Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve never spelunked, although I’ve been in a number of caves around the country as a tourist. Like Carlsbad Caverns, Lava River Cave here in Oregon, Cave of the Winds in Colorado and others I can’t recall. Most of my additions were suggested either by fantasy stories or the many geology texts I’ve read.

— David Long

I’ve finished the game. You should read my previous posts about Adventure 751 before this one.

Three parts I needed to check the walkthrough on. Two puzzles were sort of fair. The third was absolutely off the charts unfair and I don’t know how anyone ever solved it.

CompuServe in 1995, via The Columbus Dispatch. They had 3.6 million customers, but four years later they would be bought out by AOL. When moving to a new interface, their text-based games shut down.

To start with, a classic, me missing a room exit. This is at the now-defeated leprechaun:

You’re at the east portal of the Gothic Cathedral.

GO NORTHEAST

You’re at sham rock.

GO UP

You are on top of a flat black rock.
There is a small briar pipe here.
There is a suede pouch here.

Whoops! There were “smoke rings” coming up from the rock and there’s also suspicious items on the map picture.

What happens next took place for me later, and is one of the puzzles I needed to just look up the answer. It’s clearer for me to explain it now. I’m referring here to the boulder just north of the sham rock:

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

We’ve already had a “get strong” puzzle multiple times along our journey, so the thought passed my mind that this might come up, but I was expecting to find a different kind of mushroom or special cream; getting by the boulder instead involves the food from the beginning of the game.

The food tastes bland, but is not unpalatable.

In Normal Adventure it gets fed to the bear to make it happy; we swapped in the honeycomb in this game as the food is described as “watercress sandwiches” when you try to give them to the bear. The “bland” part of the description is the key, as you’re supposed to use one of your treasures (!) on top of the food (!!) and then eat it (!!!).

PUT SPICES ON FOOD

All the food needed was a bit of spicing up: it smells delicious!

EAT FOOD

Zam! What a meal! Now we’re ready for anything!

This does not consume the rare spices (unlike the cakes you ate to get small). Which makes sense in a pragmatic sense, but the general rule of this sort of game has been that eating something means that thing goes away. It’s still not obvious from the description, but now the boulder can be moved.

Grunt…Pant…You have pushed the boulder to one side, enough to permit you to squeeze past it.

GO NORTH

You are at the bottom of a vertical shaft, apparently a dry well, whose cylindrical wall is lined with smooth stone. Far above your head, you can see daylight!
A heavy iron handle, slotted at one end and rounded at the other, lies at your feet.

At least I knew immediately what the handle goes to!

Back to the castle we go:

You’re in the Central Court.

PUT HANDLE IN WINCH

The iron bar, evidently the winch handle, slips easily into the winch mechanism.

TURN HANDLE

Turning the winch slowly lowers the great wooden drawbridge.

This also suggested another puzzle solution, as this landed me at the ravine area right next to the angry centipede.

You are at cliff by west end of moat.

MOVE VINES

Parting the vines reveals a dim recess in the cliff wall.

IN

You are in the lair of Ralph the Giant Centipede. The air reeks with the stench of rotting bits of flesh. Giant centipedes, in general, are not partial to visitors.
A golden fleece is lying nearby!
A giant centipede is eyeing you with a none-too-friendly look.

GET FLEECE

You have snatched the centipede’s very own security blanket!

Provoked beyond endurance (centipedes have none), the indignant insect lurches to all of its feet and starts towards you.

OUT

You are at cliff by west end of moat.
The cantankerous cootie is heading towards you, and he definitely harbors no goodwill towards you.
A dim alcove can be seen behind the vines.

GO EAST

You’re beside moat.
The angry arthropod is definitely gaining on you. You had better either sprout several more legs or find some way to evade him.
A wooden drawbridge spans the moat.

GO NORTH

You’re in the Central Court.
The incensed insect is in full gear now. If you don’t move quickly, his monstrous mandibles may masticate you into murky mush!
A heavy iron handle is inserted into the winch.
A wooden drawbridge spans the moat.

TURN HANDLE

With a great creaking and groaning, the winch raises the drawbridge to a vertical position against the stone wall.

You have raised the bridge just in time. The centipede stamps furiously up and down in front of the moat, but, finding no way to cross, finally gives up and lumbers back to his cave.

I love “cantankerous cootie”; Ralph is so vivid I wonder if he’s supposed to be some sort of University of Chicago reference (not Atari Centipede, which wasn’t out yet). Moving on to the castle interior…

…as a reminder I had found a tapestry (treasure) and a black bird statue (not) as well as a door with colored tiles. I did not disclose the answer to the tile puzzle, and Voltgloss managed to work it out in the comments.

The key is the word FNORD, being spelled by the initial words of the colors. As Aula observes in the comments, the color names are decidedly odd, which might suggest thinking of initial letters.

You are inside a large steel vault.
Nearby is an intricately-wrought bronze shield bearing the escutcheon of Duke Aldor.

The other two places of note are the Secret Garden and the kitchen with the dumbwaiter. I already suspected what to do with the dumbwaiter as the puzzle is more or less wholesale stolen from Zork (I’ll get into that later) but let me get into the Secret Garden. You don’t enter it here at all, but rather an exit at the third helicopter stop I missed last time.

(Also, the knapsack with the silk sheets lets you refer to it as a PARACHUTE, which made me much more confident the following sequence would work before I tried it.)

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.

GO NORTH

You are on a narrow N/S ridge high above a stone wall and wide moat.

GO NORTH

You are at the northwest end of a narrow ridge high above the castle’s inner courtyard.

WEAR PARACHUTE

Ok

JUMP

After a few seconds in freefall your parachute opens with a sudden “Pop!” Several moments later you land unhurt. The magic ‘chute then folds itself back into the knapsack.
You are in an idyllic garden hidden in an inner courtyard of, and surrounded on three sides by, the Castle Keep. The far end of the garden is bounded by a high cliff.
A wooden door leads into the castle.
Lying in one corner of the garden is a golden apple!

From a game design angle, what I’m frustrated by here is how this is the only place the parachute works; jump in any other high place and you won’t get a description at all. I know that “magic” can technically hand-wave away anything, but inconsistency in magic use is one of my main teeth-grinders, especially in that it’d be fun to jump off in other high places.

Note as far as I know this loses the helicopter (remember we left at the ledge) so I ended up shuffling my sequence around to do the golden apple part last. So let’s warp back a little and go inside the mine instead.

You are in a gloomy tunnel, the entrance to a long-abandoned mine. All around is fallen rock and rotted timbers. To your left, a small room adjoins the main tunnel.

Arthur O’Dwyer mentioned I had missed an exit here, but at least this time I had fair reason. Going DOWN goes into the mine, and none of the other compass directions work. You’re supposed to go LEFT, which is counter to everything else in the entirety of the game.

You are in the engineering room. On a control panel on the wall are four buttons, colored green, brown, red and yellow; and a digital gauge.

Going down into the mine reveals it is flooded by water. The gauge currently reads 5, which tells you the flood level; pressing the “red button” and waiting will cause the water to go down. The frustrating aspect is that reading the gauge does not pass time.

PUSH RED BUTTON

From somewhere in the distance comes the deep throbbing of a heavy engine.

READ GAUGE

The meter reads “5”.

READ GAUGE

The meter reads “5”.

READ GAUGE

The meter reads “5”.

READ GAUGE

The meter reads “5”.

I was deeply confused for a while, because I knew I had at one point seen the meter go down, and had even had the engine explode because I didn’t turn it off. However, you need to do some command other than READ, like LOOK, and then READ GAUGE afterwards.

You are in the engineering room. On a control panel on the wall are four buttons, colored green, brown, red and yellow; and a digital gauge.
The deep hum of heavy machinery fills the control room.

READ GAUGE

The meter reads “1”.

LOOK

You are in the engineering room. On a control panel on the wall are four buttons, colored green, brown, red and yellow; and a digital gauge.
The deep hum of heavy machinery fills the control room.

READ GAUGE

The meter reads zero.

With this taken care of you can go to the bottom of the mine. There’s a passage there that’s too narrow to go through while holding items (like the one at the emerald / dark room).

You are at the bottom of the mine’s main shaft. Several passages, now all blocked by cave-ins, used to lead off in all directions.
To the north, the one remaining tunnel is partially blocked.

GO NORTH

The tunnel is a real squeaker. You’ll be lucky to get through with your clothes on, let alone anything else.
You’re at bottom of mine.

If you drop everything and go through, the room is too dark to see. I already suspected taking the puzzle from Zork when I saw the dumbwaiter back at the castle; you’re supposed to put a light source in there (lighting the candle back from the cathedral works, the one that I had previously used to burn the thicket except burning it was wrong) and then lower the dumbwaiter.

You are in a dead-end shaft formerly used for temporary storage.
The dumbwaiter is at this level.
It contains:
wax candle
There is a pile of silver ingots here!

You can put the ingots in the dumbwaiter, leave, go back to the castle, and then pull up the dumbwaiter to find the ingots waiting for you.

The water didn’t just disappear! It filled up the ravine.

You’re in an open field on the south side of a flooded ravine. South and west the land merges into nearly impassible swamp. In the muck is a fresh footprint! Incredibly, it looks very much like that of a Giant Devonian Rat, long thought extinct.

This ravine had a statue. The setup was that you could go in or out of the ravine while not holding anything, but you couldn’t take that valuable statue at the bottom with you. By filling up the ravine with water, you have softlocked the game.

I was incredibly stumped because I was looking for alternate exits, when instead I should have been thinking about getting the statue to rise with the water. I was imagining the statue as extremely heavy, so that this wouldn’t work:

You are at the east end of a steep ravine, near where a drainage pipe emerges from a rock wall.
There is an ancient marble statue lying here!

PUT STATUE IN BOX

Ok

DROP BOX

Dropped.

You’ll find the box with the statue sitting at the muddy ravine when it fills. This isn’t the puzzle I consider outrageously unfair, as at least conceptually this was neat, and we are down to not too many items to fiddle with.

Speaking of fiddling with items, remember that “briar pipe” and “suede pouch” from the start of the post? The pouch has tobacco, and you can use a match from the matchbox to light tobacco in the pipe. It wasn’t obvious what it was for, but I remembered (barely) there were some mosquitos out in the salt flats (just a bit south of the ravine) that I had never been able to bypass.

The air ahead is filled with huge mosquitos, with stingers the size of icepicks! The mosquitos haven’t yet caught your scent.
Do you really want to proceed?

YES

Your pipe fumes have effectively fumigated your flying foes. The bothersome bugs beat it as you approach.

You are enveloped in a cloud of noxious-smelling tobacco fumes.
You are on a small dry patch of earth, surrounded by dank swamp.
There is an old cracked shaving mug here.
There is a large cloth bag lying nearby.
There is a smooth, white pebble lying nearby.
An old shiny button is lying here.
An ancient mystic amulet, somewhat tarnished by the dampness, is lying here!

I never used the amulet for anything; it counts as a treasure. (Briefly searching through the walkthrough, it looks like it could be used to teleport, but that’s optional.)

Donovan fit almost everything into the art, but I’m not seeing which spot in the swamp would be the rat nest.

From here this was nearly done! If you’re wondering about the rope that was frustrating me before, you can drop it at the bottom of the well and play the flute to cause it to rise, giving another way to get into the castle (again optional). However, there was one item I had done nothing with and did not count as a treasure and here is the part that went off the charts:

There is a clay statue of a black bird here.

I kept trying to invoke it for some kind of magic? Maybe it would turn into a real bird and do something? Unfortunately I already “used” essentially everything so backwards thinking from my object list was no help.

The bird is dirty, you’re just supposed to clean it.

POUR WATER ON BIRD

The liquid reacts oddly with the black substance covering the statue of the bird. After a few moments, the black coating dissolves completely, revealing a statue of solid gold encrusted with priceless gems of every description!

INVENTORY

You are currently holding the following:
brass lantern
official document
knapsack
maltese falcon
glass bottle

At least I didn’t have to go through a complicated endgame. The way Crowther/Woods works is that once you’ve placed all the treasures, you hang out in the underground enough and there will be an announcement that the cave is closing; wait longer and you’ll get tossed into the endgame. There’s no surprises here other than the item catalog is different than original Crowther/Woods:

The sepulchral voice entones, “The cave is now closed.” As the echoes fade, there is a blinding flash of light (and a small puff of orange smoke). . . . As your eyes refocus, you look around and find… You are at the northeast end of an immense room, even larger than the Giant Room. It appears to be a repository for the “ADVENTURE” program. Massive torches far overhead bathe the room with smokey yellow light. Scattered about you can be seen a pile of bottles (all of them empty), a nursery of young beanstalks murmuring quietly, a bed of oysters, a bundle of black rods with rusty stars on their ends, and a collection of brass lanterns. Off to one side a great many dwarves are sleeping on the floor, snoring loudly. A sign nearby reads: “Do not disturb the dwarves!” An immense mirror is hanging against one wall, and stretches to the other end of the room, where various other sundry objects can be glimpsed dimly in the distance. An unoccupied telephone booth stands against the north wall.

GO SOUTHWEST

You are at the southwest end of the repository. To one side is a pit full of fierce green snakes. On the other side is a row of small wicker cages, each of which contains a little sulking bird. In one corner is a bundle of black rods with rusty marks on their ends. A large number of velvet pillows are scattered about on the floor. Beside one of the pillows is a large, dusty, leather-bound volume with the title “History of Adventure” embossed in pure gold. A vast mirror stretches off to the northeast, almost reaching the phone booth. At your feet is a large steel grate, next to which is a sign which reads, “Treasure Vault. Keys in Main Office.”
The grate is locked.

Mind you, figuring out what to do was hard in Crowther/Woods, but here it’s an identical solution, so I was able to claim victory.

GET ROD

Taken.

GO NORTHEAST

You’re at NE end.

DROP ROD

Dropped.

GO SOUTHWEST

You’re at SW end.
The grate is locked.

BLAST

There is a loud explosion, and a twenty-foot hole appears in the far wall, burying the dwarves in the rubble. You march through the hole and find yourself in the Main Office, where a cheering band of friendly elves carry the conquering adventurer off into the sunset.

You scored 667 out of a possible 751, using 1726 turns.

Your score puts you in Master Adventurer Class B.

I have no idea where the missing points are. Maybe this is a game like the “2.0” version Woods wrote which accounts for your turn count? I absolutely did not optimize. (Optimize light, sure, but there’s a fair amount of aboveground parts to this game, and I never tried to be efficient when it came to sorting inventory at the building/safe.)

That’s still enough to close out the game for good. I’ve known about this one for ages and I can’t describe how gratifying it was to finally play. Some of the mainframes are finally getting tape dumps and there’s more lost content likely that will be unearthed (I’m sure Rob is about to show up and announce another 30-hour game suddenly landing), but because I’ve been able to look at the picture (even using it to annotate other variants of Adventure!) Long’s Adventure 751 had a sense of absence that other games did not.

As far as game quality goes, it was mixed; I think it started to get to the point where it was too big. The new sections were intrinsically clever but they felt like they were part of another realm entirely, even when, say, the rat was using similar mechanics as the pirate. I would have loved to see what Long would have done with an entirely different game.

It is faintly possible there’s a little bit more. In Arthur O’Dwyer’s writeup he discusses a version of the history text file in the game where “more than double” is instead “more than triple”.

But does this indicate any actual expansion of the cave? The unearthed game already includes all of the features mentioned here. Was Long just massaging his messaging?

It is possible Long was able to noodle with the program more while it was on CompuServe, and while I don’t know the details yet, Rob has mentioned in the comments here that the commercial version will be forthcoming so we’ll get a chance to take a look.