Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game (previous post here).

From Spectrum Computing.

This was definitely in the “gonzo” style of design, with red herrings dropped wherever the author felt like, and only a vague gesture at some kind of consistent plot/universe. Why is the time machine locked where it is? Why is the key needed to win stuck in a particular spot in a maze? Why does an ordinary battery that happens to be nearby work for the last step?

We’ll need this later.

To continue from last time, I had four places (ditch, river, chasm, fence) I was unable to pass by, as well as a sleeping bull and a spider to deal with. The main overarching issue was the game starts with a hunger timer; while it was possible to pick up a “toadstool” and reset the timer, eating the toadstool eventually turns the player into a fungus so it’s game over as well. Keep the toadstool in mind for later, though.

I had a ladder I had been trying places (including USE LADDER while down below) but I apparently hadn’t tried USE LADDER yet in the starting room.

The mushroom in the greenhouse is safe to eat, alleviating the hunger puzzle. The ladder is now fixed in place so can’t be used again.

From here the game is mostly straightforward. I had already suspected the PLIERS from the Phone Booth might go to cut the fence (and while I didn’t learn this until after finishing the game, DIAL 999 at the phone both explicitly gives the hint “use the pliers on the fence”).

The inside has a “grandfather clock” that it describes as needing winding.

USE KEY from the maze (the one where you go UP at the draft to find) will cause you to enter the clock.

I am inside the clock which is really a time machine, but there is no source of power to operate it.

Once again the command USE comes in handy, which is good, because I really don’t know what we’re actually doing with the battery. Does the TARDIS come with D cell plug-in slots?

The number of red herrings was colossal, and at least some of them (maybe all of them) were intentional (rather than the author deciding to bail on a puzzle but leaving the items in for fun). For example, with the “sleeping bull” and “sword” at the start, you can go as far as killing the sleeping bull, and then trying to eat it.

The sword is otherwise useless and doesn’t do anything helpful at the spider. The whole gas mask / poison message is an additional red herring and is cheeky enough that the walkthrough at CASA gets genuinely upset about it:

This game depends of some random elements, but it is possible to give an exact step by step solution anyway. Here will be given two solutions. The first one is the most logical solution.

The “logical” solution includes wearing the gas mask as part of the gameplay and remembering to remove it to consume the mushroom at an appropriate moment. The second, allegedly illogical solution skips the mask entirely. I’m unclear why there would be so many red herrings but it would be considered outrageous for the gas mask to also be one?

The was even a red herring in the instructions:

Perhaps if I was British in the 80s I would have spotted this faster, but the GREEN CROSS CODE is simply referring to remembering to look both ways before crossing the street. The British made things rather more elaborate with the acronym SPLINK, which you can hear explained in 1976 by Jon Pertwee of Dr. Who fame:

(I defy you to find a 30 second public service announcement that’s any more British than that.)

The end screen did suggest that the player try to optimize their turns. You can completely drop having a light source and do everything in the dark.

You can still feel the maze’s draft in the dark. Nice coding!

What I failed to do, sadly, was optimize even further. Remember the toadstool? It does technically work to extend your life, sometimes.

Trying to do a no-mushroom run.

I got all the way back to the fence but I needed three more turns in order to win. According to Exemptus there’s some randomization in the timers so it may be with a best-possible-scenario on both the hunger timer and the toadstool timer (which can kill you after as little as 1 turn, if you’re unlucky) you can a.) run to underground and pick up the toadstool and battery b.) grab the key from the maze c.) grab the pliers, at which point the player should be starving d.) eat the toadstool e.) use the pliers, key, and battery to win. I was unable to get it to happen, but if it somehow could happen it’d be like The City of Alzan where you escape and win but have a deadly disease anyway (cured off camera? maybe?).

Via Spectrum Computing.

Speaking of City of Alzan, you might wonder — given the death-timer feels very similar between the two games — if Mr. Yeandle had exposure to the Trevor Toms system in addition to the 1980 Reed article. However, that’s not really necessary, as the Reed article includes a vampire bite, and in the text even has the “cutting off the language” trick that happens with Time-Line:

“I Think I’m dy…”

I know death-timers in Quill games tend to be more a Thing than average text adventures from this era; I think you can trace this to the source code above.

Coming up: the second part of the Quill story, as Tim Gilberts writes a game. Then we’ll go to the United States for two very unusual adventures from a magazine column, followed by a journey back to Japan.