Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

(Continued from my previous posts on the game.)

I was trying to push to the end, but I still must be missing something fundamental. At the least, I can say (checking the list of rooms in the machine code) that there isn’t much more for me to explore; this is intended to be a “tight” game like Savage Island Part 2, and the way the alien-transformation works makes me think the author even had Savage Island Part 2 specifically in mind.

True color picture of Venus, from Reddit.

Progress hinged on two relatively obscure parser actions (one is from Savage Island and I really should have thought of it, I needed spoilers from Alastair). First off, the Identi-Comp.

What will you do now? EXAMINE COMPUTER
Notice on Identi-Comp: “Speak Clearly”

You
see numbers 1 and 2
A switch is set to
1
What will you do now? TO TWO
Okay

What I was missing (sleuthed out by Rob) is the verb REPROGRAM works on the system.

What will you do now? REPROGRAM COMPUTER
Identi-Comp: “Reprogramming commences after
second medical
usage”

The one-or-two part is setting whether the “reprogramming” happens after one or two medical uses (I’ll explain what that means shortly). I’m still not sure what “speak clearly” is all about; that may be the fundamental thing that’s keeping me from winning the game.

It’s a bit of an exhausting moment not only because this is the first time the verb has shown up anywhere, but it’s unclear what action the player is even doing. There was a moment in Seiko’s Adventure where you needed to “close hatch” while looking at a lot of buttons, essentially jumping over the first-layer interaction (which buttons are getting pushed, exactly) straight to the second-layer interaction (the hatch gets closed). Most classic text adventures stick with first-layer interaction and will come up with interfaces with five buttons that all happen to coincidentally be different colors to facilitate this; in Epic Hero 3, to launch the spaceship back off the planet you merely press a red button, as opposed to typing LAUNCH SHIP and letting the avatar in the world figure it out.

Just a reminder the Identi-Comp is in the central hub room on the ship, a fact that will be important later.

So what, exactly, is the avatar doing when the player types REPROGRAM COMPUTER? How do we even know (from the minimal description we get) that it’s got enough available parts to do that? I admit I visualized it smaller-scale with just the one-two switch, and was instead focused on potentially breaking the system open to fiddle with some wires. (For all I know, maybe that really is what the player-avatar is doing! Or maybe the “reprogram” action is actually a command spoken out loud?)

The second obscure command — the one from Savage Island — is HOLD BREATH. Back at the medical unit, you can transform yourself into an alien (made clear by the fact your space suit no longer fits based on your shape). Unfortunately, this means you breathe Venus-atmosphere but not ship-atmosphere, so opening the unit kills you.

With HOLD BREATH, you can safely hit the button.

There’s no apparent way to unhold, just after enough time your face will start to “turn red” and after “Gasp!” you’ll start breathing again. In alien form, you should be on the planet when this happens.

One last catch before going there! If you haven’t gone through the Identi-Comp reprogramming, specifically with the setting on TWO, then you will no longer be able to operate the door in alien form.

You are in a Medical and Genetic Engineering compartment.
Objects you can see are: Auto-Surg Unit ■ Scanner ■ Brown Pad ■ Closed Brown Hatch ■ Life Support ■

What will you do now? PUSH BROWN
Okay
Nothing happens

I think pressing the orange button and closing the unit counts as one medical operation, and pressing the black button to convert counts as the second; once we are xenoshifted, the ship changes the controls to allow us to use them in our new (non-described) form.

Non-described protagonists are nearly 100% the norm for this era, but it’s absolutely fascinating to have this then extend to where we clearly aren’t “ourselves”. Do we have tentacles? Multiple eyes? A large hump on our back used for breathing? This is not purely theoretical since it extends to our body’s capabilities in the world (for example, it wouldn’t immediately occur to me that we still have the kind of body where holding our breath makes sense). Neither the suit nor the boots fit anymore, although the headband does still fit and work.

One small … step? … tentacle glide? … for xenokind.

This shows holding breath from opening the medical unit, all the way to getting on the planet and walking to the pool/statue, where “Gasp!” shows when we need to take a breath.

No running out of suit air at least! We can still go over to the alien statue and SHAKE HAND to get a message, although we need to be wearing the headband to do so (this is true in either human or xeno form).

“Enter my domain. I have a question for you.”

We are now dense enough to go in the pool, HOLD BREATH, and DIVE DOWN (my problem before was not putting DOWN there, this is not nearly as smooth a parser experience as Epic Hero 2).

The purple plants glow and you need them in your inventory before going into the hole, leading to a small new area.

It took me a few beats to realize that the hole beneath the pool liquid does not lead to more liquid, but rather is an “open air” (in terms of alien atmosphere) room. There are circumstances where the tunnel winds in a way that this makes sense, but I was visualizing something entirely different at first.

That is, it’s fine if we run out of breath here and “gasp”. HOLD BREATH needs to happen again before going west (which leads back to the pool).

To the north is a stream which is smoky (it turns out to be liquid nitrogen) and a furry red block, which “contains something alive”.

You can break the block, resulting in just “red bits”. It doesn’t count as sentient though; if you take it back to the lab, and SCAN BLOCK (another new thing I discovered) the game informs you of this, meaning it isn’t our ultimate goal. I would expect that given this particular path hasn’t used either the explosive or the weird ledge found by jumping with boots.

I’ve tried taking the thought bomb into the hole and placing it either at the stalagtites or the nitrogen stream, but in both cases there’s a “crater” and no other result. The funny side result is I had the 12-inch rod with me, and when trying to dive it “floated up” and turned into a 9 inch rod and a 12 inch rod.

It turns out the thought bomb only blows up if you are wearing the band and holding the rod while in 12 inch form. (Without the rod, the game indicates a “relay” is missing.) The rod only goes in the ledge-hole if you have it in 9 inch form. This weird duplication bug means you can both have the rod deposited in the hole at the ledge and blow something up after, but clearly the intent was to have the rod be inaccessible (meaning the blowing up should happen first). I have not tested every single room but I have tested most rooms, and I’m worried there’s some special way to put the bomb in place that I’m missing (but is special coded for a particular room).

Any suggestions from this point (even guesses) please put in ROT13; I’m still going to try pushing to the end on my own.