with a parser because it refuses to type all the characters I need for a command. Gus Brasil mentioned (based on the Vocab list) that TRANS works as an abbreviation, and indeed it does: REMOVE BLOWN FUSE FROM TRANS gets the much desired Blown Fuse.

But things aren’t over yet because now I needed to put in the new one, which was another saga in itself, and I actually took a break from the puzzle and went exploring a little in case I missed stuff. Gus also incidentally pointed out that the teleport-to-nowhere I found which kept repeating had a clear message if you do the map-upside down:

This is exactly like troll levels in Mario Maker.

Finally being satisfied that I had everything resolved (except the truncheon, which I’m saving) I went back to the grind:

put new fuse
put new fuse in trans
insert new fuse in trans
put new fuse in fuseholder
insert new fuse in fuseholder

This wasn’t a problem with guess the verb or even guess the noun, but guess the preposition. The game needs “into”: INSERT NEW FUSE INTO TRANS.

There was one small benefit from all that fiddling. At one point I typed OPEN BOX rather than my usual command (I had PUT NEW FUSE which seemingly worked, but only set the item down). I discovered that the square also contained a silver key.

You can’t move off the square without dropping the transporter (again, too heavy, so it always would look like there is a box there no matter what). The silver key is being hidden by the property of the game always displaying a single box for any item being in a spot, no matter how many items there are. If anything in this game is a troll at the level of what a fangame normally does (rather than a professional game) this is it: this is the kind of glitch in reality that most authors try to hide (and as far as I remember, never got used by Corr/Denman) but the exact conditions here (you have to drop an item on the square to turn around and look at it, you can’t see a box in the square you are standing) are being exploited by a superfan to their limit. Compare with Super Mario romhacks that require using glitches to beat:

Moving on, as we still haven’t explored the area the transporter lands on:

It’s fairly straightforward except for yet another troll, which is somewhat dependent on the player’s keyboarding. They have to wind their way out a “wormy” passage, followed by a very long passage where one step before the end you need to turn left. This means you are hitting the “up” key a lot, and if you accidentally hit “up” one too many times you plunge into a pit. I didn’t have this happen since I was moving slow to make a map, but since I could tell what the author was aiming for, I made an animation demonstrating the fall:

The bottom of the pit has infinite hallways in any direction. You have to reload. (Again: The original Corr games did have some softlocks, but not of the kind where you realize you are in an impossible room or area.)

Turning correctly, you can make it over to pick up a magic map, which is the only other item here. Normally then this would be a jump back to where you started, followed by a trip up to the mined floor, but…

…it doesn’t land you back at the same place you started! (I marked the landing point as the swirly wormhole.) I’ve also simplified the map a bit here, as there’s some teleporters that loop you around (and I didn’t feel the need to find the exact positioning for each one) and I’ve also left off marking most of the doors, some which use a gold key (which we haven’t found yet); just note you need to come back here once you have the gold key in order to pick up the red key.

After some major map-fiddling I found the “escape” door (a door seen from the other side, but requiring a silver key to open) so finally made it back to the elevator and the mined level, with the truncheon and magic map in hand. I already knew the magic map was relevant because when examining it at first, it gives the same grid as before. Once you actually arrive there, a path is drawn out like this:

Clearly my own map was turned from the “real” compass the game was using (I hate not knowing how to orient things, grr) so I did some magic with Microsoft Paint in order to redraw the route on my original map.

To get through to the route in the first place involves busting the mirror. I had some difficulty because the typical HIT and SMASH and ATTACK weren’t in the list, so I had to go with CHOP. Chopping with a truncheon?

The path then follows mostly uneventfully as long as you don’t typo your keypress. There’s also a “big blue nothing with a button on the rear side” but that’s again just trolling, and to get through the last step you should look in the box as it contains a contact mine which needs to be picked up (don’t step on it!). In the end you can reach the corner box which has a gold key.

The route is changed on the way back, so you need to refer to the magic map (or do a lot of saving and loading) to make it to safety.

In the end I wasn’t too annoyed by the fact I mapped it first before finding a relevant item, as knowing the boundaries helped make sure I did the path correctly.

With the gold key in hand you can head back and get the red key, and then go on a spree of opening doors. This yields a Speak and Spell, a geranium, a botanist (who doesn’t want a shriveled geranium and kicks you out if you try to give it over), and John Carpenter, the director (in a room marked “Director”). Seriously:

This would be after he made The Thing, but I don’t know what that means for the game. I tried GIVE for every item I had and got no reaction.

The only other open area I have is back where I blew up the guard; there’s a second guard blocking the way further, and it seems like they need to be removed out of the way as well. You can step back and throw the contact mine, then throw an item at the contact mine to blow it up, but that blows you up as well.

Guard #2.

After throwing the contact mine to be next to the guard.

After THROW TRUNCHEON. You can’t throw farther.

So that leaves the botanist (and maybe getting a non-withered version of the plant over), the director, and the guard to deal with. I still have an empty wine bottle (the flower can’t go in it) and a Speak and Spell but I’m otherwise out of options.

Gus, you’re welcome to drop hints but ROT13 only please. Based on the vocabulary list there isn’t much left to find. Anyone else is welcome to speculate about wacky stuff to try and I’ll test it out.

No cereal boxes in the vocabulary, unfortunately. COME BACK ALI. COME BACK ALI’S SISTER.