I’ve finished the game; this is continued from my previous post.
Portion of the ad from Softside’s January 1983 issue announcing that Adventures of the Month are now being moved to the disk/cassette version of the magazine.
Just to get it out of the way first, we’ve got headhunters again, something I’ve written about before. Since this is set in India and vaguely Indiana Jones-shaped I checked in case it was making a reference, but Temple of Doom came out in 1984. Perhaps Indiana Jones was making a reference to it, or at least stereotypes like it; the movie has an infamous “monkey brains” banquet, and as Roshan Seth (who plays one of the villains, Chattar Lal) explained to Empire magazine:
The banquet scene was a joke that went wrong. I got a great deal of flak for it because people kept saying, “How does an intelligent man like you agree to be in a film which shows Indians dining on beetles and eels?” Steven intended it as a joke, the joke being that Indians were so fucking smart that they knew all Westerners think that Indians eat cockroaches, so they served them what they expected. The joke was too subtle for that film.
The original script had a line from Indy that Hindus wouldn’t touch meat and this prompts an additional line about being suspicious of who the hosts are; it never made it to the film.
Still from the relevant scene.
Moving forward, I was stuck last time on a bear, or at least a bear was stuck on what I thought was likely an oar, but the bear was sleeping and wouldn’t move. What I had neglected to do is LOOK TREE.
(Nevermind climbing the tree doesn’t mention the nest, even though you’d think it would.) Throwing the apple at the nest resolves the bear issue. You can throw the knife instead but it loses whatever item you throw (and you can go back and get another apple; you’ll need it in just a moment).
THROW APPLE
At what?
(Example: AT NATIVE)AT NEST
Hornets emerge from nest
and bear runs for his life
far off into the jungle
With that resolved, it was time to take care of the canoe. The stalling for time with the bear puzzle led me (via a comment of Voltgloss) to realize I could CUT ROPE twice and take the rope with me that was holding the canoe; it gets used multiple times later. I then hopped in the canoe, applying the previously-found PADDLE verb.
I find it interesting it doesn’t understand PADDLE, but does understand PADDLE ACNOE with my typo there.
You can LOOK CANOE to see the previously-unmentioned hole filling with water. You need to PLUG HOLE; the only item that works is the apple. Which is kind of absurd but at least the game has it come out mid-paddle.
The lost gun (and fact it gets you just killed earlier) puts this as yet another data point in my list of games where weapons are red herrings>. The knife doesn’t get used for violence, either.
More jungle! This time it’s a small set piece, where to the southeast there’s some quicksand; you can CLIMB TREE (every single jungle room has a “tree room”, I’m leaving them off) and find there’s a sturdy branch. Assuming you remember to take it off the canoe, you can tie the rope to the branch, then go down and SWING ROPE across the quicksand.
To the northeast are some headhunters; if you try to pass by to the northeast, one will throw a spear (if you don’t, they’ll leave you alone, which suggests a structural-solving puzzle solution you’ll see shortly).
With the spear thrown the headhunters will go in hot pursuit and follow you around. If you haven’t guessed yet, the right action is to circle back to the quicksand, and swing over using the already-prepared rope.
You then can retrieve the spear, except the game insists on having some kind of obstacle.
After much gnashing of teeth with PULL SPEAR and JUMP SPEAR I finally came across PULL HARD; applying a verb modifier is extraordinarily rare and downright abuse of the system (given the author-player contract generally has established it as a verb-noun form at nearly all other times, even disallowing PADDLE by just itself earlier).
Past the headhunter section is a chasm; you need to tie the rope to the spear, then tie the rope to a tree on the side you’re on, then throw the spear before finally climbing the rope across the chasm. Strangely, it works intuitively well; ropes are infamous for having implementation issues, but it helps the rope refuses to let you do anything other than the right actions for solving the puzzle.
You can retrieve the spear (although you need to cut the rope to do so). It gets used one more time on the section right after: another maze.
I get what the author was after; he wanted the jungle to feel tangled but didn’t want a full Crowther/Woods style tangled mess, but this still was a tangled mess to map out. Kirsch really wanted you to not bother mapping at all, because he added in a native who wants something valuable. You can hand over the spear, getting directions out of this area in the process:
I had my map already complete before I got this hint.
The southwest exit hinted at leads to another small area with a waterfall and wall of fire close to each other. You can GO WATERFALL first to get wet, then go back and go through the fire, where being wet is enough protection to pass through.
This leads to a northeast path with another LONG ROPE (always fun when you lose an item, only to find another version of the same item later; of course in code, it really is literally the same item). You can CUT ROPE to make two short pieces of rope, which will sort-of become important in a moment.
The “sort-of” is because you next come across a tent (see above) with the kidnapped daughter inside. Climb a tree and wait and eventually you’ll see a bandit come out; JUMP BANDIT to do a knockout. (As far as I can tell, this also works the same if you just go southwest for a while, wait, and come back to the tent.) You can then try to subdue the bandit via TIE BANDIT, and things go wrong.
Dale Dobson couldn’t get the tying to work. He didn’t discover what I found, which is you can TIE HANDS AND FEET as one command (no longer even being a two-word parser) but even though the game seems to understand that it still breaks and the bandit kills you (“You didn’t tie me good enough”).
Dobson studied the source code and found the relevant line never gets called, so he (and I) continued playing via the command NT=3 followed by GOTO 300 (this changes a variable disabling the bandit, and then resumes the game).
After all that nonsense was through, I was able to enter the tent and untie the daughter, who now follows the protagonist for the rest of the game.
The first obstacle is the two bandits that had left the tent earlier start chasing; you can fortunately get past a bridge where cutting the ropes seals off your escape.
This is the other reason I checked the year Temple of Doom came out, although the bridge-cutting scene in the movie was much more dramatic.
Unfortunately, you’re not done with natives yet. A bit more jungle in and you’re blocked by MAD NATIVES; there’s a skunk nearby, but the way to handle it is via the command HOLD NOSE (not even pretending the parser is reasonable any more).
I think this is the first Kirsch game where you need to refer to a body part?
The actual scientific name is “Mephitis mephitis” although I like the “Stinkerus americanus” joke.
This lets you get by but then the natives go in pursuit. If you just try to outrace then they’ll catch you, and there’s no obvious obstacle like a bridge to stop them.
You do pass by some quicksand (not blocking the path) and this ended up being the most clever puzzle of the game (or at least it would be if there wasn’t parser struggle in getting the command to work). You need to put your hat on the quicksand so the natives think you fell in.
Then it’s a clear shot to the ending except for another maze. There’s a mountain you can climb where you will see the embassy is “west” of a cedar tree so the idea is to wander until you find cedar (LOOK TREE everywhere, that is), then keep going west. I already caught on earlier so I did not map the maze this time.
And that’s a wrap! Kirsch is still going full steam in terms of imagining scenes and then trying his best to enact them in the parser; they don’t always survive contact with the implementation which results in things like PULL HARD and whatever mess was happening with the rope and the bandit. I do think the presence of mazes weakened this considerably over his prior games with the same general weaknesses; while he twice gave hints for getting out and clearly did the layout thinking it was more of a “tangled map” than a maze, in practice I still had to deal with the same annoyances as most maps from this era have.
We’ve still got enough Kirsch games to go I don’t want do tier-list them out, but as a general observation, it doesn’t seem like he’s had an “experience arc” like you might hope; there isn’t continual improvement, just the same template being repeated in multiple ways where sometimes it sticks and sometimes it misses. I think the best Kirsch games so far have been
Kidnapped: early game, with building floors being a clever way to set out a series of mini-adventure games
Jack the Ripper: an extended preparation puzzle, including a very clever part with the killer’s knife
Around the World in Eighty Days: the source material is more or less just like a Kirsch game, so this meshes reasonably well
Dateline Titanic: recontextualizing the treasure hunt as rescuing passengers
Arrow One: conceptual sci-fi with a better setting than usual for Kirsch and a clever language puzzle
As far as Kirsch’s own favorite, I’m going to guess he liked Jack the Ripper, because he produced two sequels (which we’ll see in 1983 and 1984, respectively).
I do think his rapid pace may be part of the issue on the lesser games — certainly at least the bugs and lack of polish show — but I’m not sure if just going bi-monthly would fix the issue; I don’t know if introspection would help. At the very least, there’s now a gap until the next Kirsch game. It doesn’t show up until March! That’s because February has an RPG instead, by a totally different author.
Both The CRPG Addict and El Explorador de RPG have played it, if you want to see what it’s like.
Coming up, we’re going to stick with random 1983 games, and I’m making my next pick truly at random (I’m not using the next item on my list, I’m using random.org and having it choose a number) so who knows what will happen?
Renga in Blue 
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