Author Archive
Not a lot of progress, but I did manage to connect up all the map, and I wanted to — for my benefit as much as yours — lay out all the puzzles I still had left to resolve, and items that have yet to hold a purpose.
The first bit of progress was not really from me but from a commenter, the astute Matt W.:
also, what if you try “meadow” or “remember meadow” in the memory room?
Well, let’s try it:
You are in a small, many-sided room. There is an obvious exit to the northeast. Some roughly carved letters on the south wall say “DEARIE, DO YOU REMEMBER?”
REMEMBER MEADOW
You’re in the center of the grassy meadow.
REMEMBER MEMORY
You’re in the Memory Room.
It’s another XYZZY-style teleport. I don’t know if it is useful for a puzzle or just for convenience. The map really tries hard to have multiple entrances and it does all hook together. My “second” and “third” undergrounds hadn’t connected yet, but this room
This is a lovely little room that looks like some kind of beautiful luminous blue jewel inside. A narrow opening heads off to the northeast, and a smooth path leads upward.
There is a message scrawled on the stones. The walls shine with a lovely irridescent glow.
READ MESSAGE
Some demented person has scrawled on the floor “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don’t Wanna Let The Gong Go.”
and this room
You are in a neat square room with an odd device in the middle of the floor. It has a big metal container, some copper tubing, and smells like something gone sour.
The only visible exit goes south.
E
You bruise your head painfully on the rock wall.
both link up. Specifically, if you drag the gong to the room with the message, and bring a rubber hammer from next to the cargo room, you can make a new exit.
BOINNNG!! CRASH, rumble, rumble …
When the dust clears you see that the lovely blue wall has crumbled and fallen into a heap of rubble, revealing a room to the west.
Here’s everything linked into one big underground:
I’m unclear if I’m close or not to revealing everything, but the obstacles I haven’t resolved are:
1. Getting dizzy and falling when going down a stair.
You are on a very dangerous path that winds up and down along the sheer stone wall of the abyss.
D
Suddenly you feel light-headed, sick. Your eyes refuse to focus. You begin to cough, and there is a tight feeling in your chest. You fall to the ground …
2. An abyss you may or may not be able to cross. If something does work I suspect magic.
You are at the west end of a gigantic cavern. The towering walls remind you of some sort of gothic cathedral, and your eyes peer vainly upward in an effort to see the ceiling. Faint wisps of mist eddy around you like lost souls. A narrow opening leads southwest, and the cavern stretches out to the east, where a bottomless abyss crosses the floor.
The abyss effectively blocks you from crossing the cavern.
3. A hog on the outside who won’t let you approach; I suspect it may be connected to a spot on the outside that needs to be dug up. The game says you don’t have a shovel, but it may be the hog can do the digging?
You are in a small smelly animal pen. There is a pile of well-chewed corncobs in one corner, and a lot of mud. The only ways out of the pen are to the east and southeast.
A rather hostile pink hog is snorting at you from a corner.
GET HOG
The hog glowers at you out of little close-set eyes and snorts angrily. He doesn’t seem to like the idea.
4. The robot, which I have still to defeat.
A huge, heavily built robot rolls menacingly around the room, sensors blinking, and refuses to let you pass.
5. There’s a “pirate” gnome that will grab treasures if they’re in your inventory or on the floor, and I have yet to find out where they get stashed; if it is like Original Adventure, by finding the stash there will be a new treasure.
There’s a message about “ominous rustling” I assume has to be from the pirate if you have nothing valuable.
There is an ominous rustling sound from the darkness behind you. When you whirl around, someone — or some THING — dodges back into the shadows.
6. Two rooms of buttons I have yet to be able to do anything with. I still haven’t found anything resembling a combination, but I suspect if there’s any “you just missed an exit and a side room” type puzzle left, it’s this one.
There is a large panel in the west wall. It is firmly shut.
Next to the panel are ten buttons labeled 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.
Items I haven’t used are a magazine…
It’s a copy of “Games for the IBM PC,” but unfortunately it’s the special gnomish edition — all in GNULLIAC.
… and … that’s pretty much it. Everything else has served a purpose. Maybe the rubber mallet that rang the gong also does something else, but I doubt it? I burned using a tuna sandwich to placate a mountain lion and technically the lion is optional. That fur muff I speculated about last time was indeed useful for putting down the fragile sphere:
The lovely crystal sphere lands lightly on the fur muff.
Not much more to keep scratching at, so I suspect victory or bust next time. (I’ll also take hints in comments, but ROT13 only please.)
Another Dian Girard book, this one co-written with her husband.
In addition to being a member of a science fiction club, Dian Girard wrote books and stories herself.
This is from a 1974 volume where authors were asked to write stories predicting the future of 2020.
She published a number of short stories earlier in her life (including one from the collection above) and a story entitled Invisible Encounter from a 1982 collection (the year of this game). She later wrote a set of sci-fi/comedy books. Here’s the description from Hypneratomachia (2009):
Hard on the heels of the side-splitting, hair-raising bestseller Tetragravitron, comes an all new adventure of Captain Spycer, that voluptuous, redheaded, space heroine, and her trusty crew–robot Peter Decade, scaly red Col. Krabchake, lewd and lecherous Prof. Groppe, and that wide-eyed innocent Brian Lefarge–are off to save the universe in their cosmic-powered ship. In this new challenge, our stalwart crew is looking for the evil masterminds behind some mysterious force that sucks the power out of stars, leaving their satellites frigid and lifeless.
As you might have guessed, they also lean on the bawdy side, making it possible that the mysterious unnamed sixth game she wrote is the infamous Granny’s Place, also published by Temple Software and using the same system as the other games. We’re save worrying about that for a future day and dive back into the underground world of The Hermit’s Secret.
My actual gameplay of late has not felt like narrative, but not like puzzle either. I’m not sure a good analogy, but let me describe in two ways:
a.) you’ve figured out how to map “standard” mazes in adventure games before, and drop a bunch of objects and fill in spots; there are no twists. You aren’t really doing a puzzle, and it certainly doesn’t come off as some kind of narrative: maybe an “activity”?
b.) you’re writing a research paper about genealogy. You are studying various family trees and following them back and finding connections. This isn’t a puzzle, really, but it certainly isn’t a narrative, even though there’s an “implied narrative” in the process of parents having children. It’s not drudgery and perhaps even kind of interesting.
My gameplay in the last few days have been a little from columns a and b. Even though there’s been a puzzle or two, they’ve been quick solves, and really, all I’ve been doing is taking the three distinct underground maps and trying to merge them together. (Kind of four, but the sequence I figured things out led me to already know how something was connected the moment I found it.)
To explain, let me first update the meta-map from last time:
Now there are four entrances to the underground, all marked as shown. The “silo” was next to the barn, and I thought it might be an isolated puzzle when I found it (that is, getting in would lead to a single room but no extra exits or geography):
You’re standing in front of a large tall stone silo.
There is a small black box by the door. It seems to be a voice print lock of some sort. Paths lead in most directions.
I found out how to get in by wandering the “bureaucracy area” from last time. One room has a tape; another, a tape machine, and in yet another, a presentation room with a button. Spooling in the tape and pressing the button gets a curious message I still haven’t fully deciphered:
This is a large control room. There are big switches and even bigger machines all around you. Exits go south and east.
There is a glowing white button in front of a display screen. The screen says “ACCESS RESTRICTED – CONFIDENTIAL” and has a list of words: CURTAIN WATERFALL DAVE SHACK REMEMBER MEADOW.
“Dave” seemed like a distinctive word. If you go in the underground through the shack (which I’ll go into detail on later) there is a sign from “Dave” talking about claim jumpers being shot, and I suspect he’s supposed to be the hermit of the title. While back out at the silo (I just started a fresh game) I tested each of the words off the list and DAVE hit paydirt.
You are inside the silo door.
A broad curving gray surface fills the room from top to bottom. It is about ten feet in from the outer stone wall of the silo. There seems to be a doorway in it some distance to the north.
This turns out to be only a few rooms away from the nosecone and the cargo room from last time where all the treasures go. This makes it really convenient to use the treasure stash and pop from there either back outside (with the DAVE word) or inside (through the bureaucracy area).
In case you’re curious, here’s my current latest haul, although there’s a bracelet and fossil I know I haven’t bothered to tote back yet. (Also, there’s still a glass treasure that shatters; it is possible the rug is soft enough to absorb it? I also found a fur muff at the end of my last session that might work to keep it from breaking.)
There is a lovely emerald here.
There is a wonderful little jeweled airplane here.
A magnificent diamond is gleaming by your feet.
A valuable erotic etching has been left here.
An expensive ruby necklace is lying here.
A very valuable stamp is lying here.
There’s a beautiful — and expensive — gold ring here.
There’s a nice persian rug on the floor.
There’s a big bar of silver here.
Despite the list building nicely, I feel like there’s a lot of map to go. Before I start showing off pictures, I want to explain that any “corner mark” that you see represents a room where I’ve tested exits. That is, I didn’t just trust the text (or at least my own reading skills) to put which directions I could go, but did every possible direction possible to see which would work. The game is generally good about listing directions but I did have one spot (in what I’m calling the “third underground”) with a “secret exit”:
You are standing by an immense stone idol. The fantastically carved vaults of an ancient temple stretch out to the south.
NW
Sorry, there’s no way to get through in that direction.
You are standing by the Great Idol.
SW
Sorry, there’s no way to get through in that direction.
You are standing by the Great Idol.
SE
You have found a secret staircase. Dark openings lead north and northwest from here.
Perhaps the author only put one, but the presence of one (and my own downfall of forgetting to mark exits) made me check all of them, and there were a few that were only vaguely described which I might have otherwise not have gotten.
Having gotten that out of the way, let’s finish off the bureaucracy section:
Other notable locations include a “cage room” with a mongoose which you are able to pick up assuming you have an animal cage from elsewhere (one of the other “undergrounds”)…
You’re in some kind of animal care center. Empty cages, their doors hanging ajar, line the walls. Some of them are small, and others are disturbingly large.
A pretty little cream-colored animal with a bushy tail is sitting on the floor, looking at you.
…a “map room” which is clearly meant as a meta joke…
You are in a large room full of charts and graphs. Corridors lead north and south from here.
A large map completely covers the west wall.
READ MAP
Well, it’s sort of hard to describe. It has a lot of little boxes on it, connected by lines, with names like “Steep Path,” “Grassy Meadow,” “Rocky Tunnel,” and so on. Very odd, really.
…a room with buttons where I am unable to refer to any of the buttons…
You are in the Check Room.
There is a large panel in the west wall. It is firmly shut.
Next to the panel are ten buttons labeled 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.
…some minutae like a rec room and lounge which make the life of the dungeon keeper feel black and dreary…
You are in the employee lounge. There are chairs and tables, a small microwave, and all the usual things.
Exits lead north, south, and east.
S
You have reached the recreation room. There are some old ping pong tables here, and a dartboard without any darts.
There is a doorway north of you.
…and a robot blocking passage to the south. I have a theory on how to get by but I haven’t had time to test it yet.
You are in a large paneled east-west hall. It’s quite fancy, with carpet on the floor and indirect lighting.
A huge, heavily built robot rolls menacingly around the room, sensors blinking, and refuses to let you pass.
Importantly, on the other side of the robot is one of the other undergrounds, the one reached by entering from the shack.
This second underground is enterable from the shack guarded by the thirsty dog — this is where the warning sign from “Dave” appears.
You are at the entrance to an old gold mine. A dark rocky tunnel leads off to the south, and there is a ladder going up to some higher level.
There is a notice nailed up one one wall.
READ NOTICE
“Claim jumpers will be shot on sight. This means you!”
It’s signed by someone named “Dave.”
Oddly, enough, there’s a heavy gong in one location. It is to the south of an unsteady bridge where the game specifically calls out a weight limit, and to the north there’s a hint that a gong is needed in a particular place:
This is a lovely little room that looks like some kind of beautiful luminous blue jewel inside. A narrow opening heads off to the northeast, and a smooth path leads upward.
There is a message scrawled on the stones. The walls shine with a lovely irridescent glow.
READ MESSAGE
Some demented person has scrawled on the floor “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo, I Don’t Wanna Let The Gong Go.”
This suggests to me that the gong needs to go up out of the Gold Mine Underground and back through the Bureaucracy Underground in order to fulfill its destiny (which requires beating the robot).
There’s otherwise simply a lot of geography to trudge through, leading down to a very curious “memory room”, which feels like it came out of a Phoenix mainframe game (and I also have no idea what to do with it):
You are in a small, many-sided room. There is an obvious exit to the northeast. Some roughly carved letters on the south wall say “DEARIE, DO YOU REMEMBER?”
I should finally mention there’s got to be another link between the second and first undergrounds, as there’s a button room that’s a clone of the previous one I mentioned (“ten buttons labeled 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.”) I would suspect an elevator but the game doesn’t even recognize the noun “button” so I’m at a loss as to how to operate it.
The third underground (which I’ll term The Gnomish Underground Empire) comes beneath a air control tower at an airfield.
The Gnome Dungeon represents a maze of some kind which I think has randomization, so I’m likely just going to save mapping it for when I’m desperate; sometimes it connects to the “Gnome King’s Dungeon” which I have placed below it.
I haven’t been able to connect this one up, although I assume there’s a link somewhere.
Also present is the “secret stair” I referenced earlier; it leads to a “still room”, and testing one of the directions there gave a unique response indicating there’s a secret passage somehow.
Tree roots have grown down into this room, piercing the ceiling and walls until it looks like a forest inside. There are exits leading north and west.
N
You are in a neat square room with an odd device in the middle of the floor. It has a big metal container, some copper tubing, and smells like something gone sour.
The only visible exit goes south.
E
You bruise your head painfully on the rock wall.
Again, there isn’t so much “obstacles” as much as “stuff I haven’t finished mapping yet”; there is one abyss I can’t get across, but the room description suggests I’ll reach the other side from some other route rather than finding a way across as if it were a puzzle.
You are at the west end of a gigantic cavern. The towering walls remind you of some sort of gothic cathedral, and your eyes peer vainly upward in an effort to see the ceiling. Faint wisps of mist eddy around you like lost souls. A narrow opening leads southwest, and the cavern stretches out to the east, where a bottomless abyss crosses the floor.
The abyss effectively blocks you from crossing the cavern.
I have intuition I’m closing in on the “exploration stopping point” — where I’m doing finding new rooms just by virtue of wandering and now need to look hard at what puzzles remain and what objects I have access to and start finishing the game. Every time I look there’s been a new area, so I’m not going to bet on it; the author was clearly fond of the “imaginary landscape” portion of Adventure (terminology she uses in the PC Mag article) and since she didn’t have her notions filtered through the technical limitations of Scott Adams TRS-80 games, she kept to the same hundreds-of-rooms mentality as original Adventure without compromise.
The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society is one of the earliest “fan clubs” for science fiction, founded in 1934. Their clubzine, De Profundis, was first published in 1957.
One of the members, Dian Girard, is the author of our game today, and significantly, the author of five more games after: Phantom’s Revenge, Castle Elsinore, Monster Rally, Valley of the Kings, and one we don’t even have a name for. I say “significantly” because she seems to be the first woman who was also a “solo author” to have produced multiple adventures. The one-off Miser from the previous year was by Mary Jean Winter; Roberta Williams and Alexis Adams both worked as part of teams (although Alexis did get sole credit for Voodoo Castle) and the other women who have come up so far have been co-authors (like Christine Johnson with Mad Venture or half the team that made In Search Of… Dr. Livingston).
In other words, she was one of the multi-game auteurs at the time, one who, like Scott Adams, produced an article for outlining her methods. There’s a fair chance you haven’t heard of her — beyond the current modern obscurity of text adventures — because her work was originally published by a company not known for games, Norell.
Norell was one of the very early publishers focusing on DOS, and if they’re remembered for anything at all now it is their Pack & Crypt software, essentially the first widespread compression format. Unfortunately (for them) they charged for both compression and decompression utilities, whereas others made their decompression products free, so while it had been well-poised to become a format suitable for the BBS age and the ascent of IBM-compatible clones, they were essentially dead by 1986.
From PC Mag, Feb-Apr 1983.
But back to games: a summer 1982 catalog listed Original Adventure, and two of the Girard games were out by the end of the year.
The Adventure port is of note because Gillogly originally did one extremely early using the C language (1977 while at Rand, later it went in the BSD Unix compilation) and it looks like the Gillogly/Billofsky version is simply a port of that. It’s also of note because The Hermit’s Secret has a strong foot in Original Adventure to the extent it might borrow some code elements (it keeps variants of dwarves and the pirate, for instance, although heavily reskinned). There clearly was also some influence from Infocom, as you can see from just the screen layout:
The screenshot is from the re-published version by Temple Software. No Norell versions are available anywhere and that means the two games Temple never picked up (Monster Rally and Temple of the Kings) are currently lost altogether.
That’s the iconic static status line “moves” and “score” dropped in the corner, there. The parser also accepts some element of full-sentence parsing — you can FILL CAN WITH WATER, for instance — but not everything as it does not accept (for example) TAKE ALL.
As implied from the ad-copy earlier and the title screen, and especially by the derivation-from-Adventure feel, this is a treasure hunt, and as the INFO screen of the game informs us all the treasures go into a room with a sign marked LOAD. It took me a long time to find this room, because the game is quite large. Essentially, the main design decision here is to have, just like Adventure, long descriptions which can’t (generally) be referred to, and where the only items where interaction works are separated from the text. This allows a lot of text without much cost (unlike Infocom, which had to bother describing things with the EXAMINE command).
You are walking along beside a merrily bubbling stream. There is a high cliff north of you, and there is a small path to the southeast that winds down the side of the mountain.
N
You are standing at the bottom of a waterfall that cascades like a white veil down the sheer cliff face. A steep path goes northeast from here, and another path leads south.
NE
You are on a steep path that forks at this point. You can go north or east into the mountains, or to the southwest where a waterfall cascades down into an icy mountain pool.
On the three descriptions above, you can fill a container with water, which solves an early puzzle, but otherwise the rooms are there for trekking by and making a map.
The above is what I have so far, a great deal of which is outdoors; I’ve only solved an absolute minimum of puzzles. Much of my time was spent wandering and checking exits. For example, there’s a “mountain” area which doesn’t look so terrible once laid out, but was sufficiently maze-y with “loops” that I had to drop objects in each room and test every possible direction.
Also, one of the exits randomly goes between a choice of two rooms, which is guaranteed to give me a headache.
Here’s a metamap of the general layout:
The most confusing thing — and it took me genuinely an extra 15 minutes or so to reckon with it — is that going north far enough loops around; that is, you can start at the Meadow and take northward directions to eventually loop back to the Meadow without anything particularly mazelike on the way.
The three marked places (Airfield, Shack, Mountains) all have passages leading into darkness, and that’s where the underworld part of the game is. To get into any of them you need a light source first, which requires entering the shack by solving a minor puzzle with a thirsty dog.
You’re at the hermit’s shack.
There is a large dog, panting slightly, lying across the the doorway. He eyes you with interested anticipation. There is an empty water dish sitting next to the shack.
POUR WATER IN DISH
The dog laps up the water, wags his tail in a friendly manner, and then wanders off to lay down under a nearby tree.
Other than the lamp, there’s a megaton of other items, including treasures, all lying around in the aboveground.
gold ring, ruby necklace, crystal sphere (breaks when you drop it, like the vase in Adventure), emerald, jeweled airplane, valuable etching, keys, a rare stamp (found by using the keys to unlock a mailbox), green paper (“Gnome Industrial – One Unit Voucher”), card (which says “Gnome Industrial” and has a brown stripe)
Two hours in I finally made it to the underground — passing through the warehouse on my meta-map above — and found a bureaucratic complex.
You are in a small conference room. The walls are painted standard off-white, and the furniture all looks rented.
The only exits lead west and south.
S
This is a rather large conference room. The walls are paneled with golden oak and the furniture looks quite expensive. There’s even a built-in bar at one end. One exit goes north, and another leads west.
A yellowing old memo has been left on the floor.
GET MEMO
An old memorandum
Okay.
READ MEMO
“ALL LAB PERSONNEL –
Be certain that megarat cages are securely locked, and all lights are left ON at the close of your shift. In event of a megarat escape, close safety doors immediately and notify Plant Security. These animals are dangerous. Take no chances.”
(Megarats are the “grues” of the game and keep you from wandering around in the dark.)
This setup feels like it’s trying to do something akin to a Zork parody, but with some Adventure-style characters still tossed in. A “very short man in a brown business suit” tries to kill you with an axe, and you have later encounters with “assassins” who you need to kill with the axe. Unfortunately, your aim isn’t great, so it’s quite possible to miss and die without being able to do anything, but here’s what happens when things go well:
You killed a small dark-robed assassin! No sooner does he fall to the ground than six little men in dark suits run out and snatch up the corpse. A moment later a little black hearse labeled “Utter Gnome” roars by and vanishes into the darkness.
There’s also another gnome which scarfs treasures (both in your hand and off the floor) and spirits them away somewhere, just like the pirate/thief.
The very last thing I found in my play session — and it seemed a good stopping point to come here and communicate with y’all — is the room where treasures go.
A broad curving gray surface fills the room from top to bottom.
A slender ladder leads up the surface to some higher level.
U
You are in a cargo room. There is a large bin against one wall, and the word “LOAD” is stenciled on its side. Exits lead up and down along slender steel ladders.
U
You’re in the nosecone of a rocket. A fascinating array of dials, buttons, and switches are set into a control panel in front of a comfortably padded chair. A steel ladder goes down to the cargo room, and a smooth steel corridor leads east.
The treasures go in the “cargo room”. The positioning below the rocket makes me wonder if for the endgame, rather than random getting teleported to an endgame area, our objective will be to take off into space. Because riding into space toting a hold full of treasure would be… awesome? I guess we’ll see.
I’ve finished the game.
Ad from Atarimania.
With the exception of one very difficult puzzle and one slightly odd action (I needed hints for both) this wasn’t terribly hard; perhaps the most interesting thing about the game (other than the technical aspects I’ve already remarked on) is the main quest itself, which involves taking a sword only a small distance from one place to another. There is something sanctified about the act.
The comic writer for the ad is confused here: you’re not “bringing back” anything, just restoring the sword to its rightful place.
Continuing directly from last time, I had a monster in a river, and I was quite stuck.
Moving forward another hour, I was still stuck. The game has a built-in HELP feature so I tried it and the game told me to keep the monster smiling. Moving forward yet another hour, I was still (still) stuck. It was time to unleash outside-the-game hints.
I found out that I had missed one item. Back at the tavern at the start you can spend one gold coin to buy some ale. This means, incidentally, you can’t buy all the items in the shop (to recap, that’s knife, staff, lamp, pole, honey) but need to leave at least one off. Since I had already used the other items, I restarted and avoided buying the knife, and spent 1 gold coin on the ale instead.
The ale is still somewhat tricky to deliver — GIVE ALE TO MONSTER just has the game claim the monster is too far away. The trick it to simply pour the ale into the river, which works (!?).
I feel zero guilt about spoiling this puzzle.
Fortunately, the rest of the game went much smoother. I was able to get the boat out to a lake with an island in the middle. I still had the magic book and the prayer (SOLOCIN) I hadn’t used, so it was not hard to find the first right action.
The second right action which I did not find on my own — but I’ll just explain here to save time — is that you are also supposed to GIVE BOOK to the statue, and you’ll get a key in exchange. I’m not sure if this is unfair or not.
Going back to the clue from saying SOLOCIN, I think what it is cluing is a boulder not too far from the island which you can break open by hitting it with a tuning fork (found nearby the start of the river).
Dale Dobson somehow solved the puzzle by accident without realizing the tuning fork was causing the boulder to implode; he had just tried to GO WEST and the action happened automatically. This is interesting in a theoretical sense, since using the item automatically ought to be helpful and more friendly to the player, but if the jump is too much it could lead to a player having a puzzle solved for reasons they don’t understand, which is arguably a worse situation.
Inside the cave is a spot for a sword, and a maze.
Nearby there is a sign that says SPEAK NOT THE NAME MYRAGLYM UNTIL SHE IS HOME.
This is where the sword goes. I just had to find the actual sword, but it was not far away. I initially assumed it was in the maze, but random walking through the maze (not even mapping, I was tired) yielded a scroll with two magic words, and a longbow. (One of the words on the scroll, incidentally, causes all items to disappear — that is, it softlocks the game.) I thought maybe I still needed to search the maze and actually map it, but first I combed around the lake to make sure I hadn’t missed something, and I had.
Going DOWN (not SWIM or any permutation thereof) lands you in a place with a lizard.
One of the words on the scroll caused a magic arrow to appear. I dropped the scroll (as seen above) switched to the arrow, using it to SHOOT LIZARD.
With the lizard dead, I found the Sword of the quest, took it back to the shrine I had seen earlier, and spoke the word MYRAGLYM.
This teleports you outside, fortunately back to before getting taken away by the bird. You then are extremely hungry, and I hope you left your honey from the start of the game in a convenient spot, otherwise game over. (I had, by luck.) Then you need to return to the tavern which already knows of your achievement:
In an evaluative sense, the game went up to “pleasant diversion” but only had one really clever puzzle (the boat) which more or less got canceled by the terrible puzzle right after (getting drunk from river water). The most fascinating aspect was the quest itself, where a sword gets moved from one place to another, as it isn’t like some terrible wrong is otherwise being averted, or evil madman being thwarted. Temple of the Sun is the only other adventure of this era that I know of that has a remotely comparable arcane-ritual-as-quest.
Interesting on a secondary level is the number of influences. We can trace all these games back to Crowther/Woods Adventure, and Apple II graphics games to Mystery House — here specifically, the “biome journey” of Wizard and the Princess — but we also now have the third major influence of Zork. By late 1981 the sales of Infocom were starting to make them a serious force in adventure games; by contrast, in late 1980 they had only had a smattering of sales.
Despite roughly an comparable number of unexciting puzzles on a surface level to other games at the time, the slight edge of polish was enough that the game never felt “janky”, even when pointing out in an objective sense how verb difficulties like with the quicksand should never have happened in the first place. There is a sheen of professionalism from mimicking some of the aspects of Infocom that it gives sufficient warmth to override other qualities.
…
I have a decent notion of what I’m going to play for the next few games, but one thing I haven’t done lately is take requests. I can’t make promises, but if there’s a 1982 game that you really want bumped higher on the queue, I might consider it. (The reason Planet of Death and Inca Curse kicked off 1981 is because frequent commenter baltasarq requested it. I do pay attention, even to the people who keep valiant hope up that I might go back and do some more Eamon games.)
Image from Wikipedia.
I have a few bits of news to share:
1.) Would you like to listen to me talk about text adventures (and interactive fiction in general) for an hour and a half? A new episode of The Memory Machine Podcast just dropped, as hosted by Nathaniel Lockhart.
Link here
For this episode of the podcast, Nate has on Jason Dyer to talk about the wide and wonderful world of interactive fiction, from its nascent period with “game books” all the way up to present day interactive fiction competitions.
2.) There was an early prototype of Infocom’s follow-up to Hitchhiker’s Guide, The Restaurant at the End of the World, with work by Stu Gallery. It was a very early prototype without much available if you just compiled the code.
Adam Sommerfield has gone and made the game slightly more playable, taking some of the partial-code bits and filling them in:
Also partly coded was the restaurant itself (Milliways); referred to as the Pub (likely just a partial copy and paste from the first game). You can access this room by typing “pub” and pressing Enter, you will jump to the Pub but it is a one-way trip and you will need to restart to get back to the ship.
I want to stress that this remains 80% Stu Galleys original code, it’s just been connected up and i’ve added a more fleshed out ship as originally intended (based on available plot descriptions).
You can find a link to the demo here.
3.) Speaking of Hitchhiker’s, long-time readers may remember my write-up of the knock-off game Galactic Hitchhiker from 1980, written for the rather obscure UK101 system. The game holds the current record for first newly-written commercially published text adventure game in the UK.
Jim Gerrie later did a “fixed” port which is playable online, and smooths over some of the rough edges in terms of interaction.
However, if you’d like to play online but still want complete authenticity, Anthony Hope now has the version for you: Link here. He ported it to BBC Micro, which has the same machine language (6502) as the original machine, so managed to make it more or less a one-to-one conversion.
Sirius Software, founded by Jewell and Terry Bradley, was one of the more prominent Apple II publishers of the early 1980s as they were joined early by the legendary Nasir Gebelli. Nasir was born in Iran and went to the United States in 1979 after the Revolution (his family was connected to the royal family) and ended up getting a reputation as the best Apple II programmer alive; he later went to Japan as a contractor with Square and worked on games like Ridge Racer, Final Fantasy, and Secret of Mana.
This game — and their three other text adventures from 1982 — have nothing to do with Nasir. Specifically, in 1982, Bob Blauschild cranked out Critical Mass and Escape from Rungistan, and Tim Wilson wrote Kabul Spy and today’s selection.
The Object of the game is to recover the magical sword MYRAGLYM and return it to the altar from whence it was stolen. Rumors speak of a secret chamber near Blockpoole in which the sword is said to lie.
There’s a couple remarkable technical things to comment on straight off the bat.
First, if you compare with, say, one of the On-Line games, or anything from Highland, you’ll notice the font/picture layout is somewhat different. This is because both the On-Line games and many others from the time used Apple’s built in graphics mode which naturally put four lines of the system-font text on the bottom. This made it hard to have much length to text. This game instead has a custom-created font that is displayed in graphics mode (rather than as raw text) to get more textual real estate.
Additionally, we’re finally at a phase where developers can be influenced by Infocom. It uses LONG and BRIEF as ways of changing room descriptions (to either always show a full-text room description each time, or only have a shorter version of revisits) and allegedly — according to the manual, at least — has a full parser system which not only allows for indirect objects but combination commands like GET ROCK AND SHIELD.
The game lays out a whole bunch of items to start with, five of them being from a shop (you start with 50 gold, and each item costs 10, so there’s no reason not to just buy all of them):
a rock
a hammer
a long staff
a jar of honey
some rope
an old lamp
a knife
a shield
One of the common themes through the game is a tight inventory limit (6 max. although in practical circumstance you have to leave some room to pick up more items) which constantly had me shuffling what I was holding; later, there is a “one way pass” where I’ve just been having to guess what’s useful. On one hand, the limit forces a little more thought as to what item goes to what puzzle, but constantly shuffling back to piles feels slightly less like having an adventure and more like being a delivery driver.
Attached to the shop is a tavern where you can get the plot, assuming you skipped the brief mention in the manual:
Any permutation I’ve tried of TALK TO MEN works. Despite the manual acting like there’s a lot of possible dialogue content, you can’t go Infocom-level deep and ASK MAN ABOUT (specific topic).
The opening otherwise has you pretty trapped in; the main way out is blocked by a carnivorous plant which will chomp you if you try to go through, and none of the items on that starting list work to get by it.
I thought for a while I’d be making one of my “intro to the game but I haven’t gotten very far” until I finally worked out what was going on with another obstacle, some quicksand.
I assumed the goal here was to escape in some fashion so I was trying to use a rope to lasso things, and crucially, the verb SWIM didn’t seem to do anything.
YOU ARE SINKING INTO THE QUICKSAND
I finally realized that if you attached a direction to the verb SWIM, it would work; that is, you could SWIM WEST or SWIM NORTH to get out, or progress farther with SWIM EAST. (This is one of those stopping points I suspect the author didn’t even think of; the verb ROW shows up later, also with consistent use of direction, so with SWIM they likely didn’t even process what a misleading response there was when SWIM was used on its own.)
Swimming leads by a white potion (yoink!) and this place:
For everything in the game so far (and everything past this point) ever item or creature you can refer to is mentioned in the text description, but here the bees are entirely unmentioned in the text. You can only see them in the picture. Assuming you have the honey you can GET BEES, then take them back to the carnivorous plant and feed it (who will then be happy enough to let you pass).
Before moving on to the next section of the game, I should mention there’s also a.) a hermit looking for a particular jewel that you find hiding behind a tree, b.) a boat in a river that can only row back and forth and seems to be purposeless, although it is a setup for a nifty puzzle later and c.) the white potion shrinks you down and kills you.
Moving on past the plant, there’s yet more forest, and one place in particular which is too dark and you fall…
…but somehow in complete darkness can still tie a rope and climb up.
Once past the pit you can find a torch which then you can light a lamp with. This lets you return past the dark area and find an amulet, which turns out to be the jeweled item that the hermit was looking for.
The book gives a “dangerous” prayer (I still haven’t been able to use it yet, but I assume when I find either the magic sword of my quest or the shrine it goes to it comes into play) but the riddle is more immediately important: it indicates that there’s one spot (near a large bird nest) where you can SING and get picked up.
This is the “one-way” moment I mentioned earlier. I assume you eventually will be able to loop back to the main map, but for now I’m having to just guess what the character’s inventory ought to be.
There’s yet more forest and a cliff you can apply the rope (again) on — and yes, I didn’t have the rope the first time so had to restore my game — and then (after picking up a tuning fork I haven’t found a use for) comes a fairly neat puzzle involving a river.
The setup reminded me of the boat from the start which was stuck in a lake with nowhere interesting to go. However, the boat was too big to carry. What if the white potion which killed me earlier also worked instead on items?
Very slick! Taking the miniature boat in hand, I was able to drop it in the northern river — it popped back to regular size. I then discovered I forgot the staff (from all the way back in the shop) that I needed to use as an oar, d’oh.
Another restored game later, I had both the boat and “oar” at the river, and pushed my way up to a river monster.
This is a good place to pause, not only because it makes a nice dramatic cliffhanger, but because I haven’t solved the puzzle yet (at least with the items I had handy). Despite my quibbles this game been a reasonably fun so far; the custom-font as opposed to system-font and at least slight nod to parser convenience has made the package feel more “professional” than many other pre-1982 games. This is a vague and hard-to-nail-down concept but I’ve often felt like I was playing a “straight from the coder’s bedroom” product — even when this wasn’t literally true — and a stray typo or graphical bug could happen at any moment (and they sometimes did). Here, even though I did spot one typo early, and even given the slightly crude art style, this feels like a game I could see come out of professional packaging.
From zx81stuff.
Mikro-Gen, formed in 1981 by Meek and Andy Laurie, is mostly known for the Wally Week series, including the action-adventure games Pyjamarama (1984) and Everyone’s A Wally (1985).
The first screen of Pyjamarama for C64. I do like this kind of game but it really falls in a different genre than the ones for my All the Adventures list. One thing I’ve idly been wondering is if any of the platformer-adventures popular on British computers in the 80s really count more as pure adventures; that is, the action elements are so minimal it really becomes about bringing the right items to the right places. The closest I can think of is the Mikro-Gen game The Witch’s Cauldron, which is a regular text adventure, but the pictures have the side-view from arcade platformers.
They also dabbled a bit with text adventures by republishing today’s two-part series by Saturnsoft aka Saturn Developments, which appears to be simply a one-person label of the author of the games, Chris Evans.
From Every Game Going.
Saturn Developments came out with two more games published directly by Mikro-Gen, Mad Martha 1 and 2, which we will get to eventually (both seem to be satirical absurd text adventures with mini-games jammed in?); in fact, Mad Martha ended up being oddly integral to the history of Mikro-Gen, but that’s a story for another day. We’re instead left with this humble offering, which started on ZX81.
From a German eBay auction. This graphic was too awesome not to share. One thing I always keep in mind with ZX81 games is the finicky keyboard, meaning an slower expected input rate; I’ve noticed with every emulator I’ve tried that I have to slow down my usual typing speed as if I’m dealing with a chiclet keyboard. Fine for playing text adventures, I’d hate to type source code with it.
I can tell you, now having suffered, do not play it on ZX81.
The opening screen. There’s something hidden here in a way I’ve never seen in any other adventure game; I’ll be getting to that.
There are two issues, one minor, one major:
The minor issue is that it tries to compensate for a lack of apostrophes on the ZX81 with using a comma instead (“DID,NT” and “WAS,NT” respectively). I can understand just leaving out apostrophes as a sort of machine shorthand, but comma substitutes are grammar murder. (The ZX Spectrum version actually adds more of these substitutes so I suggest running away screaming.)
Rather more seriously, it is literally impossible to win without changing the source code. I only found this out after a long amount of play; fortunately I did not resist hints for any longer, for I found out the issue I was trying to solve was literally impossible. To the south of the starting place there is a fragile bridge.
You’re supposed to be able to cross it at least once, but something broke in the code so it always breaks.
This doesn’t seem to be a single-character fix, either. I’m not sure what the issue is, but here’s the offending line.
2970 LET OK=((INT (RND*100)+1) <= N)
The fix is just to set the variable equal to zero as opposed to try something random. As I was having difficulty with ZX81 commands I just said forget it and hopped to the C64 port instead, which has the bonus of proper word wrap, lower case letters, the bridge working as intended (?) and also some random ASCII graphics as a bonus.
Enough setup: the premise of the first game (Mines of Saturn) has you piloting a ship that, due to a radiation storm, needs to make a crash landing near an abandoned mining base. You need to find dilithium crystals to fuel your ship.
The game really is quite small otherwise and straightforward, other than few extra instant-deaths other than that bridge one. What’s really interesting in the setup — and I can’t think of any other game from this era offhand that does this so consistently — is it strongly hints at what you missed if you die. For example, early on you can find a boat and try to USE BOAT to cross canal. The game kills you but says you needed oars.
The oars are on the other side of that bridge I mentioned, but it was an interesting response to see in that I didn’t waste any time trying other methods of crossing: I knew I was missing an oars object and just had to wait for it (well, normally I would, except the solution here was just switching to C64).
This general niceness (after switching over) led to a relatively short and easy experience, except for one spot near the end. You’ve just zapped some spiders with a ray gun (obtained by using boat + oars, and make sure you charge it up first)…
…and then you need to go up. Trying to do so kills you, and the game openly ponders about the ladder that was part of your original ship.
THE SIDES OF THE POTHOLE ARE AS SMOOTH AS GLASS,YOU WILL HAVE TO GET A LADDER,PITY…WAS,NT THERE ONE ON YOUR SHIP ?
The thing is that the ship is not mentioned in the initial room of the game! You’re just supposed to assume it is there even though it is essentially invisible, and that there is a “ladder” object you can pick up.
Opening screen again for reference. What’s simultaneously interesting and unfair is that there really is no way to know about the ladder without first having the death, so the “official” ludic narrative essentially includes both the death and reviving and trying again, as opposed to the death being “smoothed out” of the real narrative.
After taking the hidden ladder to the right area, you can climb up to a crystal, use a hammer, and win the game.
If I had started with the C64 version this would have been a relatively smooth and inoffensive experience; short and feeling a bit like a type-in, but it’s honestly OK for a game to be short?
RETURN TO EARTH: “Having escaped from your previous dilemma, you reach Earth Station 1, but fail to make radio contact. You effect a safe if harrowing manual docking with the orbital station. On entry you find it deserted, and the control room destroyed. You must explore the station and find some way to alert Earth of your predicament, BEWARE, many of the rooms are identical, there is extensive damage, and signs of Alien intruders.”
For the follow-up game on the opposite side of the tape I went directly for the C64 version, not wanting to risk getting burned again.
Unfortunately, while the planet of the first game had a little atmosphere, this is set in a boring-halls style space station. At least Death Dreadnaught went all-in with gruesome descriptions, this really has very little going on:
There’s a sequence here where you get an axe, to break open a medical chest to get a serum, to cure a spider bite, to find a battery and some keys; additionally, you need some “nerve gas” to defeat another set of spiders.
Even the deaths are less creative.
The whole point is to get the keys and the battery to be able to open the cabinet at the start and activate a radio, which lets you call Earth for help and win the game. Except … the C64 version is broken and you can’t activate the radio!
No, TAKE RADIO and TAKE SET don’t work either.
I checked with a walkthrough and found that the game here does indeed seem to be broken, so rather than painfully go back to the ZX81 (not a long game, but I’ve already dealt with enough jank on this tape thank you very much) I just looked up the winning message in the source code.
CONGRATULATIONS, THE RADIO IS NOW WORKING, AND A RESCUE TEAM IS ON THE WAY
Ok, there’s one fun death: there’s a pistol and if you try to use it there’s a hole broken in the station hull and you die from air escaping. (Really, it’s a little hilarious at least.) I think it safe to say my experience with the first games of Chris Evans was a crash and burn.
But the absurd thing is–
I said I was going to save the Mad Martha story, but let me tell it now. Indirectly, this game started the relationship between Chris Evans and Mikro-Gen, so it really is the first domino in a very important relationship: that between Mikro-Gen and Crash Magazine, one of the big Brit-mags of the 80s. Let me just quote Retro Gamer’s profile here:
One of the ways in which it tried to secure talent was by going to the many computer fairs that were dedicated to specific machines in the 1980s. In August 1983, Mikro-Gen appeared at the ZX Microfair in London’s Alexandra Palace and it had a stand very close to a small mail order company called Crash Micro Games Action. The two companies soon began to talk and the conversation ended with Mikro-Gen handing over a copy of Mad Martha and being delighted at being given a good review. Little did anyone know that six months later, Crash Micro Games Action would become Crash magazine and the two companies continued the relationship it had built up. This ultimately helped Mikro-Gen to become known to programmers and gamers, which helped as the bosses tried to secure a winning team.
In other words, if it weren’t for this janky two-game tape, we wouldn’t have Mad Martha, and without Mad Martha, Mikro-Gen wouldn’t have become big, and then we likely wouldn’t have later classics like Equinox.
> DRINK WATER
Well, you weren’t all that thirsty, but you take a long drink of water. I’m sorry I’ve nothing stronger to offer you.
I have completed the game, although I did need hints for the last handful of obstacles. My prior posts are needed for this one to make sense.
From Every Game Going.
Previously, I ended on a puzzle I was tantalizingly close to solving, although I had only theorized a connection: a room giving the names of explorers and trying to reach a Snark without being vaporized. The wall messages were randomized and there were eight of them:
Peary
Captain Scott
Columbus
Marco Polo
Peary and Columbus
Peary and Marco Polo
Scott and Columbus
Scott and Marco Polo
Eight possibilities, and eight directions, where four of them list two things: this was listing north, south, east, and west with the combinations being NE/SE/SW/NW. I originally had looked at the letters of the names themselves, but I then realized the explorers were associated with particular directions. North for arctic explorer Peary, south for Scott, west for Columbus, and east for Marco Polo. So that message was just a code for a single direction.
You are in a small room with exits to the southeast and northwest. The whole of one wall is taken up with a large painted mural, which shows the explorations of Peary.
So the description above means: go to the Snark area, take the north direction, then go all the way down.
In the room there is a Snark burbling frumiously to itself. As you approach, it gives you an uffish look and then disappears completely. You are in a large cellar with walls of Lewis coral which has obviously been designed as a home for some exotic beast. There is a narrow exit upwards.
There is a box of sapphires here!
From The Hunting of the Snark.
Speaking of close-to-solving parts, I had last time theorized the piece of wood was a boomerang, but when the response to THROW WOOD was underwhelming I just assumed it wasn’t. I still decided, perhaps, I could attract the attention of a flying jackdaw which held something shiny, maybe it would try to play “chase the stick” or build something out of it (crows are known for using tools like sticks).
You are at the eastern end of the great court.
There is a jackdaw flying around in circles far above you.
Something it is carrying in its beak glisters in the sunlight.
> THROW WOOD
The boomerang catches the jackdaw a passing blow, knocking it to the ground, dead. The weapon itself continues in flight.
Erf. Unexpected violence, but at least that’s resolved.
I poked around with more confidence at the remaining issues. I had a creature (a “baby hexapod”) that was crying for its mama, and pondering my verb list I had gathered, I noticed I hadn’t used FEED yet, so I decided to try it.
> feed creature
The hexapod gobbles up the steak greedily after which it calms down considerably, only occasionally burping and saying “Mama?”
I hadn’t specified the steak, the game did that for me automatically because I was holding it. (Sort of a minor variant of point-and-click adventures having puzzles solved by clicking in the right spot but not knowing beforehand want the action will be. Brief plug for Joey Jones writing about the slow evolution of verb-full to verb-less in Lucasarts games.)
I still needed to find Mama, and I was rather short on places to go. I had, in full:
- a forest area that caused sleep
- a cave blocked by undergrowth that a dragon was able to burn, except I couldn’t get by the dragon’s fire after
- a regular wall of fire
- a rocky plain where going in direction caused death
- a pit with a “furry arm” that comes out and kills you if you try to go by
- a “fish room” with pictures of fish
- a room full of dust (I thought at the time it might be decoration, although it isn’t)
- a statue too heavy to move
The only plausible location seemed to be the rocky plain, so I managed to get success on my first try:
You drop the hexapod to the ground. It runs off to the south.
OK.
Following the hexapod leads to the parents:
The baby hexapod runs into the arms of a much larger isomorphic creature, obviously its parent. In a similar high-pitched voice this creature squeaks “We thank you for seeing our little Alpha Centauri home safely to us. Pray accept this reward – such baubles are of no interest to us but we understand that they are highly regarded by humanoids.” She then drops a string of pearls at your feet and the two of them disappear down a hole in the ground, which at once closes after them.
You are on the rocky plain.
There is a string of pearls here!
Again, another very self-contained puzzle. So self-contained, that the overall game meta structure was starting to look like this:
This doesn’t hold completely — the vampire had documents which led to the vault, for instance, and the egg/dragon setup has a second part to completely solve the puzzle — but the generally flat structure made still made me suspicious about one item in particular, a bottle with a djinn.
> OPEN BOTTLE
A huge djinn appears from the bottle with a WHOOSH. He says sonorously “Many thanks, oh effulgent one! I will help thee if it be in my power.” He then vanishes and reappears after a short while, saying “I have done thee service to the best of my powers, oh lustrous one! Farewell!” The djinn then vanishes for good.
I had been trying in various places to use the djinn in the bottle as the solution to a puzzle, but maybe the djinn doesn’t really do anything at all other than provide the bottle it was in! Thinking in those terms, I burned the djinn somewhere random (I did mark my save game with an X as a branch in reality in case this was wrong) and then used the bottle to scoop up some water. This is sufficient to defuse both the dragon and the wall of fire. (ADD: Paul points out in the comments that the djinn moves the tapestry from the start of the game to the vault. I didn’t even notice that! I will gladly still take a right solve for wrong reasons.)
You are in the forest. There are paths to the west, northwest and southwest. To the east is the entrance to the cave. There seems to have been a fairly large fire here recently.
There is a baby dragon here, breathing fire towards you.
> THROW WATER
You throw the water at the baby dragon, whose flames are thoroughly quenched. It gives you a reproachful look and then flies off into the distance.
The wall of fire quenching led to a jeweled helmet (another treasure) and getting past the dragon led to a cave with a first folio of Shakespeare (yet another treasure) and nothing else. The flat structure arises again.
This left me rather stuck. I really didn’t have anything for the statue, but I could try the creature in the pit some more.
As you reach the edge of the pit a large furry arm reaches out and pulls you into the murky depths. There are horrendous sounds of snarling and your body is wrenched to pieces and then eaten.
I was able to throw it things and have them get eaten, so I strongly suspected I needed to poison it somehow, but I didn’t find anything on the map that remotely seemed like poison. I’m still honestly a touch puzzled here — did I miss a clue? — but the key was the room of “dust” which I guess is something a bit stronger:
You are in a small chamber the floor of which is covered by a thick layer of white dust. There are exits to the west and southeast.
You can poison something (I tried the bird I had killed earlier with the boomerang) and toss it in.
You throw the jackdaw into the pit.
There are sounds of roaring and threshing in the pit.
Suddenly there is an almighty screech followed by silence.
This lets you get by and pick up some “dilithium crystals”, another treasure, and yes, another “dead end” in terms of structure.
Going back to my list, this left
- a forest area that caused sleep
- a “fish room” with pictures of fish
- a statue too heavy to move
The forest and statue are connected. Specifically, you’re supposed to eat a piece of cheese that I had been toting around, thinking I’d give it to an animal. Somehow the cheese causes a dream in the sleepy area.
> EAT CHEESE
Well, you weren’t really hungry, but you eat the cheese all the same. Don’t blame me if you get indigestion.
> S
You enter a luxurious grove in which the atmosphere is so heady that you fall asleep almost at once. The cheese you ate so recently gives you terrible nightmares, from which you are glad to awaken. The most vivid one is about a stone statue and a man calling out “NOMET”.
I’ve never had food-induced nightmares before, but I’ve heard it is a Real Thing. What was interesting here is how it played against my adventurer tendency to Avoid Consuming Items — that is, having something disappear by eating it is often the wrong move. Someone less experienced in adventures would be more likely to come across the solve early here.
You can take this word over to the statue — fortunately there were so few puzzles left this seemed like an obvious choice — and speak it, and this will cause the statue to come alive and walk its way over to the vault for you.
Finally, there’s the fish room, which seems to follow no logic at all to this solve, and I just had to have the hints tell me what to do:
You are in a square room whose walls gleam with pictures of fish of every description… turbot, halibut, you name it. A passage leads back to the north.
> OFF
On the western wall the word SWAMP seems to stand out from the surrounding blackness, as though produced by a thousand glow-worms.
I guess this happened in Acheton once — you had to turn the lamp off in a room — but here it really seems completely unclued. Again I wonder if I missed something.
Unfortunately getting SWAMP gets you nowhere, there’s a second trick. SWAMP indicates a magic word, but it is in code: encoded by the same code as THE PASSWORD IS (something) from much earlier.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
R I SEA H OT P DW
At least the O’GRAM bit signaled the code being significant, but SWAMP is a word and the “decryption” isn’t:
> OPREH
A concealed exit in the south wall silently slides open.
> S
You are in a small cupboard south of the fish room.
The lost ruby of Hamil is here!
Not a fan. But that’s the last of the treasures, so it’s on to the endgame, which is one turn exactly.
You are in the vault.
There is an elegantly carved boomerang here!
There is an antique silver goblet here!
There is a richly bejewelled helmet here!
There is an enormous tapestry here!
There is a diamond ring here!
The ancient crown of the Kings of Hamil is here!
There is a platinum bust of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle here!
There is a string of pearls here!
There is a box of sapphires here!
There is a first folio of Shakespeare here!
There is a huge marble statue by Michaelangelo here!
The lost ruby of Hamil is here!
There is an oil painting by Van Gogh here!
There are some emeralds here!
There are some priceless dilithium crystals here!
There is a golden crozier here!
Suddenly a narrow crack in the wall begins to widen. You rush for it and manage to squeeze through, leaving your possessions behind in the vault, before it closes again. On looking at your new surroundings, you find that…
You are in the departure lounge for Valhalla, a spacious room filled with riches of every kind. There are a dozen dancing maidens standing in one corner of the room, looking expectantly at you. Heavenly sounds fill the air. On the wall there are three notices, which read ZPNT NAM TPMHA SAYMAL? ZPNT ZNL TPM WPANLM? and ZPNT HL TPM LMT, LSATMY?
The encrypted messages (same system as before) are asking
WHAT ARE THEIR ORDERS
WHAT WAS THE PHRASE
WHAT IS THE SET, SORTED
and I sort of had to right idea and set to work trying to anagram the letters R I SEA H OT P DW. I had reached 299/300 points by now so I was past my patience point. It is possible if I hadn’t been anxious I might have realized on my own there was an alternate perspective: to list out the plaintext letters and write what the corresponding encrypted letters are (rather than the other way around).
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
N YM PH SW ALT Z
So to win you have to type NYMPHS WALTZ.
> NYMPHS WALTZ
The nymphs burst into a round of applause, a hidden orchestra plays the Blue Danube, and you waltz the night away. After this you all embark on the ship for Valhalla and set sail, watched by a cheering crowd of hobgoblins, orcs, hexapods and many other exotic beings.
You scored 300 points out of a maximum of 300.
Perhaps you really are quite clever. Well done!
This game was fascinating as a sort of mini-version of all the evil Phoenix games that had come before. Simplified in structure, condensed in size, smoothed out in difficulty, with a few rough edges (like the fish room, which I still don’t understand) remaining.
I can’t say I “immersed myself” in a world the same I did with, say, Deadline. The narrative is clearly not the point; attacking this was definitely more akin to tackling a puzzle from a magazine or newspaper which happened to give feedback to actions. This clearly fed to something in the British taste because these games allegedly sold quite well for their time, and we have, of course, a plentitude more to look forward to.
I can say while this certainly didn’t have the ambition of the prior games, even given the “don’t stay in the same room or you’ll die by aardvark” timer, it was in its own way the most pleasing.
(Incidentally, I did finally find a safe zone — you can hang out at the fountain at the court as long as you want without getting killed. Makes a decent base for storing objects so you can sort through inventory and think without getting gutted.)
Erect and sublime, for one moment of time,
In the next, that wild figure they saw
(As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,
While they waited and listened in awe.
From the original printing of The Hunting of the Snark.
To continue directly from last time, I need to do a slight correction, as Paul Ingerson pointed out I missed a hint. I thought the wand’s effect was unclued, but it is described as having “mystic runes”, and you can READ it:
The runes on the wand say:
“Though bold in name
They flee in shame!”
Since kobold has the letters “bold” in the name, that is supposed to hint at the wand’s effect being to make kobolds run in fear.
As Hamil is a game without an EXAMINE verb, I wasn’t thinking of getting more information off a particular object. (Also, “mystic runes” I usually don’t think of as English letters!)
Now, let’s rewind to the start, where I had found a slab written with O’GRAM, and dropped into a crypt…
…as Paul (again) surmised, this was meant to hint at CRYPTOGRAM. (This is a puzzle I solved last time but I wanted to see where it was going before I reported in.) Specifically, the crypt looks like this:
You are in a crypt below the chapel, a dank and musty chamber. Sinister passages lead to the east and west, and there is a hole in the south wall. There are some steps up here, but they lead nowhere.
On the wall is scrawled the following legend:
TPM WNLLZSAY HL YAMNY
That’s a rather short cryptogram to solve straight out (and I confirmed there was no simple Caesar shift going on) and in fact I ran about the map a bit before coming back to it, but I found that just to the east there was a major hint:
> E
You are in a short passage, which enters from the west and terminates in a large metal door with no obvious means of opening. The door bears the legend
HE WHO WISHES TO PROCEED FURTHER MUST SPEAK THE PASSWORD
This was a major enough hint I immediately realized the message had to be THE PASSWORD IS … something. Y was D, A was R, M was E, and N was A, so the word was DREAD, and saying it caused the door to open. This word is incidentally randomized on new playthroughs.
This led to a room where, oddly, the only thing I could find was a large tapestry (too big to carry, even) where picking it up opened a window to the sun outside.
You pull down the tapestry from the wall, exposing a small window, far above your reach, through which the sun is shining and a refreshing breeze is blowing.
Where realization struck is that not far off was a coffin with a vampire (the one depicted on the cover above).
You lift the lid of the coffin to reveal an elegantly dressed corpse.
Its eyes snap open and it smiles thirstily at you. The vampire (for such it is) then leaps from the coffin, drops something it was carrying, and moves towards you with fangs bared.
The vampire starts chasing you. The trick is to having the password-room open but have not yet pulled the tapestry; then get the vampire chasing, lead him to the sunlight room, and let him have the full blast.
A ray of light hits the vampire, who emits a ghastly screech and then literally crumbles into dust, which is dispersed by a draught from the window.
Heading back to the vampire’s coffin, I found some documents in a language my avatar couldn’t read, and the documents were notably not a treasure. I stashed them away and merrily did some more mapping / puzzle solving before running across their use more or less by accident. I happened to have them in my inventory when I was exploring an open court next to a “museum”.
You are at the western end of the court. There is a portal leading out at this side,above which are inscribed the words:
THE RIGHTFUL HEIR TO THE KINGDOM OF HAMIL
WILL BE KNOWN BY HIS DEEDS
A lowered portcullis blocks the exit.
> W
The sentries see at once that you are carrying the deeds to castle Hamil, bow respectfully to you, and raise the portcullis.
You are in the entrance hall to Castle Hamil, which is filled with knights who greet you as their lord. To the north there is a passage into a small vault.
The vault is where the treasures go, although for some curious reason, there’s a garlic stashed there already (not a treasure, and I’ll explain where it’s useful later).
The whole court/museum area is pretty dense with interesting items and puzzles.
Location 1 has a huge egg which hatches into a dragon; there’s a forest area to the south with a cave blocked by “an impenetrable mass of undergrowth” and you can deposit the egg there, and find later the dragon has hatched (and burned away the undergrowth) but won’t let you by. You can alternately be there when the egg hatches and find the dragon wants to be friends with you, except that being friends is also fatal:
Suddenly the egg you are carrying gives a loud CRACK, the shell splits, and a baby dragon emerges. It purrs happily at you, unfortunately giving you third degree burns in the process. In fact the dragon’s attempt to make friends merely results in your demise.
My suspicion is that being at the cave with egg hatching is correct, but you need to survive friendship (at which point the dragon will let you by into the cave), but that’s only 60% confidence or so.
Location 2 has a talisman which says OBLIVION. OBLIVION is an understood verb but I haven’t gotten it to do anything (with or without the talisman). The talisman also has the odd effect of randomly being “left behind” when you go a particular direction, meaning you need to backtrack and pick it back up if you want to keep it. I’ve found two uses for it I’ll get into later.
Location 3 has a hard-to-pick-up treasure
There is a huge marble statue by Michaelangelo here!
where getting the statue indicates “You can’t take that!” I assume the hugeness is the issue here. Perhaps some magic will allow transport into the vault, or perhaps it can be shrunk down? I don’t think this is a puzzle I’m ready to solve yet.
Location 4 has a easy-to-pick-up treasure
There is a large curved object here, elegantly carved by skilled craftsmen from the wood of the sacred tree of Hamil!
and it may just be there for stuffing into the vault, but it feels mystical enough I get the intuition this doubles as a useful object somewhere. (It does not seem to be secretly a boomerang, or at least, THROW WOOD doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary.)
Location 5 has a jackdaw flying around with a shiny object. I haven’t been able to grab its attention. (Also, in my current playthrough it is in the east court rather than center, indicating either I made a mapping mistake or there’s something random about the positioning.)
Location 6 leads down to the Snarks.
You are in an east-west passage. There is a sign reading “TO THE SNARKS” and an arrow pointing east.
> E
The passage comes to a dead end here, but there is a hole in the floor.
> D
You are in a curiously constructed room. There are steep passages leading down from here in all eight horizontal directions, each labelled “TO THE SNARK”. There is also a hole in the roof, through which you will have no trouble returning.
The directions all lead to downward stairs, where a message is revealed slowly, Burma-Shave style.
You are in a steep twisting passage. On the wall is daubed the word “UNFORTUNATELY”.
> D
You are in a steep twisting passage. On the wall is daubed the word “SNARKS”.
etc., leading to UNFORTUNATELY SNARKS HAVE TO BE KEPT DEEP IN THE GROUND. Going down one more time is then death.
> D
In the room there is a Snark burbling frumiously to itself. As you approach, it roars like a Bandersnatch. “Oh no, it’s a Boojum!” you gasp, as you softly and suddenly vanish away.
(I like how my spellcheck understands Boojum but not frumiously.)
The only major observation I’ve made is that all eight directions seem to lead to the same set of downwards stairs. Normally I would have trouble being sure of that, because dropping items cause them softly and suddenly vanish away, but the talisman from earlier is an exception: if it drops on its own, it doesn’t count as regular dropping, and then you can confirm by hopping into other directions that you’re going down the same set of stairs to reach it. (That doesn’t mean there isn’t some weird flag set by doing some trick with the eight directions, but resolving whatever is happening doesn’t get fixed by just being in a specific set of rooms.)
Speaking of the talisman, let’s get down to the other use I spoke of, which is at the same forest area as the baby dragon that can burn the entrance to a cave.
To the south is a sleepy-time grove. I don’t know what it’s useful for.
You enter a luxurious grove in which the atmosphere is so heady that you fall asleep almost at once. You awake shortly afterwards with no (apparent) after-effects.
You are in a luxurious grove which contains an abundance of beautiful plants. The sun is shining, birds twitter, bees hum… in fact the whole atmosphere is soporific in the extreme. Now awake, you find it difficult to remain so. The only exit is back to the north.
To the east is the previously mentioned cave, and to the west is the nastiest maze of the game I’ve yet encountered.
Three spirits appear in front of you. They claim to be the servants of the Maize Goddess, Mecohuatl, and promptly bear you away as a sacrifice to their deity.
It’s a maize maze, and for a long time I kept getting attacked by spirits as shown seemingly at random. After a lot of experimentation I finally realized the oblivion talisman gave protection, as long as you either carried it or it was in the current room. That means if you’ve dropped the talisman, you’re safe as long as you can go right back to where the talisman was. The maze, unfortunately, is the irregular kind where directions back are not obvious, and you can’t even use the in-game command BACK (“I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how you got here!”).
It’s hard to convey how distressing the whole experience was. Some exits jump back in the “path” by two or more rooms, so you really want to be dropping extra objects in rooms so you can keep track of Room 1, Room 2, etc. Also, the only way to save is to backtrack out of the maze entirely.
Let’s just say an “enormous” number of clone bodies were sacrificed before I reached the end, which was just a treasure (a Van Gogh painting). Once you actually have it settled, the procedure is to try to walk through with the talisman, and every time you drop it, go back to the previous room and pick it up.
There’s still also a few other scattered puzzles through the map, either addressed or unaddressed. In one room an enchanter seduces (?) you, Odysseus style, but kills you in the process. The proper procedure is to eat garlic beforehand (remember from the vault?) so she is repulsed, and then you can grab the emeralds she leaves behind.
Other random bits and bobs include: a six-legged creature who is crying for their mother, and who you can pick up; a “fish room” with “pictures of fish of every description… turbot, halibut, you name it”; a wall of fire; a bottle with a “djinn” that offers to help “if it be in my power” when set free, but I’ve yet to see an effect; a pit with a “furry arm” that comes out and kills you if you try to jump over; a rocky plain that is “heavily cratered” and trying to walk in any direction results in the earth opening up and swallowing you.
Then there’s this bit, which quite irregularly has a bicycle wheel, and more ominously, has randomization:
> SE
You are in a small room with exits to the southeast and northwest. The whole of one wall is taken up with a large painted mural, which shows the explorations of Columbus and Peary.
There is a bicycle wheel here.
> SE
As you leave the room, a disembodied voice whispers ‘Do not pause!’
You are in the large orbicular chamber.
The mural in particular is randomized. It changes the explorers upon entering the room, or even just has one explorer; it could be, for example, Captain Scott and Marco Polo. In a 90s game I might think this was just a way to add flavor, but in a Phoenix game, this is most definitely some kind of hint, probably connected with “do not pause”. I’ve tried to connect this even with the snark but still haven’t had any luck.
Another Hunting of the Snark picture for good measure.
One last piece of irritation before I close out; it’s something I’ve run across since the beginning of the game, and have finally decided has no logic to it at all other than to kill me personally. If you stay in the same room too long you die.
While you are wondering what to do next, a giant centipede scuttles in and gives you a poisonous bite in the leg.
There are various other deaths, including via anteater. I thought things couldn’t be that simple and perhaps there were “safe zones” or the like, but no, this seems (as far as I can tell) to be a consistent effect found everywhere in the game. I guess the idea is to encourage moving forward, but usually when this was originally hitting I was just organizing my inventory or trying to test out room exits. I have learned now when checking exits (that is, double-checking going, say, northwest is really is blocked off, even though it’s not in the room description) to leave and come back to the room I’m testing every so often in order to stave off death by anteater.
In most normal play the death doesn’t come up, but my pattern of hanging out in a room and fiddling with each of my inventory objects in turn or just trying random verbs is usually what I do when I’m stuck, so the main effect of the feature is to throw me off my groove. Still, I’m managing to hang on without hints so far, but I suspect the latter half of the game will have at least a few demons as puzzle somewhere.
The mathematicians of Cambridge have been a rich source of brutally hard games as written on their local IBM mainframe, including:
Acheton (1978)
Brand X / Philosopher’s Quest (1979)
Quondam (1980)
Hezarin (1981)
They formed their own ecosystem of sorts, where none of the games were yet visible to the commercial public. The were only played by the small group of mathematicians making them in the first place. 1982 is the year that self-containment changes, with works starting to be published by local company Acornsoft.
1982 was also the year that Johnathan R. Partington (who worked on Acheton) went on a prolific streak with three games in one year: Avon, Murdac, and our choice for today, Hamil.
This game is allegedly easier than the cranium-crushing puzzle-fests of the prior games, but given this is being assessed relative to the hardest quartet of adventures I’ve ever seen, “easier” might mean still on the medium-tough side.
Image from the Acornsoft version of the game, via Every Game Going.
While I’ll be sharing some images of commercial versions (the one by Acornsoft I’ve already mentioned, and one published later by Topologika) I’m playing the direct port of the mainframe version as ported into z-code. (Here’s a link for direct on-line play.) The major obvious difference between the earlier mainframe version and the commercial versions is in the intro, which in the original is short and enigmatic…
You have discovered that the outside world is dangerous. Pursued for many days and nights by hordes of hostile beings, you have arrived, breathless, at a sanctuary. It seems that you are trapped, as it would be foolhardy to venture outside again. However, there may be more to this place than you think…
You are at the western end of a primitive stone chapel. Light streams in through the windows, which are set high above your reach in the entirely featureless walls of the building. A plain arch leads northwards to the world outside which, as you know from experience, is extremely hostile.
…but the intro is rather elongated in the commercial versions, primarily to note that while you are the “rightful heir” of Hamil, and that “you have only just discovered your birthright.”
Silly things like “motivation” and “plot”, bah. Here, I like the enigma more. You start in a small, three room church, with just a bicycle lamp, a rod, and an ancient piece of steak (?) to keep you company.
You are in the middle of the chapel.
There is an extremely heavy stone slab set into the floor here.
It bears the name O’GRAM.
Knowing what I was up against, I went straight for my “try all the verbs off my standard list” method.
SHAKE and FISH seem to be referring to nouns, not verbs, but I marked them down anyway.
This was productive right from the start because (referring back to the O’GRAM slab) while you can’t GET SLAB, PUSH SLAB, PULL SLAB, MOVE SLAB, or HIT SLAB, you can LIFT or RAISE it. This is one of those “yes, I can see why you’d logically only take those two verbs, but you should still acknowledge the other ones” sort of moments.
You succeed in prising the slab from the ground with the aid of the metal rod. A flight of steps beneath is revealed, and you therefore prop the slab up with the rod, leaving a gap through which you should just be able to squeeze.
Going down leads to the rod snapping and the slab closing shut, leaving you underground in the world of Hamil.
A most definitely incomplete map in progress. Starting room marked on top, the “hub” is the marked oval.
The design reminds me of Acheton, with a hub of sorts that branches into a plethora of relatively self-contained areas. (The hub room itself contains a magic wand, which we’ll get back to later.) The overall effect is sometimes akin to a “jukebox” puzzle game like The 7th Guest where an area is self-contained and exists primarily to dispense a treasure. (Oh yes: just like all the other four games, there’s treasures, although it is unclear yet what happens to them. I would assume if you gather them you’ve proved your heirdom, hurray, but I don’t know for certain.)
Here’s three puzzles I’ve solved as examples:
The simplest maze to start. The game intentionally forces you to ditch your inventory.
As you leave the room there is a violent earth tremor and a mighty rushing wind, which between them force you to drop all your possessions. Moreover a large rock falls, narrowly missing you and cutting off the way you came in.
You are in the Maze of Hamil. Light streams in through many gaps in the rocks. There is the constant sound of rockfalls, distant and not-so-distant.
The gimmick here is that there’s coins in each of the rooms, and you need to visit all of them before the end room (which I have marked as “fares please”). As you leave a room it gets destroyed, so you have to create your path to visit all the rooms before the exit.
You are in a small valley surrounded by unclimbable rocks. The only exit, to the west, is blocked. A mighty voice intones “FARES PLEASE!”
The whole purpose of this is to get a Crown of Hamil, a treasure marked with an exclamation mark (!).
You are in the Quaternion room. On the wall is scribbled a selection of obscure algebraic formulae, none of which seem particularly relevant at this juncture. There is a narrow exit to the south.
The ancient crown of the Kings of Hamil is here!
This one’s not hard once you realize the premise, but a second area that has a similar premise but ramps up the difficulty.
To get to the Lost World zone, you have to go back a sleeping T-Rex who then wakes up and starts chasing you.
As you pass the Tyrannosaurus, it stirs uneasily and then wakes, stands up and begins lumbering towards you. You run through the exit and find yourself on the slopes of the Lost World – a vast plateau criss-crossed by a network of boulder-strewn paths and populated by beings long thought extinct. From this point it is also possible to descend to the centre of the plateau, from which a large flock of pterodactyls is taking off in perfect formation. Meanwhile, the Tyrannosaurus is still galumphing towards you, having already caused a small avalanche which has blocked the path back into its cave.
There’s a specific number of pterodactyls taking off, and the idea is to kill enough time so that when you enter the center, it is pterodactyl-free. This means getting chased as long as possible, but this time the paths get filled up by earthquakes, not the rooms.
The T.R. follows, causing an avalanche to block the path you took.
You are in the Lost World.
A Tyrannosaurus Rex is lumbering towards you.
So our goal ends up being to visit every single path and return back to the center. In mathematician lingo the first puzzle is is a Hamiltonian path (visit all the rooms) and the second puzzle is a Eulerian path (visit all the edges connecting rooms). And yes, the name “Hamil” of the game does not seem to be coincidence.
Realizing the gimmick took longer than the solve, but still, this felt very much in The 7th Guest zone, of basically using the rooms like a giant board game with its own rules as opposed to being “in the universe” of the adventuring world.
Not like there still isn’t normal adventuring things — while you get a bust of Conan Doyle as a reward for solving this puzzle, you also get a whistle which helps solve a side puzzle off the hub.
You are in a small room which is furnished as a living room, though evidently for an inhuman being, to judge from the designs on the walls. These depict different ways of cooking human flesh. I hope you have more taste.
There is an antique silver goblet here!
There is an old lady here, sitting on a rock. Even in this light, there appears to be something odd about her.
> BLOW WHISTLE
Phthui!
An enormous alsatian appears, snarling and foaming at the mouth. It is about to set on you but sees the old lady as a worthier opponent and fights a fierce battle with her, eventually tearing her limb from limb. It then slopes off, exhausted.
There is an antique silver goblet here!
The mangled remains of an elderly female hobgoblin are here.
For the third area, it is a more “traditional” maze, and the old ultra-evil of the prior Phoenix games surfaces.
Specifically: going in any “wrong” directions results in meeting an enemy, like a dwarf with an axe, or a mummy. You then have a turn to react, followed by death.
You are in the labyrinth.
> N
You are in the labyrinth.
There is a mummy here, shambling towards you.
> KILL MUMMY
The mummy throttles you to death.
Oh dear! You seem to have passed away.
You scored 53 points out of a maximum of 300.
Do you want another game, oh heroic one?
It appears the majority of the enemies are entirely unkillable, and you’ll notice the pattern is to have two exits per maze room — you can drop items and do relatively speaking the normal mapping, except for having to die repeatedly as you test exits. (Also, the game disables saves while in the maze; fortunately you can drop items to help map it out, pop back out to save, then go back in again and nothing has happened to the dropped items.)
Where I got puzzled was the last room, which appeared to be a dead end — you could enter, but every exit had monsters, including a “kobold” which weren’t in prior exits. I vaguely suspected the usual pattern was being thrown off here, so I experimented with trying to kill the kobold, and notably using the wand:
> E
You are in the labyrinth.
There is an angry kobold here.
> WAVE WAND
The kobold suddenly shows signs of terror and runs away from you at top speed!
Yes, despite all the other enemies being unkillable (probably) there’s one that isn’t, and there’s also no indication that this is the wand effect in particular and the only way to find out is to test the wand. While I did technically solve the puzzle about the best way one could (I had nothing resembling an offensive weapon, so honestly the wand was the only thing that occurred to me as a possible solution) I can still mark this moment as thoroughly, unrepentantly evil.
The reward for solving the puzzle is a golden crozier which may end up not being useful (other than for stashing in some room I haven’t found yet).
I’ve only prodded lightly at other areas, like a museum that has a statue of Michelangelo’s that is marked as a treasure but is too big to carry, and some woods with a mysterious location that temporarily puts you to sleep, so I’ll write about them next time when I have a better grasp of what’s going on.
Renga in Blue 