(Continued from my previous post about what is likely the first adventure game written in Sweden on a home computer.)
I may not have squeezed out every single piece of working game from The Temple, but I’ve squeezed out most of it. Once past the initial issue, the game’s crashes don’t come back until later, but they come back spectacularly.
The only Janic bag I’ve found multiple pictures of, from Tradera. They were the company that later picked up Commodore products and ended up sending their PET computers to Datatronic when they went bankrupt.
Exterior of Janken Minidata, where the PET computers eventually ended up. Source.
I switched to just using v1 (although anyone adventurous enough to edit the game might want to look at the early version of the game as well). After fixing the “burn” issue (where I changed “go” into “goto”) and I made sure to use directions with abbreviations (“n” instead of “go north”) I was off and running again. It took a while before another hard crash. I still am not clear if this was “left unfinished” or just undone by the bugs (caused by bad transfer issues, perhaps?).
To recap the action, we start in a cell with a bed that has a pillow and matches, and nothing else useful. If you hang out long enough in the toilet room someone arrives to deposit an item.
Me messing around with random directions in case leaving room directions out is one of the game’s issues.
Regarding the “kn” typo above, I assume the intent is the word “in”. In PETSCII the binary for “k” is 01001011 and the binary for “i” is 01001001, exactly one bit difference; of course it could be a perfectly ordinary human-made typo, but this sort of thing does make me suspicious. (See “Scgtt Adams” from The Golden Voyage, clearly a one-bit error.) The game also uses KNVENTORY rather than INVENTORY.
Going back to the main cell, there’s a bowl with food, and inside the food is a saw-blade. It looks like we have a friend on the inside, on our mission, which is to (????). (Really, I still don’t know. There’s dragons later and a diamond but the game just being a treasure raid doesn’t mesh with something else you’ll see later. Maybe it’s a mixed quest where we have multiple goals.)
You can then cut the door with the saw (“That was a hard work”) and get farther inside.
The first of three maps.
There’s a “gray corridor” with a locked door we can take care of in a moment; going upstairs to the kitchen, you can find a knife in a cupboard (which will get used much later).
There’s also a warning about “watchers” in the room to the east which you fortunately don’t need to heed too closely.
They’ll only wake up if you PRESS BUTTON which sets off an alarm.
The keys can be used to both the window and the downstairs door. It’s better to unlock the window first because once you unlock the downstairs door (another cell) you’ll lose the keys going in.
You’ll lose the keys even if you drop them off elsewhere first and aren’t holding them, so this counts as a bug, but maybe it’s a bug in a “plot continuity” sense; you need the wire to get out of prison, and there’s more keys outside the prison, so this is a clean way to avoid referring to two sets of keys. Just: it’s a softlock if you lose them too early.
So far, the items: matches, pillows, wire, knife, explosives. Heading outside the window, there’s a fire-escape going up, another locked door, and an exit to the west. There’s another locked door (which you need those keys for!) although the door is jammed from the other side so you can’t go through anyway.
To the west in the prison yard there’s a parked car, but you can’t do anything with it yet, so it’s time to go up the fire-escape and use the wire as a rope.
Can you climb a wire in real life? It happened in Ferret as well.
This is not an intensely guarded prison, but I’m guessing our Man on the Inside might have helped with that.
The landing spot has some driftwood and a boat at a sea. If you try to swim in the sea, you die; if you try to go via boat, you die.
It is faintly possible this is not just intended as a death-trap; while this is a “biome journey” of sorts like Wizard and the Princess nothing is one-way. In fact, it seems to be useful to maybe go back into the prison.
The reason you can’t unlock and go through the front door of the prison is the stone as seen above. I would think the explosives would take care of that problem but I never got them to work. If you do this, when you get the car-keys later (which you’ll see shortly) I think you can possibly drive the entire car out and do things with it.
Moving on from the unexploded rock, heading north there’s a ferry. Get on and you can find a radio, the car-keys (told you) a book, and a button. Pressing the button causes the ferry to move to a new destination. You can re-press the button to go back.
Voilà, the third map:
Straight off the bat you can find a pistol (if you try to KILL anything before finding the pistol the game says you need one). Then there’s a bit of branching, including:
▸ a desert with an note, a torch, and a cactus; the note says the nose can be very useful.
▸ relatedly, on a “narrow ledge” you can find a pamphlet mentioning you can TURN the nose in all directions
▸ a “high wall” with some scratchings; reading them reveals the word DIRAM, although I tried to use it and crashed the game
▸ a “liane” in a swamp which baffled me for a while; I realized after a bug I’ll show off later that it was referring to liana vines but for a while I thought it was a person and tried to talk to them
▸ with the liane you can tie it to a pillar at a collapsed bridge and retrieve some ratsbane
The use of the word reminds me of Citadel Adventure using the word “embrassures”. Sure, it’s technically a word in English (spelled wrong) but it’s extremely rare compared to all the other English words; this is the sort of move someone who learned English as a second or third language would make. I would guess the Swedish equivalent (lian) is more common? Mooware on Bluesky pointed out that liane is vine in German (spelled that way) so maybe Stefan Modin was just mixing languages generally.
Now, for that bug that led me to realize it was a vine in the first place: if you go north from where you find the pamphlet, you’ll end up in a dark place.
I was able to goto 7 and keep the game going, but without light. I tried “go hole” and usually died…
…but one time I successfully made it, coming across a treasure with dragons and a chest.
The buggy room has a letter you can read and find the word LOUZI; trying SAY LOUZI teleports you to a new area.
The new area includes a pit with rattlesnakes and a shovel. I have tried digging many places with the shovel although I admit I have not tried digging all the places with the shovel (that is, taking it all the way back to the prison yard etc.) I feel like I’ve hit the “broken threshold” enough that I can’t distinguish between a puzzle and a bug, so this seems like a good spot to close things up for now. If I ever get confirmation the game is fixed to the point of being completable (maybe not all the bugs) I’ll take another swing.
For now, we’re headed back to England, as coming up: Twin Kingdom Valley.
Renga in Blue 
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