Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game, and you should make sure you’ve read my previous posts on Madhouse before this one.

From the script of A Boy’s Life by Melissa Mathison, named before release as E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

Last time I was stuck on

• a botanist and a geranium that was withered so they didn’t want it
• the director John Carpenter (not an obstacle or anything, but he was clearly there for a trade)
• a few assorted locked doors (no puzzle here, just waiting for the right key)
• a guard (having already taken down one with a rocket)

On the guard, I had a contact mine that seemed like it might work on the second but it exploded just a little too well.

Guard #2.

Gus Brasil dropped some rot13 hints but just the topic alone was enough to help; he picked getting by the guard as the goal which let me know where to focus. What eventually broke the case open was looking again at the verb list and keeping in mind something could be a little broken (that is, a native German speaker might treat something in English a little unusually), just like CHOP was used with a truncheon.

The key turned out to be knock, which in the format “knock noun” means something like knocking on a door, but is used here for “knock guard” (without the “out” you’d normally want in English) or more specifically “knock guard with truncheon”.

This leads through another set of doors (locked and requiring random keys to open, nothing behind them) and a third guard guarding a third hall in the same manner as the first two …

… except not exactly in the same manner. This guard was more aggressive and trying to give him something or interact causes him to “tear you apart”.

I remembered back at the beginning of the game, there was a guard described as cruel that knocks you out and drags you into the second (dark) cell. The guard is triggered by yelling. Since this guard was more trigger-happy then the last two, I tried the contact mine method again: THROW MINE so it is right in front of the guard, heading back to the protective steel doors, and once they are up, using the command YELL.

I found this the most satisfying puzzle of the game.

Using their aggression as a weakness.

After the guard was dead I could check the third row of doors, and at the final one I met E.T.

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was a 1982 movie involving a friendly alien landing and a boy helping him go home. He causes bicycles to fly. He works out how to say things with a Speak and Spell.

A Speak and Spell, of course, I had in my inventory! Giving it over didn’t do anything, and I had to go back and look over the relevant section in the movie for a bit before I realized revivifying the flower is part of it too. If you’re holding the geranium and you hand over the Speak and Spell, he’ll repair the flower.

You know how I gave some latitude for Fairytale given the conditions it was written in, and even the baseball puzzle in Zork II gets a pass due to an alternate solution? Yeah, no such defense here.

The flower can then go back to the botanist, who will be pleased enough to give you a Rubik’s Cube.

I checked, and the Rubik’s Cube was first shown outside of Hungary at a German toy fair in 1979, and they had their own craze and familiarity with the toy. What I could not find is how it was linked to director John Carpenter. Maybe he mentioned it in some interview? At the very least we’re out of puzzles so this wasn’t hard to find.

Carpenter leaves behind a passkey, letting you unlock nearly every door in the game (you can dump the green, silver, gold and red). Back at the E.T. level there’s some more that needed to be mapped, and two doors that require the passkey.

It’s absolutely pure mapping with zero tricks, and perhaps a little odd for the very end of the game; using the passkey you can get the blue key behind one of the doors. The blue key then goes to a final locked door near the director door and you can walk out to victory.

The bottle doesn’t get used, except I think the implication is that the gunpowder was in the bottle to begin with, so you just get the empty one back?

Weirdly — and I know from the outside it might not seem that way — I enjoyed myself. It helped that I understood the context here of a game the author clearly liked and wanted to push the boundaries of and make their own. (I’m going with the assumption that Eberhard Mattes is the author of the toolkit as well as the game, although it is of course possible it was a team effort or a friend of his.) The “HAHAHA” part of the map which would have annoyed me in a professional case (Bard’s Tale 1, say) came across as somewhat charming knowing this was a way of conveying the joke.

The best troll setups are those which violate the player’s expectations. In order to do that, a setup needs to make the player think they know what they need to do, have them fail in a humorous way when they do it, and then let them know what it was that they were supposed to do instead. If any of these components is missing, a troll setup will fall flat. If a player doesn’t think they know what to do, they will not have an expectation to violate. If they don’t fail or there’s no humor, then they’ll wonder what the troll was. And if they don’t have an idea of what to do right the next time, they’ll just end up confused rather than amused. Make sure that each setup has all three components.

— From the Trolling for Dummies manifesto by Defender1031 in regards to Super Mario Maker

I still don’t think the setup-joke aspect always works as expected, but the fact we’re talking 1983 or so it’s fantastic that it works sometimes. The “nothing with a button on it” made me genuinely laugh; while I was slightly annoyed at the time with how the silver key was hidden leveraging the properties of the engine, looking backwards in an intellectual sense I find it fascinating that the trick was even possible. Anti-design for games prods at established wisdom; what’s odd is that there’s so little established wisdom in 1983 I wasn’t expecting to see much like it yet.

Despite an enormous amount of text adventures being produced by “toolkits” (especially once the Quill enters the scene) the toolkits are generally intended more in the way of a word processor trying to present things in the smoothest way possible; that is, doing something that “makes fun of” a property of The Quill is going to fall mostly flat because the players are just going to think of it as another text adventure, as opposed to the norms established by the Frank Corr-style game.

Frank Corr himself incidentally did have plans for Deathmaze 7000 in the works after Asylum II but just like his “octagonal” based space-game the new Deathmaze never surfaced. I’m not sure what happened and I hope to have the full story someday. If nothing else, I’d like his opinion on Madhouse, which until I started posting on last week was completely forgotten.

Coming up: A random Britgame, followed by the start of The Quill (sort of, it’s complicated).