Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts.)

I’ve finished the game, and as predicted, there was not much left to go.

I was left before with a crystal rod and a related curious hint.

I have no idea what this hint means. What I instead was eyeballing was the “hole in wall” in the description. I was mentally equating that with the DOWN exit; there have been many games where a listed “background item” simply corresponds to a direction, but given I was horribly stuck, it was worth checking if that was really the case.

Anyone with an idea what the deal with the message was? I also was thinking in a structural-solving sense, insofar as the harpoon and rope make for one of the more elaborate puzzles in the game, yet the end result seemed to just be a relatively weak hint (like how the bottle from the ocean also just had a hint, one I didn’t even need because I had already solved the relevant puzzle!

Going inside the new passage, there is a vault, and now is when that number on the island gets applied:

(Of course, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever a sunken ship would have its combination clued by numbers written on a nearby island.. This is one of those adventure-things that gets handwaved off generally, but it really is so much more absurd than “the color on the windowsill matches the combination five rooms away” here; the game is clearly detached from reality in a “gonzo” sense where anything can happen.)

Sorry, not much update even with the analysis there! That’s the risk with adventure game blogging; you sometimes end up stopping right at the end. I do have one historical update, though:

From a Molimerx ad for the Epic Hero series, Computing Today January 1983.

I found the ad above in a January 1983 magazine (which was on newsstands, so it really was up in December ’82); that means I can drop the 1982/1983 business and stick this and the other two Epic Hero games in the Year 1982.

This game did not seem much like we were being heroic or epic, though? I could see calling a series that and diverging later into less epic material, but with this as the first in the series, it’s a curious naming convention. Perhaps Epic Hero games 2 and 3 will live up to the picture.

But for now, coming up: a wildly unusual mainframe game recently rescued and unlike anything featured on this blog before.