Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous post.)

I’ve made progress on but haven’t yet finished the ADV part of Cosmo Cross; while I suspect the section is short, I made it through enough content to report in.

To continue from last time, I had found some difficulty beating the space combat portion that starts Cosmo Cross, so used the raw power of editing the BASIC code to jump to the part most relevant to this blog, the adventure. Once reaching orbit you activate a signal device and get a text message about getting teleported to Ariosferia.

Soon you will see the surface of the planet, and arrive at the entrance to the base at its center.

The instructions also warn “you must never look behind you.” You’ll see what’s going on with that shortly.

The parser is the kind (like original Mystery House) that asks verb and noun to be typed on separate lines; confusingly, sometimes a modifier is also requested. Here, you need TO OPEN / DOOR / LEFT or OPEN / DOOR / RIGHT. This will cause an animation showing one side or the other opening, and then GO / FRONT (not FORWARD or the like) will advance inside.

The left and right side consist of a series of four doors, and a series of four … windows? decorations? On the shot above when facing one of the windows I haven’t been able to do anything. After TURN / LEFT:

The game gives a full list of verbs if you press the HELP button on the keyboard. Other than OPEN, GO, and TURN which we’ve already used, there’s USE, TAKE, SHOOT, and PUSH. Helpfully, if you type one of these verbs and it doesn’t apply, the game will just prompt you for a verb again; at the “window” or whatever that is, I tried all four, indicating either some other condition needs to hold or they really are just decoration.

Opposite the symbols are doors leading to single rooms. Some are empty, some have items. The big issue has been identifying what the items are. While this one is clearly a KEY…

…what about this item?

After some squinting and thinking about the word SHOOT on the verb list, I decided (correctly) it was a GUN.

It was a bit harder for me to realize with the screen above I was dealing with the STONE (that is, the Bluestone we’ve been trying to find).

Here is the complete map of the two sections (at least in my playthrough – I’m fairly sure everything seen can shift around):

The “monster” is the one oddity; a creature moves around when you walk in, and it took a lot of noun-hunting before I decided to SHOOT / MONSTER. There doesn’t seem to be any positive effect. I may be in a situation like the squid in The Palms where the encounter is “optional”.

One room has a rectangle where the only reason I could come up with MEMO was the suspicion the author had played Mystery House 2. Taking the memo reads it automatically.

The memo indicates the Bluestone and the teleport switch to return to the spaceship are both hidden, and that there are three switches, including a “self-destruct” switch.

Two more details: the end of each hall has a figure which may or may not be passable. Via testing verbs I found the game was wanting USE, yet none of my items — and I apparently had all of them available — did anything useful.

Finally, there’s the ominous “don’t turn around” message. If you turn to face “south” on my map you will outright die. This might have been a dodge to get out of drawing the opening room, but it’s a wonderfully atmospheric way to do it. I always felt a small bit of pressure while walking around even though this isn’t an intense/time based area like the first section of the game was.

Sent to another dimension!

My guess is at least one of the “windows” or whatever those are have some extra secrets, so I need to laboriously test each one; the game tries to animate movement as much as it can so every step is sluggish. I still expect an escape with the Bluestone next time, and I’ll at least try the later sections; no promises I’ll get that far, though.