I’ve finished the game; this continues from my previous post. (As predicted, it didn’t take that long, but I wanted to talk theory a little more so you get a whole new post for the ending.)
Picture from Suns, another Kreis game published by CLOAD.
I had a TRS-80 that didn’t turn on; the trick here was something from earlier that I thought was a red herring. Back where you pull a white lever to open a secret door, you die by turning the red knob…
YOU HAVE ENTERED A SECRET UNDERGROUND CAVERN. THE LIGHT IS DIM HERE, BUT YOU CAN MAKE OUT A PATH GOING WEST.
-W
YOU ARE IN A VERY DIM UNDERGROUND CAVERN.
A RED KNOB, A WHITE LEVER, AND A GREEN SWITCH ARE ALL ON THE NORTH WALL.
-TURN KNOB
SUDDENLY THE CAVERN STARTS SHAKING, THE WALLS AND CEILING GIVE WAY, AND ROCKS START FALLING. HOW NICE. YOU ARE KILLED AND BURIED AT THE SAME TIME.
GAME OVER. START OVER (S), STEP BACK (B) OR QUIT (Q)?
..and if you try to FLIP SWITCH, it just breaks off the wall.
-FLIP SWITCH
AS YOU FLIP THE SWITCH, IT BREAKS OFF FROM THE WALL AND FALLS TO THE FLOOR.
This feels like the “there are three buttons, only one is useful, the other two do nonuseful things and/or kill you” pattern I’ve seen elsewhere (including in the other Kreis game) so I stopped thinking about the switch past that.
Getting back to the main action…
…after INSERT DISK, you can also INSERT the SWTICH too.
-INSERT DISK
O.K.
THE DISK FALLS TO THE FLOOR, LOOKS AROUND FOR A SECOND – SPOTS THE TRS-80 DISK DRIVE, YELLS “OH BOY!” AND JUMPS INTO THE DRIVE!
-INSERT SWITCH
O.K.
THE SWITCH FALLS TO THE FLOOR, LOOKS AROUND FOR A SECOND – SEES THE TRS-80, YELLS “OH BOY!” AND JUMPS ONTO THE COMPUTER EXACTLY WHERE IT BELONGS!
-FLIP SWITCH
SUDDENLY THE TRS-80 COMPUTER COMES TO LIFE! AN AUTOMATIC BOOT PROGRAM LOADS IN, AND THEN THE SCREEN FLASHES,
“PRESS ENTER FOR DOOR: “
PRESS ENTER will open the closed door to the east, although there’s one more obstacle.
YOU ARE IN A ROOMS WITH A SMALL GLASS CUBICLE TO THE NORTH. IT HAS A GLASS DOOR ON THE FRONT.
THE DOOR IS OPEN.
A VERY LARGE MULTI-GIRAFFE-LEGGED, FLAT FACED, ONE GREEN-EYED, ELEPHANT NOSED, HAIRY CREATURE IS HERE, STARING AT YOU HUNGRILY AS IF IT HAD NOT EATEN FOR YEARS!!
After all the creatures going back to Death Dreadnaught that you couldn’t shoot with a normal gun, this was highly satisfying:
-SHOOT CREATURE
YOU SHOOT THE CREATURE. HE IS VAPORIZED INSTANTLY. (WHAT DO YOU KNOW? IT ACTUALLY WORKED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
The pattern of nonviolence in old adventure games (due to ATTACK X generally not being much of a “puzzle”) still continues, just as a reversal of the pattern that had been holding where just shooting the thing won’t work. It honestly came off like a themed ending to the trilogy.
YOU ARE INSIDE OF THE GLASS CUBICLE.
-S
YOU HAVE JUST STEPPED OUTSIDE OF THE TELEPORTATION ROOM. YOU LOOK AROUND, AND YOU SEE PEOPLE ALL OVER! THIS PLACE IS YOUR REAL PLANET! YOU WALK WITH SOME OFFICIALS TO A BUILDING, AND ASK THEM WHY THEY DESERTED THE OTHER PLANET. THEY EXPLAIN THAT SOME CREATURES THAT YOU MUST HAVE ENCOUNTERED GOT TO THEIR PLANET AND STARTED DESTROYING EVERYTHING. SO THEY HAD TO MOVE SOMEPLACE ELSE, AND THEY DID SO USING THE TRANSPORT CHAMBER THAT YOU USED. THE OFFICIALS ALSO MENTION THE FACT THAT THEY ARE SURPRISED THAT ANYONE COULD HAVE MADE IT THROUGH TO THE TRANSPORT. EVERYONE CONGRADULATES YOU!!!!!!!!!! YOU MADE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (GREAT FEELING, RIGHT?)
I’m a little unclear on the lore — surely we would know the way to our “real planet”? We landed on a fake planet somehow, then moved over to the real one?
A recent map by the author he made while replaying the game.
Returning to the switch puzzle a moment–
I’d say it has a positive and a negative part at the same time. On the positive end, I liked the idea of messing with the two-deadly-buttons-out-of-three concept to have one of them end up being seemingly useless but end up in a puzzle later. On the other hand, the game diverges into straight-out fantasy there, when none of the rest of the series has quite done that (there’s a torso screaming about wanting to die in Death Dreadnaught, but that’s still within the bounds of weird-science-sci-fi). There’s some signaling with the disk talking and jumping into the computer, but that came across to me as an isolated joke (like getting lost in RAM in Adventureland or getting your vision blocked by garbage characters in Takara Building Adventure). Alex hinted that the switch was the key and there really wasn’t anything else to do; it certainly was a solvable puzzle given it’s the only extra object in the game. I still ended up (for that specific puzzle) on the negative side, but I want to emphasize that while I’m pointing out mostly objective things, the scale of my actual reaction is subjective. (When a game “scores” both a 5 and a 9 from different outlets, I sometimes find it’s because both reviewers noted the same positive and negative design elements, but the negative which overwhelmed one person’s gameplay was a minor irritant to another.)
Alstair asked about if the “step back” feature would have changed my thoughts on the original game. It’s hard for me to be sure; at the very least, the design of the first game is oriented around restarts. There’s a passage described as hot; you’re supposed to avoid it and go a different way; doing this properly (even if you step in the trap to document things later for, say, a blog post) gives more satisfaction just because not having to replay to the same point is a “reward”. The choice of wrong rod near the end probably would break the back up system anyway (requiring you make a choice and go all the way back to the ship) but assuming it didn’t, it wouldn’t make the false choices less tragi-comic. However, it would be a very rare taste indeed to prefer this, and certainly on the balance I’d rather have an undo option. I just try to keep conscious — especially as someone documenting the history of old games — what gets lost in the process.
Escape from the Robots, the third Kreis game published by CLOAD. This is a port of the classic Robots/Daleks game; unfortunately, it’s still unknown who wrote the first version.
Still coming up: As promised, the wild tale of Enix and their unusual first adventure game.
Renga in Blue 
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