Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts.)

The good news is I’m fully clear of the 501 content (1978) and now tangling directly with the 751 section (1980). The bad news is the author clearly thought going to the ’80 version that it was an opportune time to up the difficulty.

At the very least, the sheer combinatorial explosion of the number of items the game now has makes each step much rougher than it needs to be.

TODAY, March 1983. The poster artist is Gray Morrow who is most famous for the Tarzan comic strips (post 1983) but also did work for both Marvel and DC.

Starting simple, I was running over my map trying to figure out the best spot for my shovel when I decided on the beach (even Pillage Village had us randomly dig at the beach, with no shovel at all!)

You’re on sandy beach.

DIG

You’ve dug yourself into a three foot hole in the sand.

DIG

You’re up to your waist in sand.

DIG

You’re in a deep pit in the sand.
You have unearthed a delicate, multi-hued conch.

That doesn’t mean I’m necessarily done with the shovel! None of the other candidates I’ve tried have panned out, though.

While out at the beach, I should mention the flute. Or rather, specifically the rat it summons: the rat has been roaming around aboveground the whole time, essentially the outdoors version of the pirate. I realize it was swapping useless items for useful items, so that “pebble” I found really was an item swap; I’ve also gotten an old shiny button where a pirate chest used to be (I had dropped the chest thinking it would be heavy and “protected” but it isn’t). The occasional bad odor also is from the rat.

The upshot here is rather than the rat being useful (as I was first thinking) is that I needed to get rid of the rat. The flute’s reference to the “pied piper” is the key here.

You’re at blackened shoals.

GO UP

You’re at Ocean Vista.

LOOK

You are on a high cliff overlooking the sea. Far below the rolling breakers smash into a jumble of blackened shoals.
The thunder of the surf is deafening.

PLAY FLUTE

After playing the flute for a few moments, you become aware of stealthy footsteps behind you.
The big rat, entranced by the music, blindly lurches over the edge of the cliff, only to be pounded to smithereens on the rocks below.

With this done, it is safe to put items on the ground in the building now. I used the opportunity to mop up a lot of the items I needed, like the vase (which is highly breakable and goes on a cushion). I also finally ran across the Wumpus corpse I had been looking for back at the Lost River section.

You are standing on a large flat rock table at the western end of Lost River Canyon. Beneath your feet, the river disappears amidst foam and spray into a large sinkhole. A gentle path leads east along the river’s south shore. Another leads sharply upward along the river’s north side.
Nearby is the smashed body of a defunct Wumpus.
On the Wumpus’ finger is a small gold ring.

It was, of course, one of the last sections I checked, but I should have been suspicious sooner, just in a structural-solving sense: there was otherwise a decent chunk of map that wouldn’t be used.

Six rooms otherwise not used. Crowther would be fine with a section like this, but not Long (who was the one who made this part).

One other item from the area I’ll mention now, although in practice it came much later than my other finds:

You are in the Conservatory, whence the gnomes often repair to relax with a little music. On one side of the room is an old upright piano.

OPEN PIANO

Ok

LOOK

You are in the Conservatory, whence the gnomes often repair to relax with a little music. On one side of the room is an old upright piano.
It contains:
official document

Oof. I was mentally sorting it as some kind of already-open grand piano even though it explicitly says in the text it is an upright. (I wasn’t trying to visualize it, though. I know there’s the aphantasia condition where people aren’t able to visualize and so they keep things in their head more conceptually; I don’t have it, but just because I’m good at visualizing doesn’t means I store everything visually. This is a case where my brain abstractly stored a “piano”.)

More on the official document shortly.

With all that I was still stuck on the “sham rock”, the centipede, and the statue in the ravine. I’m still stuck on all of them, more or less, although I got a little past the rock. Let me do an aside on the rose in the thorns right before the sham rock, first…

A NE passage is blocked by an impenetrable thicket of sharp thorny brambles.
Deep within the brambles is growing a perfect, blood-red rose!

…I had been burning them to get them away but this destroys the rose. You’re supposed to use the sword (pulled from the stone while wearing the crown) instead.

Your elfin sword makes short work of the brambles. After a few minutes work, you hack a large hole through the tangle.

If you just try to take the rose now, it will shrivel. That vase that was previously used for the break-if-you-don’t-drop-on-a-pillow puzzle is now repurposed:

PUT ROSE IN VASE

As you place the rose into the vase, the rose opens in full bloom, revealing a sachet of rare perfume inside.

(This is one of those puzzles where I was starting to feel the burn of having so many items.)

Past the thicket, the leprechaun was wanting me to vanquish “one much larger than I”. Oddly, I knew that I had tried going by with the bear, dragon, and Wumpus all killed, but no luck. Arthur O’Dwyer hinted I was on the right track but I needed “proof”. That would be either the rug at the dragon or the gold ring at the Wumpus; the latter sounded more elegant.

As you approach the rock, the leprechaun (for indeed that is what he is) notices your shamrock *and* your ring, and with a muttered curse, disappears.
You’re in a large chamber. All around are massive skeletons of long-dead members of the order proboscidea ungulata, who evidently used this room as their final resting place. Passages exit north and south.
There is a huge ivory tusk here!

You have to be wearing the ring too — first time I didn’t do that and had to make another full circle to test with the ring on. Grr.

The elephant resting place just serves to dish out a treasure (the tusk) and just past that is a passage blocked by a boulder.

PUSH BOULDER

Although the boulder moves a fraction of an inch, it is too heavy for you to roll away.

So you may wonder if I barely made progress on those three things I named, how I did get farther in? Well, back to that official document:

READ OFFICIAL DOCUMENT

The document is written in an undecipherable script. However, it bears the official seal of the Orcan government.

I hadn’t talked about the helicopter strangely at the start because I knew what they were looking for (a letter of transit) so it didn’t seem like an “open puzzle” really until I found the right item.

You’re at end of road again.

GO EAST

You’re in a flat circular clearing surrounded by dense forest.
Not far away is a helicopter. Its engine is idling slowly. Several jac-booted Orcs are standing guard around the aircraft.

IN

After inspecting your letter of transit, the Orcs sullenly stand aside to let you board the aircraft.
You are in the helicopter’s cramped passenger cabin. The only visible feature is a silver button on the wall.

PUSH BUTTON

The door slams shut as soon as you hit the button, followed by the sound of the engine revving up. After many minutes of noise and vibration, the engine falls silent and the door slides open.

OUT

You are in the West Courtyard, a wide flat area bounded on the north by a high cliff and on the south and west by the curve of the castle wall.
A helicopter is waiting nearby.

Huzzah, the castle! (I could have made it here a lot earlier, the Conservatory isn’t gated by any puzzle, it’s just a matter of opening the piano and finding the document.)

At least it feels appropriate for now to be the time to arrive in a dramatic sense.

Just to the east of the landing place is a winch. I have been unable to turn the winch; it presumably connects to the drawbridge.

You are at the base of the central portion of the courtyard near what appears to be some sort of large wooden door in the stone wall.
Attached to the wall is a heavy winch.

Neither wooden pole nor rope have been helpful, and generally the winch has been resistant to verbs in general. The game feels like it is pounding against the edge of what’s possible in a standard Crowther/Woods world model (yes, the containers are fancier and you can use more than two words, but it still doesn’t work as smoothly as, say, Infocom).

Farther along is a door with a slot; that’s where the card from nearby the phone booth goes.

You are at the entrance to Lords’ Keep.
A massive door of solid oak guards the castle entrance. In the center of the door is a small slot.

PUT CARD IN SLOT

From behind the door there is a whirring sound and the card is sucked from your hand. A moment later, the great oaken door swings open.

GO NORTH

You are inside Lords’ Keep, at the south end of the Great Hall. The room is lit by smokey torches hung high overhead. Several passages lead off to connecting rooms.
A priceless tapestry is hanging on the wall!

Side passages have an “aviary” with a “clay statue of a black bird”, and a room overlooking a “secret garden” where there’s a “knapsack” with “silk sheets”. I assume the latter is a parachute (I tried jumping at the ravine with it on but just died). The same room has a barred wooden door.

You are in a small room off the east hallway. Through a heavily barred window you can look out on a lovely secret garden.
A wooden door leads out to the garden.
There is a bulging knapsack here.

Near here is the Kitchen which includes a dumbwaiter. You can put items inside and send them down; to where I don’t know. I also don’t know why you’d need to (I assume I’ll find out soon).

Finally, there’s a puzzle I managed to actually solve:

The short hallway ends at a heavy steel door inlaid with enamelled tiles, each of which is a different color. The tiles, nine in all, are arranged in a 3×3 grid, thusly:

Above the door, a green light is shining.
The stainless steel door is locked.

I am not going to give the solution here, because I’m curious if it’s possible to solve it normally. (Try in the comments!) I did it by getting most of the way through via brute force before realizing the pattern. You need to push tiles in a particular sequence, and you have enough information (assuming you’ve read my previous posts) to solve it with what you know. Brute force requires a lot of reloading save files:

PUSH WHITE TILE

You are obviously attempting to intrude into a section of the castle in which you have no business. Faster than you can spit, a trapdoor springs open beneath you, catapulting you into a deep pit at the bottom of which a number of sharp, upright spikes have been affixed.

I’m not quite done yet with new stuff, because hopping back in the helicopter takes you to a third area.

You’re on the south end of a high narrow ridge, which is bounded on its east side by a high mountain. Dug into the mountainside is a ramshackle old mine entrance. The ridge drops off to the west in a rocky cliff. You might be able to climb down the cliff, but you probably won’t be able to get back up.
A helicopter is waiting nearby.

However, the mine just leads to a flooded tunnel; I’m not sure what’s going on here. Going west down the cliff leads to the caterpillar area. (I guess you could softlock if you hadn’t cleared the quicksand by the time you got here?)

I have to be hovering near the end because I’ve now seen the entire poster map. Other than the obstacles at the castle I’m still dealing with the same three as before (just the boulder past the sham rock rather than the cursed little man saying “fnord”).