Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Back in 1987 GAMES Magazine printed an article titled They Take the High-Tech Road to Adventure profiling the company Infocom. I remember as a child reading the article many (many) times and dreaming of working there.

Because GAMES was (technically, still is) a puzzle magazine, they felt obligated to include a bonus; specifically, a transcript from Leather Goddesses of Phobos which included enough information to solve the puzzle from the game.

This is not a puzzle genre that ever took off, but I did find a perfect moment in Acheton for an experiment. Read this transcript and figure out how to get past the large sheet of glass.

There is a turquoise amulet here!
There is a bunch of keys here.
There is a lump of lead on the floor near you.
There is a small box of matches nearby.
There is a mink coat with bulging pockets lying in a heap nearby!
There is a large glass palantir here!
There is an antique porcelain plate here with a small pile of salt
on it!
There is a small earthenware pot here, labelled “London Dry” on one side.
There are some magnificent quartz crystals on the ground here.
There is a three foot black rod with a rusty star on the end nearby.
There is a small pair of scissors here.
There is a large old-fashioned mercury thermometer here.
There is a pair of dull brass tongs here.
There is a beautifully fashioned Stradivarius violin here!
> n
You are in a spacious room which has a large sheet of glass blocking
an exit to the east. Etched into the glass are the words “Find the
right key, though no lock there be”. Passages lead to the north and
south. An icy breeze comes from the north.
> u
You are in a small chamber above the slab room. An icy draught blows
in from a passage to the north.
> n
You are in a spacious room which has a large sheet of glass blocking
an exit to the east. Etched into the glass are the words “Find the
right key, though no lock there be”. Passages lead to the north and
south. An icy breeze comes from the north.
>

…this is a rotten hard and often unfair game. You can die easily. You can lose or destroy a necessary tool just as easily. This should not be seen as a fault, as such, in one of the earliest adventures ever written, by mathematicians for mathematicians; but Acheton is not only larger than nearly all other games, it also does take harshness to extremes at times.
— Richard Bos

I want to discuss two puzzles that are both brilliant and unfair.

Before I start, I should give the reminder that just like Adventure, the goal in Acheton is to collect all the treasures in the world. In this case, they then go in a vault.

> xyzzy
I’m afraid that magic word hasn’t got enough power to work in this universe.

The “famous magic word” of Acheton is ZOOGE.

> sw
You are in a low damp chamber. Mist appears from nowhere, rolls and billows around the room and eventually disappears equally mysteriously. A rough note on the wall says “ZOOGE”. There are two exits at opposite ends of the room.

Unfortunately, attempting to using it generally results in “Nothing happens.” There hence must be more conditions. In Adventure the condition was simply to be in the right place but it wasn’t tough to figure out. In Acheton it takes a more lateral jump: there are rooms spread throughout the game with stars.

You are in a small chamber whose walls show chisel marks and other signs of only recently having been cut out of the solid rock. The only exit is to the southeast. Somebody has painted a large purple star on the floor!

The reason this jump isn’t too absurd is there are quite a few rooms with the stars. It’s safe to assume they’re part of an underlying magic mechanism.

> zooge
There is a mighty rush of wind, blowing you off your feet. You pick yourself up and find that you have grazed your knee and that everything you were holding has been scattered round the room.

I thought maybe this was it — perhaps a puzzle surfaces where an item can only be dropped via this mechanism — but given the number of stars, probably not.

Fortunately, there’s another room with a suggestive hint.

You are in a 12-foot high rock chamber. There is a massive walk-in safe on the east wall. The west wall bears an inscription, and there is a bright yellow star apparently painted in the middle of the ceiling. A spiral staircase leads downwards.
The safe is open.
> read inscription
The inscription reads “Black magic should be practiced in obscurity.”

Unfortunately, I had no idea what to do with this. Hints were perused. It turns out the effect only happens with the lamp off. Unfortunately, still:

> zooge
Nothing happens.

I went back to one of the other star rooms and turned off my lamp again.

> zooge
There is a loud >>SNAP<< !

Ok, now we are getting somewhere. Except … nothing happened.

It turns out that if you have treasures on the floor in a star room that’s not next to the safe AND you have the lamp off ZOOGE will teleport the treasures next to the safe.

It’s kind of plausible someone could put all these parts together, especially if they were working as a group and sharing notes (allegedly, in 1978 the “black magic should be practiced in obscurity” hint didn’t even exist). I certainly don’t begrudge experimentation puzzles entirely, because they have a unique quality which only works in an adventure game, but there’s no better word for this puzzle as other than unfair.

Which is a pity, because there’s a followup puzzle which is brilliant.

> d
You are in a small dusty chamber. There is a hole in the ceiling and an obvious exit to the northwest.
> nw
You are in a long clean gallery. The walls are covered with frescos and the floor is a beautiful, intricately constructed mosaic of coloured stone tiles.
There is a large portrait by Rembrandt propped up nearby!
> get portrait
OK.
> se
The painting you’re carrying won’t fit through here.
> inventory
You are holding:
A Rembrandt portrait.
An aerosol can of paint.
A brass lamp.

Feel free to predict what happens next.

> drop portrait
OK.
> paint star
You paint a star on the ground nearby. The paint dries slowly and evenly.
> turn off lamp
The lamp is now off.
> zooge
There is a loud >>SNAP<< !

…

A year ago when I first blogged about Acheton I mentioned “one of the coolest yet also impossibly unfair puzzles I’ve ever experienced”. Here it is.

You are in a small deep chamber under the pyramid. The walls are decorated with ancient Egyptian drawings and hieroglyphics, and the floor is uneven and rocky. A dim light enters through the only exit, which is a staircase to the west.
There is a large cactus growing out of a cylindrical earthenware vessel fixed to the ground. The vessel bears an inscription: “BLEI AMEDI”.
> eat cactus
You break off a piece of cactus and eat it, finding to your surprise that it is delicious and even the spines melt in your mouth. After a moment, a feeling of dizziness overtakes you as the walls seem to recede into the distance and the entire room appears to expand around you.

Even what you’re carrying seems to get larger.

Eventually you realise that it is you who are shrinking, apparently without limit and not the room that is expanding, and this helps you to overcome your dizziness, though not your apprehension.

In the end, you are crushed by an object that you are carrying.

You appear to have died. Do you want to be reincarnated?

(The vessel inscription is I AM EDIBLE.)

The obvious solution here: not to carry anything.

This works, allows a good amount of progress, and is the irritating part. It turns out there are some objects that you CAN carry with you. There are two things small enough to turn into useful objects.

> inventory
You are holding:
A piece of thread.
A glass marble.
> look
As you look at the marble, it glows briefly. You get the impression that some vision is shown in it, but cannot see any detail.
> eat cactus
You break off a piece of cactus and eat it, finding to your surprise that it is delicious and even the spines melt in your mouth. After a moment, a feeling of dizziness overtakes you as the walls seem to recede into the distance and the entire room appears to expand around you.

Even what you’re carrying seems to get larger.

Eventually you realise that it is you who are shrinking, apparently without limit and not the room that is expanding, and this helps you to overcome your dizziness, though not your apprehension.

Your fears are groundless, as the shrinking stops suddenly.
You are holding:
A glass palantir.
Some rope.
You are in the middle of what appears to be a huge cavern with a boulder-strewn rocky floor. The walls are covered with pictures of giants and massive geometric shapes. There is an opening in the western wall through which light enters, but this is far above your reach, even if you were to get over there. A small opening can be seen under one of the rocks.
> look
As you look into the palantir, you see a brief vision which quickly fades. The ruling council of Acheton appears to be enjoying a grand banquet in their enormous council chamber. At present the banqueters are enjoying a fruit course.

This is the sort of moment I play adventure games for. I am still amazed just re-reading it.

Yet … while the thread/rope is necessary early on enough to stop the player, the marble isn’t. It is possible to get nearly to the very end of the game before needing the palantir. There’s brilliance enough for this era, it’s just still clouded by uncertainty about what makes good game design. (All the creators had access to before they made Acheton was Adventure and Zork.)

I know the standard frustration cliche in parser IF is guess-the-verb, but Acheton’s annoyances are more in guess-the-noun.

There is a small earthenware pot here, labelled “London Dry” on one side.
> get pot
OK.
> drink pot
I don’t understand that!
> drink london
I don’t understand that!
> drink dry
I don’t understand that!
> drink liquid
I don’t understand that!

…many variants and a Google search later…

> drink gin
You take a large swig of gin from the pot. It is very strong and you soon start to feel its effects.

Here’s another one:

> light match
OK.
> light pile
I don’t understand that!
> light driftwood
I don’t understand that!
> burn driftwood
I don’t understand that!
> burn pile
I don’t understand that!
> light fire
A few small flames are visible in the middle of the pile of wood.

I recently played the Tin Man Games conversion of Forest of Doom for computer.

The original Forest of Doom from 1983 was a gamebook in the standard style at the time, where a winning run takes many restarts. The first bit of the map has four choices:

If you choose wrong, you have lost, although you don’t find out until the very end of the book.

Maybe some emphasis would help: if you choose wrong on the first map choice, you lose at the very end of the book.

Sigh.

This got my thinking about restarts in general which are still a general style in both parser games (like Jon Ingold’s Make It Good) and modern gamebooks (like The Sinister Fairground from Cubus Games).

Acheton is a game that very much wants you to restart, on many levels:

* The near-comedic presence of death leads to short resets.

* The ningy, which I already wrote about, is nearly guaranteed to cause a total restart.

* Optimizing lamp life can require a restart deep in the game, 500 or so moves in, requiring the steps for finding treasures be carefully tracked.

* There’s occasionally a more moderate “explorer-restart”. A simple example would be when mapping a dungeon; it is understood that you map the dungeon thoroughly first, find a good route, and then restore to the point you started.

This is the sort of thing adventure gamers accept without thinking. Consider, though: it’s deeply weird. It’s almost like it is built in (to this and many other adventures) acceptance of the sort of time travel mechanic where a character makes a “fugue echo” of themselves to send out before resetting the timeline. This is true no matter what the genre.

In my most recent play session, I came across an ocean.

[Map by Marco Cavagna.]

Fortunately I remembered this section when I played through Acheton 5 years ago, so I knew that mapping the entirety of the sea is not exactly useful; the first time around, I inspected each and every square I could because this game was evil enough I knew it would have no shame about hiding a secret.