Clear progress, and also the distinct feeling I’m sinking deeper.
Scene from Hamlet. Michael Goodman again, from an early 19th century printing of Shakespeare.
To start with, let me mention a location I neglected last time near the ice floe:
You are at a cliff edge. A sign here says:
“YOU CAN CALL SPIRITS FROM THE VASTY DEEP.
BUT WILL THEY COME WHEN YOU DO CALL FOR THEM?”
The only way to go is back to the northwest.
I can’t say there’s one distinct “magical” place but it felt like if anywhere needed a magic word it’d be here, so I tried my various selections and found BRANDY (obtained from Hamlet’s ghost-father) summoned a treasure.
A spirit emerges from the vasty deep, sees your clerical collar, and recognises (as it thinks) its master, the local priest.
“Good Sir Topas, they have laid me here in hideous darkness. The house is as dark as ignorance, though ignorance were dark as hell,” it moans, “but this shall advantage thee.”
“I wish to buy my freedom,” it continues, and, depositing a small object in front of you, the spirit vanishes.
You are at the edge of the vasty deep.
There is a topaz here!
Notice how merely holding the clerical collar (which helped save me from strangulation last time) was enough to solve a secondary puzzle. That seems to be a common thread, with “passive” puzzle solving. However, there are so many parts of the game where I am clueless I appreciate a few puzzles being auto-solved.
Jumping back to where I left off last time, there was a “Moorish gentlemen” who told me to “Go and see my agent, who lives near here” and that “The name is written in code on this paper. You’ll be recompensed.”
I had ASTHMA my first time through; on a second playthrough the paper said OVERSEAS.
I intended to save afterwards, but the game didn’t let me. I took this to be a clue. I decided the use of the paper must be immediately after finding it, and it must be the kind of situation where save-abuse would make the puzzle “too easy”; that is, we’re looking at some way of expressing the answer which involves choosing from a small number of options (rather than so many that it would be impossible to solve the puzzle without realizing the code). This is what led me shortly after to:
You are in Illyria Court. The main street is back to the west, but there are directions to various residences, as follows:
North: Olivia
Northeast: (Sir Andrew) Aguecheek
East: Fabian
Southeast: (Count) Orsino
South: Malvolio.
I realized this fit the prompt; only five choices, and even though a wrong one kills, with only five it’d be an easy save-restore cycle. Based on the author’s previous games (particularly Hamil) I took the message to be a literal cryptogram. OVERSEAS, based on the message length, can only change to Malvolio.
> S
Ah! Othello must have sent you!” says the occupant of the dwelling you enter. “You deserve some sort of recompense for the perils you have been through. But go quickly now!”
You are bundled hastily out into the street, and look about you to see…
You are in Illyria Court.
There is an antique viola here!
Unfortunately, my remaining Eastcheap issues (like the drinking contest, the chickens, and the king splitting his kingdom, the bread-stealing scene) have so far gone unresolved. If I knew for certain the town wasn’t reachable other than in winter, I’d have an easier time, but if there really is a sneaky way to get in (bypassing the drug squad) and potion-warp to spring that could indicate one or more of the puzzles above can’t be solved in the current season.
I did solve one more winter issue, way back at Lady Portia with the caskets. I mentioned that nearby there was a realistic statue of a woman; I noticed, noodling around with seasons, that statue disappears post-winter, so any puzzle has to be resolved in winter.
Given none of my items seemed helpful, I decided to noodle with making a verb list, which I hadn’t done yet. For this game testing is just a matter of typing the verb, if it is understood the game asks (supposing as an example the verb “smash”) “smash what?” If not understood, the game says “I don’t understand that!”
KISS turned out to hit paydirt:
> kiss statue
O! she’s warm. If this be magic, let it be an act lawful as eating. You perceive that she stirs. ‘Tis the lady Hermione, long supposed dead. She drops a necklace of diamonds at your feet and then she leaves.
Oho! We are starting to rack up treasures (the viola and copy of the Iliad and the topaz all count) but I haven’t found a good place to put them yet. This is especially troubling because changing seasons causes them to disappear (I guess laying around for two months is bait for thieves, eh?)
I reached the point I decided I needed to noodle around with seasons some more — note how finding out the statue disappeared helped me solve the puzzle, so information later can help with winter — and I realized, after warping to spring, that I still had some potion left. (Somehow I thought the phial disappeared with the treasures.) So I tried the potion again and…
There is a calendar here, which gives the date as June 24th.
…yes, we can also go to summer. This changes the map yet again.
First off, this resets the witches (again), so you can now get a third item from them. I still haven’t found a use for the non-newt items.
The most obvious thing to me was to try first was to head to the forest which had a Midsummer Night’s Dream reference in the text (“swifter than the moon’s sphere”).
Suddenly … a charm is thrown!
O monstrous! O strange! Thou art changed! Bless thee! Thou art translated!
To put it bluntly, you seem to have had an ass’s head put on you.
You are in the mystic wood.
OK, fair. Nothing has come off the assinating as of yet, other than it looks funny in inventory:
> inv
You have an ass’s head on you, and are holding:
A toe of frog.
A laundry basket.
A shield.
A dog-collar (which you are wearing).
A dagger.
There’s the smell of blood upon your hands.
Note the last line, where our murder of King Duncan to obtain the shield has not gone unpunished. Out, damned spot!
> clean hands
I’m afraid that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten these little hands. Maybe something else will, if you can find what it is.
Again, I haven’t had the upshot yet (I assume somewhere we’ll find smelling like blood leads to our demise).
Since it is no longer the Ides of March, it is safe to pass through the building where we got stabbed (to the east of the magic forest area), leading to a whole new map section:
My assumption is this area cannot be accessed outside of summer, but maybe we could get here in winter if the bear is somehow manageable. The season gimmick adds the extra complexity that — even given there are no red herrings — some obstacles may be unpassable, and the way to “solve” the puzzle is simply to use a different season.
You are in the Capitol, a large building filled with people in white togas, who are listening to the famous orator Golesinius. For the less patient, there are exits to the west and southeast.
There is a scroll here.
> get scroll
OK.
> se
You are in the centre of a prosperous Southern town. To the northwest is the Capitol and there are roads to the south and east. In the distance you can see the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces and the solemn temples – such stuff as dreams are made on.
Going east from here gets you pummeled by the slings and arrows of fortune, but if you have a shield you can survive.
As you pass down the street a sudden volley of slings and arrows crashes against your shield. You carry on walking, to avoid further outrageous fortune.
The scroll from the Capitol incidentally rotates through a few messages, like “By indirections find directions out.” I suspect this might be a hint for one of the two mazes immediately after. Heading north gets you into a wood (with a paper marked ROSALIND)…
You are in the forest of Arden. High on a nearby tree there is fixed a piece of paper bearing the name ROSALIND.
> n
You are lost in the forest of Arden.
…going east instead goes into fog.
You are in the middle of a drooping fog as black as Acheron (sic).
It is impossible even to see the ground.
> w
You wander about in the fog and eventually blunder over a cliff.
They seem to be entirely distinct mazes right next to each other, and both of them of the “gimmick” variety. Dropping items doesn’t work at all the fog — the game explicitly says you can’t see the ground — and items don’t persist if you drop them in the forest.
Heading south into town there’s a shop with an Egyptian vase, and a barge with the Queen of Egypt.
You are on the barge. Various attendants are busily rushing hither and thither (and back again). There are steps down to the hold and to the north are the docks.
There is an Egyptian vase here!
The Queen of Egypt is here. On a burnish’d throne she sits. Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.
> n
The Queen does not want you to leave the barge.
“O! never was there queen so mightily betrayed!” she claims. Her attendants bar your exit, but you yourself rather feel that here is your space and that kingdoms are but play.
You also can get bothered by a moneylender:
As you pass the moneylender’s premises, their owner comes out to greet you. Scenting business, he offers to lend you 3,000 ducats until you next meet, the security to be a pound of flesh. Three thousand ducats. ‘Tis a good round sum.
Wilt thou borrow it from the moneylender?
I haven’t tried promising the pound of flesh yet.
That’s enough new events for the moment. Just to recap, we now have three seasons: winter, spring, and summer. Passing through them is one-way. Some events are only available in particular seasons; for example, the statue of a woman and Yorick (the jester) are only available in winter, and the scene where you’re trapped in a kitchen and get attacked by knights only happens in spring. (In summer, the room is locked up again.)
Looking at the meta-map…
…one town seems to be winter-only, and one town seems to be summer-only, with the central area mostly open during all three seasons. There may still be some chunks missing; I highly suspect there’s a way to get past the Undiscovered Country at the river, for instance, which could open up a new section to the south.
Is fall a season too? I’m not sure; the potion does definitely vanish after two uses, so if there’s an extra method of warping time one more time it requires an item later. Honestly, everything’s complex enough to keep track of as it is.
Since last time I have focused on trying to map everything out, before deciding what items / people / events go together to form solutions. I managed to stumble across a few solutions anyway.
Postcard that came with the Topologika version of Avon. Clockwise from the upper left: Hall’s Croft, Mary Arden’s House, Anne Hathaway’s Cottage, Shakespeare’s Birthplace.
First, a zoomed-out view showing everything I’ve seen so far:
The center, as mentioned last time, is a stage, immediately adjacent to a scene with three witches. (You incidentally get a second choice of item returning at the change in season, so I’m now 99.9% sure an eye of newt is the correct starting choice. Still not sure on the second, where the choices are toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog.)
Going east from the stage arrives at what I’ll call the forest area:
There’s a dagger and a laundry basket hanging out in the open that are easy to obtain.
You are on an east-west path, with a side passage to the north.
Is this a dagger you see before you? Yes, I believe so.
The laundry basket, curiously, prompts you to put items inside or to go inside yourself. You can then hide while inside and then repeatedly get prompted if you want to leave yet or not. I tried the laundry basket hiding on the nearby bear and it didn’t work. No luck with the dagger either:
You are on a bare and hostile moor. There is more moor to the south, a path to the west and a large building to the east.
There is a ferocious bear pursuing you!
> throw dagger
You fumble, and the dagger falls at your feet.
The bear pursues you, catches you and tears out your shoulder bone.
The “large building” is the Ides of March place I mentioned last time (although I’ve only visited in spring); to the south there’s a moor I’ve also only visited in spring, with a meat pie and a curious hovel.
You are on a moor. The ground is black here, as though scorched. The only path leads to the north, but there is a hovel to the southeast.
There is a nourishing meat pie here.
> se
You attempt to enter the hovel, which is gloomy and sinister-looking, but you run out in terror when you hear maniacal laughter and the words
“Bless thy five wits! Tom’s a cold. O! do de, do de, do de.
There’s also an enchanted forest with a mysterious pine, but I suspect we might need to warp to midsummer for something to happen.
You are in a magical wood. It feels as though spirits do wander here, swifter than the moon’s sphere. There are paths to the east and southeast.
> e
You are in another part of the forest. There is music in the air, marvellous sweet music. There are paths off to the west and southwest.
There is a pine tree here, from which a continuous melancholy howling emanates.
Finally, there’s a battlefield (see the winter of our discontent comment from last time) and a graveyard with a worm and a fellow of infinite jest. (“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.”)
You encounter the king’s jester, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy, alas greatly aged. He entertains you awhile and then totters away, wheezing “Don’t forget: the password is Golesida!”
You are in a walled graveyard. For those making a return journey, the way out is to the west, as the eastern exit is blocked by impenetrable grass.
Going back to the stage hub and going south arrives at what I’ll call the river area:
There’s a river you jump in (and die going over a waterfall) if you feel so inclined, and a bearded Scotsman.
You are on the bank of the river, which flows towards you down an unclimbable gorge and continues eastwards.
There is a large bearded Scotsman here, carrying a shield.
> swim
You leap into the angry flood.
Unfortunately the current is too strong for you and you are swept under and drowned.
For a less suicidal but more homicidal route, you can just try killing the Scotsman using the dagger from the forest area.
> kill scotsman
Confusion now hath made its masterpiece! With a gasp of “O, treachery!” the Scotsman dies. Thou hast played most foully.
You are on the river bank by the gorge.
There is a large bearded Scotsman here, brutally slain.
There is a shield here.
You can pick up the shield, which I haven’t found a use for. I’d expect some stronger reaction otherwise (like a group of angry Scotsmen gets revenge a few turns later) but maybe it is a much-delayed sort of thing.
Other than that, there’s the Undiscovered Country, which starts out seeming like it might be a maze.
> se
You are in the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns. There are paths in various directions.
If you check the map, you’ll see all four cardinal directions (N/S/E/W) lead back to the previous room. If you take all four, you’ll land in a new “Undiscovered Country” with no exits.
With this regard your currents turn awry and lose the name of action…
You are at the bourn of the undiscovered country, from which no traveller returns!
Going back to the stage and heading west to what I’ll call the Portia section…
…there is, first off, that calendar and potion of sleep which changes the season to spring. There’s a building to the west that is closed off in winter but can be entered in spring, but with an unfortunate demise shortly afer:
You open the door and enter the house.
The door slams behind you and you hear sounds of a key turning in the lock.
You are in the kitchen of a small house. There are several doors leading from it, all of which appear to be locked.
There is a letter here, addressed to Mistress Legosind and signed
‘Thine own true knight,
By day or night,
Or any kind of light
With all his might,
For thee to fight,
John Falstaff.
> e
You can’t go in that direction!
Suddenly the door opens and several knights armed with swords rush in. They brand you as an intruder and promptly slay you.
To the northwest there is a larger building including a “very realistic life-sized statue of a woman” (I have not been able to get any verbs to do anything) and an encounter with Lady Portia.
You are in a spaciously furnished chamber, which is clearly the boudoir of some elegant lady. Luxurious tapestries line the walls, the pile on the carpet is even deeper than that in most Adventure games, and there is a four-poster bed in one corner.
There are exits to the east and north.
There are three caskets here: one of gold, one of silver and one of lead!
The elegant lady who owns the apartment invites you to open a casket.
> open lead
The casket is empty. Shielded from your view, the Lady Portia performs a rearrangement of the contents of the caskets and invites you to open a second casket.
Choose again. Which casket will ye open now?
gold
You open the second casket, which contains a piece of smoothed ice.
The lady Portia picks up her caskets and leaves, murmuring “Sweet, adieu.”
Portia’s from The Merchant of Venice. She is bound by a curious will from her father where suitors who want to win her hand in marriage try to pick a casket (gold, silver, or lead); picking the correct one yields Portia’s portrait.
RANDOM PERSONAL TRIVIA: The first time I ever saw The Merchant of Venice was in 2004, the Al Pacino version (full video here). I was completely unfamiliar with the play, so much so I had no idea if it was categorized as comedy or tragedy. In the court scene where Shylock tries to get his pound of flesh I didn’t know if it was going to end in a bloodbath or not.
Heading back to the stage once more, and going north with a slight northwest turn, is a small area which I’ll call the Birnham wood.
Nothing much here at all, just a “milestone” in one of the locations.
You are in Birnham wood. There are paths in various directions.
There is an old milestone here.
My suspicion is this will only become important at season number 3, but I may just have the wrong verb to get the milestone to do something.
Heading northeast from the witches goes past an ice flow (which melts, remember, in spring), into the town of Eastcheap. Since the ice floe is a chasm in spring I haven’t seen the town in spring.
You are at the southern edge of a thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice – an ice floe, no less. There is a path back to the SW and a track north over the ice.
Note that you also have an odd encounter here:
A rather dull-looking constable appears, cries “HAVOC”, and lets slip the dogs of war. In fact, a small chihuahua appears and stands barking at you.
“Drug squad,” says the constable. “I must search you for certain substances.”
In fact he finds nothing prohibited and he and the dog slope off.
If you try to bring the season-changing potion in, that gets confiscated. So this prevents you from jumping over the chasm the easy way to check the town in spring. This means either
a.) the town just can’t be visited in spring at all
b.) the chasm can be jumped over, or there’s some alternate route to the town
c.) the drug squad can be outwitted, you can go to the town in spring, and then make it back to the stage by some other means
The most immediate encounter in town is with Falstaff, who is having a drinking contest.
You are in the Boar’s Head Inn, a place of great merriment. A large fat man called Sir John Falstaff is challenging all-comers to a drinking contest.
Do you wish to join the drinking bout with Falstaff?
yes
You are not able to compete with such a seasoned campaigner as Sir John Falstaff, and are soon thrown out of the tavern into the street, where you awake to see that…
There’s a side door you can try to enter the tavern but you get bonked on the head by a wine casket and die.
Nearby there’s also a Moorish gentlemen who kills you (“thou art to die”), unless you are wearing a clerical collar you find lying around the town:
A wild-eyed Moorish gentleman jumps at you from the shadows with a cry of “Thou art to die!” Fortunately the clerical collar you are wearing protects you from being strangled and you are able to break free.
The Moor is very apologetic, and mutters about someone called Des the moaner who once beat him at Reversi by cheating. “Go and see my agent, who lives near here,” he says. “The name is written in code on this paper. You’ll be recompensed.”
He runs off, shouting “Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulphur! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!”
You are in a particularly dark cul-de-sac at the end of Eastcheap. The only way out is back to the east.
There is a piece of paper here bearing the word “ASTHMA”.
There’s a gaol (which you can land in by trying to leave town with a bread from a baker, no idea if this is a trap or needed to win)…
The guards arrest you as you attempt to leave the town, claiming that you stole a loaf of bread from somebody. You are sent directly to gaol (& do not collect 200 pounds.)
You are in a cell in the town gaol. Somebody is whistling “Rule Britannia” outside. There are NO exits right now.
…and a series of five houses all which have deathtraps. I’m not understanding this section at all.
You are in Illyria Court. The main street is back to the west, but there are directions to various residences, as follows:
North: Olivia
Northeast: (Sir Andrew) Aguecheek
East: Fabian
Southeast: (Count) Orsino
South: Malvolio.
> n
The occupant of that particular dwelling is not at home. However they have left some mantraps for unwelcome visitors; a hit, a very palpable hit!
Still going! Lots and lots of scenes and everything non-linear! There’s a scene with the king and the daughters (as mentioned last time), and across from that is a farmer who has lost his chickens.
You are at the remains of a chicken farm. A fox has clearly visited this place and killed half the stock. The only way the farmhands will let you go is back to the west.
A farmer is standing here bemoaning the loss of his livestock.
“What! all my pretty chickens and their dam, at one fell swoop?” he mutters. “I asked my keeper, Puck, to get the fox’s earth seen to, but he went away saying that he’d put a hurdle round the earth in forty minutes (and that was hours ago.)”
This he repeats, over and over again, trying to understand the tragedy.
Finally, there’s a curious maze of sorts. It’s not really a maze in the normal sense; it acts like the haunted house in Murdac (I think) where you have to take a path north between NE and NW choices, and sometimes the choice is deadly, and when the choice is deadly you get a cryptic warning:
You are in a maze of mountain paths. There are exits to the northeast, northwest and south.
Is this a dagger you see before you? Yes, I believe so.
> NE
Cassandra runs past you, raving:
“Lend me ten thousand eyes, and I will fill them with prophetic tears!”
A death scene for good measure:
Cassandra runs past you, raving:
“Behold, distraction, frenzy, and amazement, Like witless anticks, one another meet.”
You are in a maze of mountain paths. There are exits to the northeast, northwest and south.
> NW
Some loose rubble falls on you, and you die with the words of Cassandra in your ears:
“Look! how thou diest; look how thy eye turns pale;
Look! how thy wounds do bleed at many vents…”
Head to the north enough times in a row safely and you can pick up a copy of the Iliad, which counts as a treasure with a ! mark. I got to it randomly without really figuring out the puzzle entirely, so that might be that. (Going south is always safe, so you can skedaddle to the exit once you make it north.)
From the play Troilus and Cressida, as drawn by Michael Goodman. Cassandra received the divine gift of truthful prophecy but also the divine curse she would never be believed.
One more encounter: a lake with a fisherman. I was already holding a worm when I entered, so I inadvertently solved a puzzle.
There is an angler fishing here. He seems to be having little success.
The angler looks up as you enter, seizes the worm from you with a cry of glee and starts to fish. In no time he has hooked a massive trout. In gratitude he decides to share the fish with you and promptly grills it over a fire that he lights. You have taken your first bite when…
The ghost of some dead king (possibly Hamlet’s father) appears.
“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm,” he declaims reproachfully. “A king may go progress through the guts of a beggar.”
The angler flees in terror. The ghost melts away, saying:
“From me you will inherit spiritual powers. The word that will prove effective to you in these matters is BRANDY.”
You are by a small lake. Moonlight shines down encouragingly. The town itself is to the north.
That’s a hefty chunk and even if I could keep going I decided I needed to report in. I haven’t used any of the magic words I’ve been racking up (golesida, brandy, asthma) so I expect I can make headway elsewhere.
with Hamil and Murdac being Partington’s (he was also one of the trio of authors on Acheton). I’ve gotten used to their particular quirks and rules, such as the possibility of a softlock if you do things in the wrong order. Frankly, within the confines of accepting the Phoenix norms, Murdac is one of the best classic treasure-hunt adventures I’ve played, so I was looking forward to Avon.
Avon has its own atmosphere due to being heavily drawn from Shakespeare. The setup is “you’ve fallen into a Shakespeare-based world, now get out”.
One day, after watching (or perhaps reading) too many Shakespeare plays, you find yourself wandering around a wondrously enchanted land. Here they use a richer language than is usual and you come across scenes which may remind you of certain Shakespearean plays.
How you are going to return successfully to the present day is something that you will have to find out for yourself but it may be worthwhile to keep any valuables you come across.
The general effect is not that of typical fantasy (that is, not like Hamil or Murdac). I wouldn’t call it “surrealism” as much as “tilted realism” where characters and objects and plot blur and swap places; it almost feels like one of the Andrew Schultz wordplay-based games or the Shake a Tower section of Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It. Consider the opening room:
You are standing on a flat plain. From here it seems that all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances to the north, south, east and west.
The text gives the appearance that the players of the world are also the same thing as the exits.
The introductory help incidentally claims
An exhaustive knowledge of the Shakespearean canon is not necessary, as in most cases just the problems rather than the solutions are pinched from Shakespeare.
but given I’ve already used Shakespeare knowledge to aid in one puzzle (as I’ll get to), this might not entirely be the truth.
Speaking of Phoenix mainframe norms, immediately to the north of the starting room the game pulls out a similar “pick your item” trick to Brand X / Philosopher’s Quest.
You are on a wild heath. So foul and fair a day you have not seen. A path leads off to the south, there is a forest path to the northwest, and a chilly wind blows down a path to the northeast.
What are these so wither’d and wild in their attire? They should be women but their beards forbid thee to interpret that they are so.
The witches are prepared to give you one of the following objects:
An eye of newt.
A toe of frog.
A wool of bat.
A tongue of dog.
Which object will you take?
I think the right pick here is eye of newt. This is because not long after the start of the game, the world goes dark
It is growing dark… too dark to see with the naked eye.
but if you have the eye of newt, it provides light (“Fortunately the newt’s eye provides a dull illumination.”) Philosopher’s Quest had a trick where you could get two items but I don’t see any such loophole here. I may be missing something, though; for one thing, Philosopher’s Quest had an alternate way to get one item as long as you didn’t pick it! So I’ll keep with getting the eye but will remain suspicious in case a situation really seems like it could use some frog toe.
Just to the west of the starting stage is a calendar turned to January 6, and just off of that is one of the coolest gimmicks of the game.
> w
You are in the market place. To the east there seems to be some kind of stage, and there are dwellings to the northwest (large), west (medium-sized) and southwest (small).
There is a calendar here, which gives the date as January 6th.
> sw
You are in a cell, which clearly belongs to some holy man, as you can tell from the religious decoration of the room. The only way out is by a door to the northeast.
There is a phial here, containing a potion of mandragora.
> get mandragora
OK.
> drink mandragora
You drink the potion. Presently through all your being there runs a cold and drowsy humour and your eyes’ windows fall like death. In this borrow’d likeness of shrunk death you continue and then awake much later as from a pleasant sleep to see…
That’s the potion intended to cause Juliet to have the appearance of dying, but really go to sleep for two days. Here, it affects quite a few more than two days, because if you go back and look at the calendar, it has now changed to March 15th.
That means that at the start of the game, the season is winter, but you can change it to spring. (This is the puzzle I mentioned where knowing the reference helped understand it.) This causes some of the rooms to be different. For example, there’s an ice floe that you can pass over during winter to get to a large section of rooms to the north, but by spring, that ice floe has melted.
Or you can have more subtle interactions, like with Richard III:
> s
You encounter a kingly figure, sadly rather hunchbacked. He mutters that it now is the winter of his discontent, and hobbles off. You are in a field. The ground is in tip-top condition, should anybody ever wish to fight a battle here. You can retreat northwards.
This meeting does not occur if you arrive at the field in spring. However, what you can do in spring is get yourself stabbed:
As you enter the building, you realise with a shudder that it is now the Ides of March. There are cries of “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!” and you are stabbed by several men in togas. With a cry of “Hate, you brute?” you give a reproachful look at the nearest of your assailants and expire.
Karl Theodor von Piloty, 1865, The Murder of Julius Ceasar.
I have no idea what this building is like in winter, because if I try to approach in winter I get chased (and killed) by a bear. Of course the bear only shows up in winter because it is from The Winter’s Tale.
A savage clamor!
Well may I get aboard! This is the chase.
I am gone forever!
He exits, pursued by a bear.
(That’s from the actual play, not the game.)
One last general observation about the game is that this seems to have “scripted scenes” far more than most Phoenix games except maybe Hezarin. I’m reminded of the ICL game Quest which randomly has you pick between Basil Wolstegnome and Maria Gnomesick at a Gnome of the Year show; here, you are asked, King Lear style, to decide which daughter gets a kingdom:
You are in a gorgeous palace. A King here is arguing with his courtiers as to the best way to divide up his kingdom. As you arrive, they decide to ask your advice, Heaven knows why.
“To which of my daughters, Regan, Goneril and Cordelia, shall I leave the largest share of my kingdom?” demands the king.
I have yet to resolve this issue; I went with Cordelia and the king was displeased:
“Mend your speech a little, lest you may mar your fortunes.” says the king, who evidently disagrees with your decision. “Hence, and avoid my sight! Vassal! Miscreant!”
In fact, I have yet to resolve much in the way of puzzles at all, and I even still have a few question marks on my map, so I’ll report back next time with a full accounting of all environs. I will say (based on the back cover of the commercial version of the game referring to “three dates”, see image at the top of this post) it is likely that we’ll have at least one more season to warp to and cause all the rooms to change, meaning this game could be very long and deep indeed.
The puzzle I was stuck on last time was, weirdly enough, fair. Maybe it needed some design finesse but…
…just as a reminder, I had found a vending machine with a coin underneath. Doing SHAKE MACHINE led to a rattling sound and the “all right” message made me think the rattling was referring to the coin. But no, SHAKE still gets the sound, and as mentioned last time, inserting a coin gets it stuck.
However, it dislodged whatever happened to be stuck by a little nudge, so that SHAKE MACHINE again gets it out.
That’s a key. I then immediately tested it everywhere, find it fit in the keyhole next to the window, and turning the key leads to a click.
This unlocks the “control” room downstairs, but before going down there, I should mention while stumped I also managed to find a shovel. LOOK UNDER worked (without documentation or prompting); what about other prepositions?
And no, SEARCH or any other verb does not find the shovel. It has to be LOOK BEHIND.
There isn’t anything intrinsically unfair about including prepositions in searches, but it has to be documented in some way they’re going to occur, especially because they were almost unused in text adventures at this time. I admit my mental logic probably ran along the way the author wanted — I thought that file cabinet is big, I wonder if anything is behind there — but I can still recognize the game is asking for a command without teaching it exists. Text adventures have the unique attribute of “technically anything in English works” but in practice as commands get rarer and rarer they need to be treated uniquely, like you have a platformer where the Z key does something essential but the game doesn’t bother to mention it and you’re just supposed to hit every key on the keyboard trying.
Moving on, with shovel in hand (and the control room unlocked) I headed downstairs, and found the control room was just a message with a single button.
The button unlocks a second door marked “TRANSPORT”.
Just to the left is a button you can push to activate the cart; then pushing the pedal will lead you deeper in the mine, where you start to have trouble breathing.
Curiously enough, the “trouble breathing” isn’t really a timer as you might expect — it means if you try to go too far deep then you die from lack of oxygen, but otherwise the “trouble breathing” state simply hovers around without consequence. Usually for one of these games when something that indicates the player’s medical condition is getting worse triggers, that’s automatically a timer that needs to be beaten.
Further in there is a purple button that can’t be reached. This will be important shortly.
You can then go in the mine, where the lantern (which I assume has been providing light through the whole transport section) is too faint to see in the darkness. You can still DIG (with that shovel from behind the file cabinet) and get an item that your player takes, then leave safely.
If you try to go deeper into the mine, that’s when the lack of oxygen kicks in:
The hammer is described as lightweight which I assume is intended as a hint it can’t be used to break things (like the Office door upstairs which is still unlocked, and is a red herring at the end).
I was horribly stuck enough here that I decided I had enough and needed to poke at a walkthrough, and here we hit the puzzle of the title.
Allow me a brief side mention of a much more recent game, +=3, by Carl de Marcken and David Baggett. Going by the ifdb description:
This one-puzzle game was Dave Baggett’s response to a discussion (flame war?) in rec.arts.int-fiction and specifically to Russ Bryan’s claim that there could be no puzzles which are logical yet unsolvable.
I remember some discussions from rec.arts.int-fiction (the Usenet group) being indistinguishable from flame wars back in the day, so maybe it was both. Here’s the opening (and only) room.
On the Three Troll Bridge
You are standing on a rickety wooden bridge. A burly Three Troll blocks your passage north, across the bridge.
Something is ticking.
In any case, +=3 was essentially a thought experiment: how could you make a logical unsolvable puzzle? Now, as a one-puzzle game, you may want to skip down a bit farther to avoid my spoiling it (I’ll drop a picture of a floppy disk to mark when it is safe to come back), as I’m about to cut and paste in the walkthrough.
Ready?
This “game” is meant to illustrate the fact that “logical” and “simple” puzzles can be made arbitrarily difficult to solve. In this particular case, the puzzle exploits an assumption that experienced text adventure players will make — that things that aren’t listed in one’s inventory aren’t actually manipulable game objects.
>give shirt to troll
>give shoes to troll
>give socks to troll
>n
The solution is perfectly logical and simple. If you were standing on a bridge with a troll who clearly wanted you to give him something, and you had nothing to give him, what would you do? You’d give him the shirt off your back, of course.
Note that if you say “examine me”, you’ll see that you are in fact a clothed human. (If you’d have been naked, the game certainly would have pointed this out, right?)
Everything explicitly mentioned in this game except the troll is a red herring.
I don’t think the game really illustrates anything about logic and simplicity as much as that it is far too much to expect the player to refer to objects that aren’t listed as there (and why can’t our player have boots, instead of shoes)?
All that preface was technically a hint for the puzzle: how do you press the purple button? All the information needed is in my prior posts (or at least all the information needed according to the game itself).
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
So way back at the chest next to the starting room…
…we can REMOVE NAIL WITH HAMMER.
There is no nail in the description, and even being given a “wooden” chest, there is no reason to assume it uses nails rather than, say, screws. The only feasible way to solve the puzzle seems to be to focus entirely on the hammer and what it might be used for, and given that nothing is breakable, come up with the use of pulling nails instead, and try to guess where a nail might be and take the leap of faith.
Weirdly enough, the game was well coded and there was clearly some creativity poured into this, especially given the lack of historical precedent; it’s just the game design effect was a miss. The author likely saw the Med Systems games like Deathmaze but definitely hadn’t seen the Japanese Mystery House, so this concept of a tight 3D environment was all his, and I appreciated the novel ways of stretching what turned out to be a tiny map. I’m especially curious if the graphical elements are what led the author down the road of including preposition-searches; looking at the file cabinet as a graphic did give me the primal urge to peek behind it in a way I’m fairly certain I would not have experienced with text.
Maybe the other game in the two-pack (Spook House) will go better now that I know the author’s tendencies, but I’m going to take a breather before trying it, and instead go to a game series I know very well: the Phoenix mainframe series, and the ultra-hard British game Avon.
Since last time I got unstuck by figuring out I was missing something on the interface, only to get stuck again quite soon afterwards. Voltgloss helped in the comments and I was able to make a micro-piece more of progress. Just plunging through that hint sheet is starting to look tempting, but maybe pausing to write will help break things through.
So it had always occurred to me that it might be possible to look in alternate directions, but I checked the manual carefully and this is all it had to say about movement. N/S/E/W as well as F/B/L/R work as I describe — you only can move with them, and if you run into a wall or a closed door the game just says you can’t go that way.
However, if you TURN NORTH or TURN SOUTH you actually change your facing. This is not in the documentation. (It turns out the arrow keys, which the manual indicates are equivalent to F/B/L/R, do allow for turning, if being used while holding the shift key.)
The storage room has a book you can see facing south which contains a “credit card” where one side says “Mine 1A”. The north side has a chest (as shown) with a lantern.
The furnace room has a message on the north side…
…and if you face the door leading back to the hall to the west, you can see a button. I do not do what the button does.
I should add it isn’t 100% obvious you should check the door facing the hall — that is, looking back the way you came — but the view of the message on the wall shows the button to the left. This let me know I was supposed to turn more. This differs from Mystery House II (MSX version) where all views were narrowly only of the environment directly in front.
Having done all that, I was still stuck.
I had to plunge all the way down the hints Voltgloss gave to find the command SHOW CARD. I don’t think that square is supposed to be a camera, I think it is supposed to be the cardboard with the message, and the camera is just hidden (this is because there’s another spot later where the card works, and no square).
I still don’t have access to much, but I also don’t think (due to the graphics and needing to have graphics for multiple views) this is a large game.
I haven’t gotten into the “Offices” yet but the doors are marked with what is inside.
To the north there’s a snack machine and another distinctly unfair moment.
First off, if there’s any way to push one of the particular three green buttons (as opposed to just PUSH GREEN) then I don’t know if I’m doing it right or not. Both PUSH GREEN 1 and PUSH GREEN BUTTON 1 give a click sound, but the game also accepts commands like READ BOOK 1 indicating it is just ignoring the later stuff in a command.
Shaking the machine reveals a sound, but I was heavily stumped until, via instinct, the game’s picture, and experience in Graham Nelson games, I tried LOOK UNDER MACHINE, revealing a hidden coin.
I checked later, and SEARCH doesn’t work — it has to be LOOK UNDER. The manual once mentions LOOK INSIDE but no clue that LOOK UNDER works, and I can assure you this is a very rare command to cause a unique effect in this era.
You can insert the coin in the machine but none of the green buttons do anything. I still strongly suspect this might be where I’m stuck on forward progress, as I’m pretty much empty on things to do elsewhere.
For example, there’s a locked file cabinet to the east. There doesn’t seem to be any potential shenanigans possible without a key. There’s also a guard post with a window next to a keyhole, but again no key.
You can also step out to a platform to the west, turn around, and SHOW CARD while facing the door, which causes it to work like an elevator.
The lower floor just consists of two locked rooms, and the SHOW CARD trick doesn’t work on either.
I would guess this is where the shutoff lever is hiding.
It is faintly possible the author is being too clever with the parser. The manual gives “CAREFULLY EXAMINE THE BOMB” as a possible command and LOOK UNDER is parsed as its own command. Maybe there’s some sensible syntax to press a green button but it only works ordered as a very particular sentence; most games of this era would let you PRESS 2 or the like.
I’m still happy to take ROT13 hints on anything at the moment.
As far as the “classic” Scott Adams goes, they’re taking a break throughout 1982; the first six of the Adams games were converted to graphical format, but I’m not replaying games just because they add graphics.
However, Adventure International was still selling at a brisk rate through the year, including some products by high school student Roger Jonathan Schrag. One of them, Arex, is a Qix variant of sorts that looks genuinely well-programmed.
Maybe his adventures are the same way, but I could only get a little bit of the way into Toxic Dumpsite before being stumped. It, along with the game Spook House, were sold as a “double feature” in a single game package; both feature TRS-80 graphics.
As the manual states:
Something’s gone very wrong at the Toxic Dumpsite where life-threatening nuclear wastes are treated and buried. The entire plant will explode like the Fourth of July in less than 30 minutes unless you can avoid the many traps and protection systems, find the right controls and shut the plant down in time.
The 30 minutes is counted in real time. If you step away from the keyboard and come back 30 minutes later the explosion will have happened.
(This is, in a way, very bad and not bad at all. Very bad in that real time and typing don’t always mix, not bad at all in that when I play games on a modern emulator with save states I can usually beat any time limits handily.)
You start with a note in your hands — it seems like you’d be briefed about this information beforehand?
Other than that, you start in a series of three rooms: the entrance, a storage room, and a room with a furnace.
Trying to head north or south from the entrance leads to locked doors (I assume one of the locked doors was simply the way we came in). I’ve tried many verbs and actions on the doors and the furnace with no luck. So I’m stuck on the game right away.
I’ve tried every verb on this list on the furnace.
There is a hint sheet for the game but I know if I check it this early I’ll have very little resistance for checking hints later. If someone would like to deliver a hint in ROT13 in comments, though, I’ll take it that way.
Having an extremely hard opening puzzle doesn’t mean the game will be dire — Subterranean Encounter started the same way — but it certainly doesn’t give a good first impression.
I was indeed close. I just had one puzzle remaining.
Before I get to that…
…I wanted to share a discovery made by eientei on Discord. Vince Apps wrote other books in addition to the ones I mentioned last time, porting essentially the same programs over; one for Electron, one for Amstrad, and one for MSX. The MSX book was translated into Finnish.
This translation includes Forbidden City, or rather Kielletty Kaupunki, and yes, all the text is in Finnish.
This represents the first Finnish translation we’ve hit on this blog, meaning we just need some Danish and Icelandic to complete our Team Nordic trading cards (Ringen was originally in Norwegian, and Stuga was in Swedish).
So the puzzle I was missing was simply applying the “go twice to succeed” hint from the notebook. Absolutely everything else (the amulet, the helmet, the locked door, etc.) can be ignored. I hadn’t checked hints yet but I did look at a map (in case I did my usual facepalm of missing a room), and I found something curious:
The “Energy Field” represents me getting teleported back to the maze. Since other exits also similarly lead back to previous places I thought that was that, but the map at CASA Solution Archive was telling me there was a room there.
This suggested perhaps the west exit is what needed to be done twice. So I took the exit, wandered back from the maze all the way back over to the same exit, and then took it again:
No special message or anything, now just going west leads to a short corridor. Moving forward is then victory:
There wasn’t any good reason for the behavior. I commented last time on alien cities working fairly well for the early text adventure medium, but this game tried hard to abuse the latitude: lots of items that are meaningless, a map with some truly random twists and turns that suggest the author wasn’t creating geography as much as making a stream of consciousness, and an ending puzzle where neither the arrival of the hint itself (via notebook summoned by pulling a lever) nor the actual action really made sense even in a future-universe with inexplicable alien things.
Still, someone cared about the game enough to translate it!
Next: I’ve got one more short game coming up which is likely also death-trap reliant (but very different in character to Forbidden City) followed by a return to the mathematicians of Cambridge and the game Avon.
In a deserted city on a far away planet, there is legend of a hidden treasure guarded by force fields, hallucinatory gases and alien life forms. Do you have the courage to set forth and seek the treasure?
The city lies at the edge of a vast primeval forest, near shimmering lakes, and will offer the unsuspecting visitor choices of silver spoons, blue liquids, metal discs and possible death. You will see however, that if the going gets tough, you can always stop for a Coke!!
We’ve played so far one game by Vince Apps, Devil’s Island as published by his company Apex Trading. It was mostly memorable for the opening puzzle requiring waiting in a cell in real-time (!) for a guard to show up; past that point was an extremely open map (with very little walled off) but a lot of instant-death, enough that I felt it proper to color code some rooms in red.
Forbidden City doesn’t have a real-time puzzle, and it is much more linear than Devil’s Island (so far) but the instant-death is still in. This time our goal, rather than escape, is to Discover the Aliens hidden treasure.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
The game was originally from Dragon 32, just like Devil’s Island, with a TI-99 version and Spectrum versions appearing as well, and I haven’t been able to find any of those versions. Rather, I played the C64 version, which showed up as a type in via The Commodore 64 Program Book. (It is through this book we even know the name Vince Apps, otherwise everything would have to be credited to Apex Trading.)
He also has the Texas Program Book (as in Texas Instruments computers), the Oric 1 Program Book, and a 40 Educational Games for the Commodore 64. The last gives some more biographical info:
Vince Apps is a regular contributor to journals such as Popular Computing Weekly and Home Computing Weekly. He is a graduate of Sussex University in Computer Science and has his own successful software company.
We still have three more games to go from the author so there’s still time to dig up a little more; for now let’s get into the game itself and enter an alien city.
Alien cities have generally fared pretty well here. The enforced text-adventure minimalism works better with exploring techno-halls than with nature, authors can go freeform with button-pressing effects (and they’re a lot less tempted to be arbitrary like they are with fantasy games), and language barriers mean NPCs don’t have to be conversational.
To make a more concrete comparison, the modern-realistic Crime Stopper which was just featured here fell short due to character interaction being extremely limited and some massive simplifications in terms of city layout. With an alien city, it is more reasonable to have a slightly esoteric subway/train/monorail system, as the other Forbidden City (William Demas) does.
I got stuck fairly quickly, because one of the commands is unconventional.
Specifically, there’s nothing to do here if you OPEN GATE or UNLOCK GATE or SCREAM or a variety of other things. The usual I and INVENTORY got me nothing. Finally I went to HELP (assuming maybe it was like Fortress at Times-End where it was necessary and not just a last-resort) and was told TAKE INVENTORY was a command.
So you start with a key but can only refer to the thing that does the unlocking, the key, not the thing being unlocked, the gate.
The game, as already mentioned is fairly linear; the red rooms are deathtraps, with a deep pit, crushing walls, and a laser testing chamber.
You can find a device with a button in a dark room to turn off a force field. Then there’s a “silver spoon” (which I haven’t used yet, might be a red herring) and a “small metal disk” in a cupboard…
…and you can take the disk over to a nearby device, drop it in, and get a rusty metal rod. Then you can go to a “flat wall” with a hole, insert the rod, and reveal a doorway.
This is followed by everyone’s favorite, a maze.
In the middle there’s a room with four levers, and one of them kills you, and of course you just need to test them out in order to find out which lever does which.
The maze only has cardinal directions, and it is the kind with a “path” where the wrong direction consistently drops the player back in the first few rooms.
Moving past the maze…
…the vast majority of the “obstacles” are still instant death traps. There’s two lever rooms (four levers each) where some of the levers do useful things and some eject you into space, and again, then only way to find out which is which is to test.
Two of the levers spawn a notebook (the same notebook). That’s just a code where you shift the letters forward by one to get “go twice to succeed”. I haven’t found anywhere to use it yet.
One of the levers randomly takes you to a “lab” area with a tin (see above, I haven’t worked out the number’s meaning yet), another deathtrap room, a potion that kills you if you drink it, and a steel locker that explodes if you open it.
Another lever goes to a forest area with a “pod” containing an “amulet”. The amulet has no description if you look at it and you can’t WEAR it.
Finally the only thing I seem to be “stuck” on is a locked door. I can’t refer to it in any way and the KEY I had at the start of the game doesn’t work.
This is one of those games where there aren’t really “puzzles” to struggle on as much as trying anything to get the game to recognize an interaction. For the record, I’ve got
a plastic cube (with a cryptogram that turns into “rubik got here too”)
a helmet (with several small lights)
an amulet
a flash of luminous blue liquid (that makes you heavy and kills you)
a key (from the start of the game)
a silver spoon
a tin (with the number hint)
a notebook (with the “go twice” hint)
a black metal rod (that was used to open the hidden doorway)
I trust either the next steps will be very simple or impossible; either way, based on the length of the author’s other game, I expect my finale here to be in my next post.
I probably should have checked help sooner. Unusually for Kim Schuette’s Book of Adventure Games, it discusses possible bugs in the hints themselves and even mentions a late action only working on two of the six playthroughs. I wasn’t able to get the ending to happen so while I came close, I can’t show the grand finale.
Via eBay, with someone’s hand-labeled disk and hand-made map.
First off, I had something close to the right actions last time.
I had missed the fact in the room with the receipt at the hotel, the phone rings. I did have the sound on, but you need to pause in what appears to be real time; if you’re typing commands too fast it doesn’t turn up, and even after I knew about the phone potentially ringing, I wasn’t able to get anything to happen until a second attempt.
“It’s all set, Beau. She shoves off tomorrow.” They hang up.
Now, you’re supposed to follow the receipt to the red herrings, just as I did. When I did so I had nothing happen and left, but if you wait — by just WAIT or LOOK — eventually someone will spring a trap on you and trap you in a locker.
The locker has a ticket stub (needed for the cinema) so you need to get in here. To escape is the only real item based puzzle: the cigarette and lighter from the desk are needed. You stand on the desk and set off the smoke alarm.
To the game’s credit, I figured out the parser commands here fairly quickly. With ticket stub in hand we could visit the cinema, and there Beau (the fiancée) arrives (I think probably this would not have happened had we not caught the phone call).
However, when we go in, we find the man… dead!
We can take the invitation if we like; whatever happens, it seems to be scripted that if we arrive at the platform where our office is we’ll get a message that tells us to wait at a phone.
We can then follow that phone message over to the (previously not-useful) museum, and have an encounter which results in another dead body.
Now we get into serious bug territory. According to Kim Schuette, the body has a key (according to the source code) but no way to access it in the game. The key then works on a locker in the stadium which opens a duffle bag with barbells, but there seems to be no purpose in this anyway (since neither he in the past nor myself now were able to see any of this in-game).
This encounter is the last you can have before picking up the ransom money, as you were informed about way back at the penthouse; you were supposed to pick it up at 7 PM, then drop it off at the lockers at the bus station at 9 PM. This part of the game is a matter of typing WAIT a lot or just I since that’s a quicker command.
I dutifully rode the clunky subway system back to the bus station, did the drop off, waited nearby for the pickup (as Mr. Schuette explains in his book) … and had nothing happen. The person that is supposed to do the pickup is Livwell (that we learned about via bribery in my last post) but he never shows.
West & 21st St.: Wait and watch for Crowded Corridor. If no one comes by 10 PM (the courier is Livwell), he won’t come due to a bug in the program. (On six near-identically played games, he appeared only twice. Perhaps a flag wasn’t set by doing something which seemed to have no bearing on the game, like not getting the Hanky or going to the “wrong” bank.)
The ending at least sounds dramatic. You’re supposed to follow the man (Livwell) with the suitcase all the way back to the Sizemore building (??) and then sneak in the elevator and shoot him. Then, arriving at the roof for the drop off, you encounter J.J. (the basketball star) and Cartier (the allegedly kidnapped person), shoot the man, and “pull lever” (which I assume stops Cartier, who was in on the scheme all along).
Ugh. I won’t recount my time valiantly trying to play the game for real and getting nowhere. I think the authors had some interesting scenes mapped out, but didn’t have a good way of putting them together that made both narrative and ludic sense at the same time. There wasn’t any learning that happened from the man at the museum, nor with the death at the theater, and no sense of a gradually untangling mystery that requires thoughtful deduction. Simply a sequence of events happened which eventually led to what would be a conclusion (if the game wasn’t broken).
You’ll be glad to hear I am already part-way through my next post, so I hope it won’t be nearly as long a gap before you hear from me next time.
Nothing terrible earth-shaking this time: I visited all the subway stops and mapped everything out.
The key in the top is now fixed, with W and E going the appropriate directions.
We’ve seen the starting office, the penthouse, a museum, and an ATM, but a brief tour of the rest:
Sports Complex:
Mainly seems to be there for a locker, which I assume we get a key for at some point.
The NOISE MAKER seems tempting for some puzzle where we have to distract bad guys, but I haven’t come close to any related scenario yet.
Unfriendly:
There might be a scene later, but this was the most bare-bones of the destinations I could find. It just is described as an unfriendly part of town, with no buildings to enter.
Broken Arms Hotel:
We can see from the registrar where Beau McBride is staying (that’s the new fiancée of our kidnappee), and visit to see a shipping notice.
I did find the crate, which I’ll show off in a moment.
“Executive Row”:
Where broken-down executives go to self-medicate.
There’s a person who indicates they know something that you can bribe. I am quite unclear what it has to do with the case — I feel like I’m seeing something out of sequence. All I can clean is someone named Oliver Livwell exists and was acting suspiciously.
Bus Station
Rather like the Sports Complex, this seems to exist for the purpose of providing a mysterious locker that we can unlock. Again, we seem to be out of sequence:
Warehouse
There’s a steel door that we can’t get through (and where I assume more drama occurs) but also the crate I promised would come up again. It is full of red herrings.
Cinema
There’s a cinema that is currently playing a movie, and it doesn’t let you buy a ticket; however, if you have a stub, you can see a movie in progress. So this is just a matter of waiting for the right item.
Apartment
You can visit your own apartment, which is very messy. There’s a picture of your mother with a safe behind it.
The combination hidden in the office (from a few posts ago) works, although it took me a while to get the syntax. You need to TURN DIAL LEFT or TURN DIAL RIGHT, and then a real-time interface happens where a number rapidly increases and you have to push a button when it hits the right spot — almost a mini-game.
The statue contains a statue which appears to be a reference to The Maltese Falcon.
It’s a statue of a bird of some sort. This is a family heirloom, handed down to you from your great grand-dad. On the bottom of the base it reads, “Made in Malta.”
If the statue shows up in the plot, I haven’t seen it yet; at the moment it appears to be just a reference.
Bank
Nothing exciting about this. I assume this is simply another location the bankcard works at, but maybe a future event happens here.
Summary
This seems to be the sort of game where I’m supposed to find clues in a specific sequence, and various people and events will show up at the right intersections once I learn about them; alternately, I’ll get a key for one place, which then has a key for the next one. In a ludic sense, I don’t really feel like I’m investigating anything, but let me save any design conclusions for the end of the game.
The locations end up not being large so I suspect once the progression really gets going unless there’s some difficult puzzles along the way, I might blaze through what remains of the plot. So hoping for a win next time?
Renga in Blue 