(Continued from my previous posts about the game.)
Progress, but not quite as much as I’d like. Still, I think I’m one or two posts away from the end.
My main target for today.
The most immediate thing I solved — roughly five minutes after making my last post — came from one last re-read of the fairy looking for their glasses.
I realized that it might not be a tiara or hat on the fairy’s head (as my brain was originally interpreting), but rather the glasses themselves (especially since the game already had the “hidden in sight” puzzle with the lockpick). It took a little fussing to actually work out what to do, though, since you can’t just GET them (the game does politely say you’re on the right track). HELP gives the majority of the verbs that are available, though.
GET, PUT, MOVE, OPEN, CLOSE, USE, OFFER, READ, TALK, GO, WAIT, CLIMB, LOOK, INV, OR A DIRECTION
(Not all of them – you can LIGHT CANDLESTICK back at the magician’s room.) I was trying to do POINT and SHOW and so forth but consulting the list the only thing that seemed like it might work was MOVE.
It’s wildly unusual at this point in gaming history to have a puzzle like this; most of our graphics up to 1982 have been too squiggly (even some of the games with very good art, like Lucifer’s Realm, did not have their art done in 1982; it was added later). Even then it took some squinting and a leap of faith because of the pixel size but at least it gets very directly mentioned in the text.
Unfortunately, the effect here has not led me to solving any new puzzles. This gives access to USE COLOR (which incidentally took some noodling to figure out — even with a mostly-complete verb list it’s not always easy to work out how to communicate things, and it’s still not clear what action the player is doing to cast the spell). This causes the screen to change color briefly before returning to normal, but I have tested it in over half of the rooms in the game with no effect. There is no textual message given, and I wonder if it’s meant to find something hidden.
That is, in this moment of color inversion, you might see something secret.
Before leaving the fairy, I should mention I was misinterpreting another part of the image. There’s a door in the back but I thought it was simply the way we entered in on (the room only vaguely looks like the bottom of a well, so I thought there was some extra step being implicitly taken by going down, and you can easily go back up again). However, you can OPEN DOOR and find yourself on the other side of the hill. So that issue is resolved.
New route marked in blue.
Nearby all that is the inn, and I misinterpreted yet another image.
I thought that was a door behind the bull, and it represented the way back into the inn. It does not: it’s a passage to the outside, through the back of the Inn, leading to a brand-new area. Mind you, not one that I have gotten too far into yet, but some screenshots to explain:
Putting together the clues from before, I need the ring and the sign language to communicate with the man in the Forest, who will then take me through the Fog here to the fifth and final mirror shard. So it likely should be saved for later.
Speaking of saving things for later, my suspicion on the tavern where supposedly we can learn sign language (but our stuff gets stolen instead)…
…is that this gets saved for last. That is, I need all four other mirror shards, and something will happen in the tavern which will allow a scene to go forward. I suspect this because the hint talks about Brother Jon only showing up “rarely”.
With that set aside, one last piece of progress is I took every single available item over to be appraised and found that the ones that work as bribes are not obvious treasures. Specifically, of the items I have…
AX, ROPE, BONES, CANDLESTICK, JUG, BROOM, LOCKPICK, COAT, SHOVEL, RING
…the AX, JUG and BROOM are all valued as bribes. I’m particularly surprised about the broom, since it was just taken from a room in the castle; the AX seems like a utility item, but now almost certainly not. Unless I’m far off base, anything that counts as a bribe does not otherwise get used as an item for puzzle-solving. This means the rope, bones, and coat are the only items left where I’m completely unsure as to where they go (I haven’t applied the ring yet, but the game hints amply where it will show up later).
I decided next to do a big push on the tower; while the person inside laughs if you TALK, the face also “beckons” you if you do LOOK. I decided this had to be the missing witch. Given you can see the tower from the outside, I wondered if you could enter from the outside, given there were two holes in the bushes just outside the tower.
Further experimentation (especially considering the verb CLIMB on the help-list) led me to realize that climb was being recognized in that room, I just needed extra conditions, or more specifically a ladder. (The noun LADDER is recognized.) We’ve already seen a ladder, though!
It is not obvious in the slightest from the picture that you can just rip the ladder right off the well — I would think it was mounted — but you can just take it, and then PUT it at the castle.
This doesn’t quite let you go high enough, but I also had a rope I hadn’t used yet, so:
Finally the witch!
The witch requests bones and the shadow of a child. The bones were easy (I was already holding them freshly dug from the graveyard) but I still don’t have the shadow. The vase that holds shadows was hinted at by the fortune-teller, but I still don’t know where to find it; I do know if you are at the hovel which has a child in the picture, you can try to GET SHADOW and it says you don’t have the right container for it.
One last bit of progress, kind of: on the south side of the town there is a barrel in the picture (not mentioned in the room description, just shown in the picture). I found I could MOVE BARREL and get the top off, and even GO BARREL afterwards.
The problem is that the barrel is dark. LIGHT CANDLESTICK (like I did at the magician) says something about lighting it at the nearest fire, so I went and tried to light it at the alchemist, and the baker, and the glassblower, and the blacksmith, and in all cases it said it didn’t understand the command LIGHT CANDLESTICK. I could go all the way to the magician and light the candlestick but it apparently is unlit by the time you walk over to the barrel. So I’m not clear what to do here.
Just for an open-problem update:
a.) finding the vase that holds shadows
b.) figuring out the barrel
c.) chocolate moose ingredient for the bakery to get the cookie
d.) figuring out where to use the color spell (this may only apply at the endgame)
This is a much shorter list than before which is why (despite me still only being a two pieces of the mirror) I suspect I’m winding closer to the end, at least closer to the point where I’ll be able to enter the endgame.
Renga in Blue 
The lockpick is actually clued before the thief tells you himself. If you TALK to Starina a second time, she says: “Keep this priviy in thine own heart – I saw a thief drop a tool of his trade near the tavern.”