The first maze you’re likely to encounter. Click to enlarge.
When the player is tempted to write a Java program to discover a Hamiltonian path through a maze, the maze is perhaps a bit too difficult.
— Matthew T. Russotto
There’s a lot of mazes. Acheton might hold the world record.
I’m going to spoil them thoroughly below.
I haven’t hit all of them in my current playthrough, but from memory there’s:
a.) The lodestone maze depicted in the map above. The “unique” trick here is the treasures are randomly arranged at the start of a game so a walkthrough needs to give a route that passes through every room (hence Matthew’s desire for a Hamiltonian path).
b.) An ice maze consisting only of two exit choices (SE and SW) but lots of deadly thin ice. The trick here is to take a (magical) item that will point in the correct direction to get to the single hidden treasure.
c.) A wizard’s maze with a start that involves going in circles trying every exit out of a room and returning to the start. After trying every door, the player enters the maze. The maze is generated at the moment it is entered. The way to get out is to use the same order of the exits tried before entering. It’s quite possible to get all the way through the maze without realizing this until the end. This marks (excluding the “room reassignment” used in Mystery Mansion as a memory cheat) the first adventure game with dynamic room generation.
d.) A maze with deadly snakes which I can only describe as a turn-based version of Pac-Man (although before Pac-Man was invented). Very tricky timing is involved.
e.) A fairly mundane hedge maze that you can burn down if you like. You might get tired of mazes and want to go ahead and destroy one.
f.) A section in the desert that might marginally be termed a “maze”. It’s based on a transport-based-on-limited-resource puzzles, rather like this one from Martin Gardner:
A group of airplanes is based on a small island. The tank of each plane holds just enough fuel to take it halfway around the world. Any desired amount of fuel can be transferred from the tank of one plane to the tank of another while the planes are in flight. The only source of fuel is on the island, and for the purposes of the problem it is assumed that there is no time lost in refueling either in the air or on the ground.
What is the smallest number of planes that will ensure the flight of one plane around the world in a great circle, assuming that the planes have the same constant ground speed and rate of fuel consumption and that all planes return safely to their island base?
(The Martin Gardner puzzle is incidentally top-flight and I’d recommend everyone giving it a go.)
In any case, the interactive fiction version requires wrangling water in the desert in appropriate places to avoid death.
g.) Was there another one? I don’t remember. I suppose I’ll find out.
In any case, the only maze I’d call “straight” would be the lodestone maze. It honestly isn’t that traumatic to map compared with that evil one from Adventure and the only reason I see the Hamiltonian path being necessary is that in order to optimize the number of turns (given the low life on the lamp compared with how many steps are needed) there is a good chance a game restart is needed somewhere. Still, once someone gets to the “cave” portion of the game they can just save, wander through using the map noting where all the treasures are, then restore and go only for the important rooms.
> e
You find yourself surrounded by gently swaying silver birches which appear to change position when you’re not looking. Plenty of openings are visible between them, but these close up in some mysterious way whenever you approach them. The trees give off a heavy scent which becomes almost overpowering at times.
> dig
You start to dig a small hole with your hands. As you do so a strange high pitched musical laughter can be heard all around. The branches of the nearby trees shake, although there is no wind blowing. I think you must be tickling the tree roots!
Just like Adventure and Zork, Acheton features caverns in darkness; you need a lamp to see. Unlike the former, darkness is not immediately deadly.
You’re in the sandstone room.
> e
It is pitch dark.
> e
It is pitch dark.
> w
It is pitch dark.
> e
It is pitch dark.
> w
It is pitch dark.
> e
It is pitch dark.
> w
You fell into a pit and broke every bone in your body.
In other words, there is a random chance of death, rather than guaranteed immediate death via grue or falling in a pit.
One thing I remember from playing Acheton the first time around is that I ran out of lamp time but I was very close to the end of the game. So for about the 20 steps it took to walk to the endgame portion I was having to walk through darkness, saving every few steps and reloading if I died. Given I was efficient in that playthrough, the lamp has a VERY tight timer. I’ll try to be as careful as possible.
Speaking of death, there are plenty of instant deaths in Acheton. Modern gamers would call them “unfair” but many were clearly intended as “funny”. For instance, there’s keys and grate identical to the start of Adventure, except for one slight detail:
You are in the hallway of a disused farmhouse. Once there were doorways leading off into several other rooms, but these were all securely boarded up long ago. Outside is a road leading off to the west.
There is a small aerosol can of white paint here.
There is an empty bottle on the ground.
There is a bunch of keys here.
There is a brass lamp on the ground nearby.
It is off.
> get keys
OK.
> get lamp
OK.
> s
You are on the road near the farmhouse.
> s
You are at the bottom of a slight hollow, from which a path leads north.
There is a 3×3 steel grate set in the ground nearby.
The grate is locked.
> unlock grate
OK.
You are standing in the depression.
There is a 3×3 steel grate set in the ground nearby.
The grate is open.
> d
You fall into a well. The water is icy cold, and you rapidly die of hypothermia.
I’m afraid you haven’t got far enough to qualify for reincarnation yet.
A second tempting entrance (a tunnel into a deserted mine) also leads to instant death. Once finally locating the real entrance, followed by the first treasure (noted with a (!)), well–
> n
It is pitch dark.
> light lamp
The lamp is now on and burning brightly.
You are in a small room with a narrow counter running most of the way across it. At the end of the counter is a sign reading “CLOAKROOM” and there is a row of broken hooks on the wall.
The only exit is to the south. There is a mink coat (with bulging pockets) lying below the hooks!
> get coat
OK.
As you take the coat, a couple of ferrets leap out of its pockets and savage you. You die shortly later from loss of blood.
–that likely could have gone better.
Death really is the mildest thing the game can do, though. The problems are the points where the player can make the game unwinnable without realizing it (that is, Cruel on the Zarfian scale). I’ll talk about one of those parts next time.
The portions-of-the-map-closing parts of Stuga are getting to be a pain (there’s a part that doesn’t seem to have any way in now — I’m not sure if it’s a bug, or if there’s some strange timed thing, but it looks like I’ll have to restart) so I’m diving into Acheton.
Via Mobygames.
Perhaps the first adventure game written outside the U.S. was “Acheton” (c. 1979), by Jon Thackray and David Seal, with contributions by Jonathan Partington, working in the mathematics department of Cambridge University, England. “Acheton” is an enormous cave game, whose name is a confection of “Acheron” (the river that dead used to cross in order to get to Hades) and “Achates” (minor character in Virgil’s “Aeneid”), based around exploration and collecting treasures.
[rec.games.int-fiction FAQ]
I’m using the Z-code port (courtesy Graham Nelson, Adam Atkinson and David Kinder), which is about as authentic as I could hope for (and reports a start date of 1978, not 1979):
Our aim has been to restore and not to modernise or “improve” the work: the original parser has been recreated and all textual responses are authentic. Our only additions have been the following commands: “inform”, producing this text; “restore”, which allows saved games to be restored (the Phoenix originals instead asked about this at the start of each session of play); and “script”, which allows the transcript of play to be written to a file.
The only catch here is this was a mainframe game where the original 1978 version is lost, so this is the last part from 1981. This is semi-frustrating for the true gaming archaeologist, but really, I’m just here to play. In this case, play again — I finished Acheton a few years ago (for fun, not part of any project) and still have my maps. I have a deep and possibly unnatural fondness for hand-drawn maps, so I’ll see about popping some scans up as my game progresses. Since this is a replay, it won’t be quite the same as my prior games; pretty much everything I solved myself I still remember, although there were a couple sections I relied heavily on walkthroughs and hence my memory as to actual puzzle solutions is foggy.
Late in the game there’s one of the coolest yet also impossibly unfair puzzles I’ve ever experienced. So there’s that to look forward to. Onward!
I’m nearing the end and a new feature has hit (I don’t know exactly when it happens, but I’m guessing when your score reaches a certain point) where map exits start closing off. Two examples:
You are in a room with an upward escalator and a door forward.
UP
Just as you’re approaching the escalator, it stops and a man runs in and closes it.
You are in a room with an upward escalator and a door forward.
The escalator has been closed by Cottage’s highways department.
Nearby:
You are in the Studio.
BACK
The lock of the door has jammed so you won’t get out that way!
Your keys don’t fit the keyhole.
You are in the Studio.
Mind you, there’s still a way to get where is necessary, but it starts to be more circuitous as the game goes on. The portions of the map that involve (more or less) random travel start to get more appealing.
This led to a welcome kind of tension, lending a modicum of atmosphere and the feeling of other presences, rather like when entering the trapdoor from Zork it gets closed and barred from the other side. It’s not exactly a horror tension (the game is too silly for that) but more of a strategic tension.; I felt like I needed to do some actual planning.
There is a particular art to reviving a half-finished adventure game. Quite often I find I have to restart because I have a.) lost my maps or b.) lost the thread of the plot.
b.) is no worry: there’s no plot. As for a.), I posted my most recent map on the last post on this blog (back in 2011) so I don’t have to reconstruct everything. I still have the same sluggish feeling about this game though, so I need a battle plan.
I went to the hint file and pulled out the list of all the treasures as well as all the things that get points. Fingers crossed: a checklist might help me psychologically get through this thing.
Two puzzles are spoiled below.
Click on the image for a PDF version of the map.
Work has delayed me a bit in finishing Stuga, but also Stuga itself has been stalling me; I’ve been having a hard time working up the energy to play it in my spare moments. I’ve being trying to isolate why. One reason is the puzzles (more on that in a second) but also because Stuga turns out to be another “find the treasures and gather them in the right location” plot, but without any time limit via expiring lantern batteries or otherwise. This seems like it ought to make it easier for me to want to play, but oddly once I realized there was no time pressure it was causing the opposite. I think it’s perhaps because there’s appeal in these old games still (and uniquely for the era) as an optimization puzzle, and I was having fun in Zork (for example) plotting out the best route to take to grab the diamond, like I was a real adventurer plotting over a dusty map. Stuga makes me feel not like I’m a character in some world, but an avatar of an avatar; like LASH, controlling someone not myself who is themselves controlling a robot from a distance. This is all weird and irrational and imprecise but that’s the best way I can express how it feels.
The puzzles, also, to use the words of Jimmy Maher, are either extremely simple or blatantly unfair. In my last post the word SESAME was mentioned in a room, prompting David Welbourn to say his next command would be OPEN SESAME. Well, it’s almost as easy as that — it’s just SESAME, and you use it at a locked gate and that’s that.
On the other hand, there’s a dark room. If you type TAKE (not TAKE ALL or any other variation) you will pick up a hidden lamp, and then be told the lamp will disappear if you leave the room so you should “stay put”. So you type STAY and then wait (in real time, yes, you actually sit still for 30 seconds) and then you get scooped out of the room and get to keep the lamp.
The Muppet sequence in my last post has been the best puzzle so far, just because it turned out to be a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure interlude with binary choices where figuring out the correct route led to a treasure. It was so unique and weird it was oddly fun to work out.
In the midst of mapping a maze I came across this:
You are on the edge of a deep well. If you jump down you won’t get back up!
u
Little you is winding.
Fozzi the bear is sitting here asking:
What’s your name ? Jason
Someone says: This is THE MUPPET SHOW with tonight’s guest artist: jason
The curtain rises and you are on a stage with Kermit the frog. The puppet audience is applauding.
Answer RUN or PERFORM : perform
Kermit asks you if you want to sing or tell a story.
Answer SING or TELL : sing
You start singing: I’m a poor lonesome cowboy and a long way from home…
The audience is cheering but the singers Wayne & Wanda are angry with you for taking their place. They want to kill you!
Answer PEACE (with Wayne & Wanda) or FOLLOW (Kermit) : peace
You approach Wayne & Wanda to make your peace with them.
You decide not to sing anymore so that W&W can keep their job. Fozzi comes up and says:
Enter an interest that you have! Dice
Fozzi gives his thanks and leaves. There is a door to your left.
Answer FOLLOW (Fozzi) or LEFT : follow
Now Fozzi enters a door. There’s also a door forward.
Answer FOLLOW (Fozzi) or FORWARD : follow
You are inside a torture-chamber. The door locked itself behind you! The walls are closing in. The only way out is blocked by a monster!
Answer RUN (out) or STAY : run
You run straight into a monster devouring vegetables! He grabs you and throws you high into the air.
You are in the loft, a small nook at the top of the house. From here you can go everywhere. On the wall it says: SESAME
A little faun runs in intending to tread on your foot but he loses a shoe and runs away howling.
You are in the Swiss clock room.
There is a faun shoe here.
GET SHOE
Ok.
FORWARD
A horde of fauns comes rushing out. Nnnnnow you are a pulp.
Do you want me to bring you back to life ? no
WHAT? Don’t you trust me? Only yesterday I revived a DEC-2020 and it worked for several minutes…
But I won’t make a fuss. Have it your way.
I’m starting to get the hang of this, somewhat. The short minimalist descriptions do have one advantage: they make it entirely reasonable to play in a split screen format, with a map on one side and the game window in the other.
The only issue is once I swapped my mental key as to “top of page” meaning “forward” and “bottom of page” meaning “backward” so my forward and backward exits were all wrong in a section.
Since “I just mapped some more” doesn’t make an exciting post, let me mention ASCII art. I’ve seen two instances so far in Stuga, here’s one:
A small faun appears.
He throws a knife at you… It hits you! !
Do you want me to bring you back to life ? yes
OK, but don’t blame me if something goes wr…
POFF!!! You are surrounded by a cloud of green gas!!
You’re alive! When the gas has dispersed You can see that
You are in a grave. There’s a musty smell here. The priest is looking down. He looks like this:
It’s interesting that Zork from the early 1977-1978 period also had ASCII art. It’s like the impulse for graphics was already bubbling.
I’m in the “mapping” phase of playing Stuga, and the LEFT/RIGHT/FORWARD/BACK is making things a pain. Just to be clear, this is fixed relative directions, so LEFT from a particular room will always go the same way.
With Zork even though there were numerous passages where going west and then east would not lead you back where you started, with here the tendency is pathological and it’s impossible to even guess what a good spacial relationship would be. With my tangled mess up there I can see the Hilbert room and its accompanying exits could be better placed, but I only knew that after painstaking drawing and testing. I’ve taken up saving when I enter a room with many exits and restoring to test all of them rather than returning the way I came because so often I don’t know which way to go back.
My second attempt made LEFT = left side of map, RIGHT = right side of map and so on for an ounce of sanity.
It’s still somewhat insane and disconcerting, though. Even though it’s functionally equivalent to N/S/E/W I’m still very uncomfortable while playing. Do any of my Swedish readers know if this became a common thing in Swedish games, or if most of them are in traditional compass directions?
Also: the lift has access to nine floors. Eek!
The alternate ending for Twilight.
I’ve been corresponding with Bob Sorem, authors of one of the ports of Mystery Mansion. It’s easy to to forget the context of these games: this was a mainframe game in the time many did not own personal computers, and so for some this was the only computer game they had access to for years. Hence: obsessive playing and perfection. Bob writes that he was disappointed if he got anything less than 999 out of 999 points.
(Bob answered all of my questions and also sent a complete map set which he has given permission to post here, so I am very grateful to his help.)
One of the peculiar things I learned from him which doesn’t seem clued at all in the game, is that the odd messages I’ve mentioned
YOU HEARD A WOMAN SCREAM
YOU HEARD A WOLF HOWL
YOU HEARD A CROW CAW AS IT FLEW BY
YOU HEARD SOME ROCKS FALLING NEARBY
which occur every hour (on the half hour — there are traditional clock bells on the hour) are also scoring opportunities. Immediately after one of those messages occurs you can SCORE POINTS to get a bonus 2 points. This can be awkward timing if you’re about to stake a vampire or fight a wolf so does cause a little extra caution, like one of random Achievement challenges in a modern game (shooting all the cameras in Portal, say).
I approached things with lower standards than 999 out of 999 points. I consider a winning run to:
a.) Kill the threats: vampire, werewolf, wolf, and warrior.
b.) Expose the murderer and hand him or her to the police.
c.) Raid the treasure in the “treasure trek” maze.
Still, this was rather a challenge to wrangle everything.
- The characters will sometimes pick up items and wander off with them. Relatedly, the murder weapon (needed to accuse the murderer) can be tricky to locate. Fortunately there’s a parrot that can be used to FIND items (it says so in the description, so you don’t have to guess at that at least).
- Part of a successful run requires a trip to a “mole maze” where the mole sometimes changes the exits. Should I marvel at the innovation (dynamic map changes!), or just be really annoyed? My method of coping was to tackle the maze first thing after getting the compass, but even then multiple attempts were required.
In the “treasure trek” maze (which occurs after figuring out the amulet-cavity deal from my last post) you are also outrunning rising water so you have to be careful not to drown. (Trivia note: when activating this section the route to the mole maze collapses and the mole maze rooms are “reused” for this maze as a way of saving memory.)
The conditions where you can or can’t do things are mysterious and seem to occasionally depend on the time of day. For example, there’s a wooden wedge in a pile of wood, but sometimes you can’t reach it.
>GET WEDGE
THE WOOD IS STACKED TOO HIGH.
then for no reason I am quite sure of, later attempting a staking sometimes result in
> kill vampire
YOU HAVE NOT FIGURED OUT HOW NOT DO THAT YET.
Fortunately there’s an alternate (brilliant) way of killing the vampire which I will discuss in the comments.
To be a little more positive, there’s just so many ways of handling things. For example, to find the murderer you can question people until someone gives their suspicions, LISTEN during a conversation (for example when the MASTER and the BUTLER are in the same room), hear it on the radio from a police announcement, or learn about it from a magic scroll. Alternately, you could presume everyone is guilty and shoot everyone in the house (Grand Theft Auto mashed up with L.A. Noire, so to speak).
One bit that helped was an extra dollop of science fiction onto the genre pile
IT IS THE LABORATORY OF THE MAD SCIENTIST. THERE ARE SEVERAL PIECES OF EQUIPMENT HERE WHICH ARE ALL HUMMING READY TO WORK. IT SORT OF LOOKS LIKE THE TRANSPORTER ROOM OUT OF A STAR TREK MOVIE. LARGE WINDOWS OVERLOOK THE GROUNDS. THERE IS A DOOR TO THE SOUTH AND A SMALL DOOR ON THE FLOOR.
There’s a MATTER XMITTER and a MATTER RECEIVER that let you BEAM UP and BEAM DOWN to teleport to the laboratory and from the laboratory to where the matter receiver is. I placed the matter receiver at the exit so I could teleport at the very end.
In any case, after midnight the Mansion explodes, so I made my exit to triumph:
YOU HAVE BEATEN THE ODDS AND HAVE DONE THE IMPOSSIBLE. YOU HAVE SURVIVED MYSTERY MANSION AND YOU CAN NOW SEE IT GOING UP IN SMOKE BEFORE YOU.
YOUR SCORE INCLUDES 84 POINTS FOR THE ITEMS YOU HAVE WITH YOU.
NOW YOU HAVE TO WALK TO THE BIG CITY.
YOU SCORED 804 POINTS WHICH RATES YOU AS A SLEUTH.
YOU PLAYED 70 MINUTES REAL TIME AND 18.0 HOURS GAME TIME OR 31 % UTILIZATION.
There are three parts I missed, according to the nebulous and nearly incomprehensible source code. First, there’s gold coins found by doing … something … somewhere. Also, SLEEP is not just an intransitive word (see the image clip on top of this post) and there’s even a way to succeed (ranking Mystery Mansion as the first computer game of any type to include sexuality) but I have no idea how. Finally, there’s a way to call a taxi (you don’t have to walk back to town as per the ending text) but the phone always gives me a busy signal; I don’t know if I need perfect timing or what exactly.
Still, I think I’ve got the full experience. I can start to see — at the end of my journey, mind you — why HP mainframe users were addicted; once the game is “figured out” it becomes more of a re-playable strategy game with multiple endings. Getting a perfect score would require reckoning with the random aspect to the mystery, the strange SCORE POINTS mechanism, and the fact visiting every new room is worth points.
Renga in Blue 