Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I wanted to knock down one more game from the Rainbow Book of Adventures contest (the first text adventure contest) before moving on to other things. There will be eight left to go (saved for some future time).

Deed of the York is another case like Escape from Sparta where something went awry in the credits. Specifically, the opening title screen indicates a different original author than Chris Harland (as seen in the image above).

So the game is actually by Dwight Logan, originally? (Oftentimes, the port author isn’t considered an “author” at all although changes can sometimes be major enough to warrant that title.) Further muddying the waters is the book’s biographical note:

Chris Harland is a bilingual high school student in the “Great White North” [Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada]. Some of his interests include sports, money, computers and rock music. Chris wishes to thank Dwight Logan and Gerald Nunn, whose initiative and help respectively ensured the program’s creation.

The description of Dwight Logan being the “initiative” certainly seems counter to the idea of him writing it in the first place. This ambiguity also raises a question on the nature of Gerald Nunn’s “help”. Just to be safe, I’m crediting all three.

The author-location also reinforces the point I made about authors coming from everywhere across the map for the contest; the author is not from Ontario or Quebec (the two computing hotspots at the time) but Regina, Saskatchewan. We have encountered the place once before with the deeply surreal game Fantasyland. (While “ranking” doesn’t make complete sense here, I’d say Fantasyland is still the most surreal game this blog has encountered.)

Your grandfather has died and the deed to the York Hotel is hidden somewhere in his abandoned summer home; your job is to find it without dying.

The game also informs you that you need to start by typing the word PIZZA. It then gives you an absolute blank prompt, no room description at all, before PIZZA is entered.

If you can’t tell yet already, this is another game in the wildly-bespoke category, where every location special-codes various commands. Some sample code to illustrate, which only operates in one of the map rooms:

56 IF LEFT$(C$,7)>="SMALLER" THEN 164
57 IF LEFT$(C$,5)="LARGE" THEN 69
58 IF LEFT$(C$,7)="FOLDING" THEN 69
59 IF RIGHT$(C$,6)="SHEETS" THEN 68
60 IF LEFT$(C$,4)="BACK" OR RIGHT$(C$,4)="LEFT" THEN 34
61 IF RIGHT$(C$,4)="DOOR" THEN 169
62 IF RI6HT$(C$,5)="CHAIR" THEN 65

What makes this even harder to deal with than other games of this kind is a.) a number of crashes, which I’m fairly sure are authentic bugs rather than issues on the emulator’s end…

My attempt to OPEN GREEN DOOR at one room.

…b.) and also the fact it uses LEFT/RIGHT/STRAIGHT/BACK as directions (as shown in the code), and the map is completely wrecked besides. To map things out I used west for LEFT and east for RIGHT.

From the opening room (the hallway) you can go STRAIGHT to a ballroom or BACK to the same hallway, you can go LEFT and BACK or RIGHT and BACK as well. That is the end of the game’s consistency in terms of directions, as everything else is chaos.

As the second screenshot indicates, there are no items. GET NOVEL is actually interpreted as NOVEL and then the game describes the novel. This is one hint of multiple ones around the house as to what the right action is to do to get the Deed (you need to type one specific thing in one specific room).

Otherwise, the house is full of deathtraps, or at least game overs. The ballroom has a stair, and going up results in meeting a ghost and losing you the game.

In the cheekiest moment, going through a door causes you to be hit by an axe, and this is followed by a left-or-right prompt.

Picking right ends the game (in a hospital) and picking left also ends the game (you end up dead).

Amidst all the chaos, the key is to realize in fact you are getting a consistent set of clues and all the game is really asking you to do is apply them. In addition to the ones I’ve shown, the starting room has a coatrack with the initials W.S., and a couch is engraved WILLIAM & ANNE.

You need to get into a library (the only way I found was by referring to a PANEL, not any of the L/R/A/B directions) and then, at a library with books (where the game repeatedly insists you can’t refer to the words in the parser), just type the word SHAKESPEARE.

Conceptually, I like the idea of a one-puzzle game spread out across a house where you’re trying to find one hidden thing. In practice, the puzzle was not in solving what was getting hinted at (which was fairly incessant) but rather in dealing with the parser in the first place, and that saying the word SHAKESPEARE somewhere in particular might even be useful (usually it just gives a blank prompt!)

Also messing about with the books in the library can crash the game.

I’ll mark this on the list (along with Raymer’s The Room) as “interesting concept for the time, but implementation couldn’t rise to the occasion”.

Coming up: One more Britgame, and thenThe Coveted Mirror.