PC-98 cover, from the Starcraft translation, via Mobygames.
I talked about “exploration” last time but this ends up being more of a “series of unfortunate events” type game, or as I termed it regarding Wizard and the Princess, a biome journey. The big difference between Rungistan and Wizard (and Rungistan and any text adventure game I’ve played, really) is the heavy reliance on timed events; more than half the puzzles involve typing something in response to an event happening on-screen, and if you are too slow you’ll die.
And if the puzzles don’t kill you, the skiing mini-game might.
The above map shows where we left off last time; the Courtyard is the exit from the prison, and just to the east is the snake where you need to not type while it goes by. Just to the south is a noose and you need to grab the rope.
The rope doesn’t get used until later, and this implies something about the game design: it is cheerfully willing to let you softlock if you miss something. I’ll show getting past the “gorge” on the map in a second, but that’s a one-way trip, so if you somehow skipped getting the rope (or the mouse back at the cell) you’re not going to find out until later. (I’ll take a closer look at this when I get done with the game — I’m not even sure how long you’re supposed to hold the mouse because I haven’t used it yet!)
I then got stuck at a gorge which was “10 feet longer than the world record for standing broad jump”. I initially dismissed the verbosity here as a joke, but it actually is a serious hint: the jumping is described as a “broad jump” meaning the game is interpreting the jump as being done in place. You can explicitly RUN and then JUMP.
But make sure you back up to where the snake was first before you start running!
The running is represented by the edge getting closer and closer; the game requires typing JUMP and then hitting ENTER fast enough in real time. It is not possible to jump “too early”.
The next section is thankfully a little more straightforward (…I think, there’s still the possibility I missed an object).
There’s a knife laying around in the desert and then you need to climb a ledge. Halfway up is a cave with a bear.
KILL BEAR with the just-picked-up knife does the trick. HUG BEAR does not.
The writing on the wall gives instructions which will be pertinent shortly:
Just past the bear is a bridge. Upon stepping on the bridge it sways, and then, in real time, starts falling away.
You need to type JUMP WEST to get off. I was stuck here longer than you might think just because I had got on the bridge via CROSS BRIDGE and thought I was still going north, when the game had invisibly turned our player character to the east.
You can now THROW the ROPE that you hopefully grabbed (otherwise, softlock) and climb your way across.
Up higher it starts to get cold.
There’s a cabin nearby described as “impossibly locked” but fortunately you can can just smash in the door to get in and find some skis.
And now we reach the one part of the game I had heard about beforehand: we have to go back to the snow, GERONIMO, and start skiing. This is an action mini-game.
You just use the right and left arrow keys to steer. I died quite a bit at the start before I realized the game wants you to steer between the trees, not to the far left or right of them. Then it took me only two more goes; it helped to discretely tap the arrow key and count rather than just “push and hold” and hope for perfect alignment.
I saw one account from someone who liked this game but never got past the skiing. This isn’t that far in the game, still; even when people liked these games at the time, they may not have gotten close to winning!
The section after the skis was the hardest I’ve done so far. In particular, one pattern the game previously established gets broken, and one of the puzzles is tough on top of the parser input being ambiguous (in other words, it’s hard to tell if you have the answer wrong or you’re entering the answer wrong).
The pattern that gets broken regards the random environmental scenery. I had examined each and every cactus in the desert and was told it wasn’t important, so by the time I got to the mountains I stopped trying. This was a mistake.
The canteen can be filled at a nearby river — which we’ll be coming back to shortly — and used in a scene with a REBEL GUERILLA.
The fuse starts disappearing and explodes if you don’t stop it in time; you’re “frozen” and unable to run away.
The solution is to POUR WATER with the canteen, but I encountered the fuse before the canteen, so spent a while fruitlessly trying actions like STOMP FUSE and THROW DYNAMITE. This made the puzzle feel different than the timed puzzles before; the bridge and gorge just demanded you type JUMP and have the wits to think about it; here, being an object-based puzzle, I was wanting to run through a lot of possibilities to test especially knowing I might have the right answer stymied by the finicky parser. I appreciated the timed aspect adding drama but it made the puzzle a drag until I had the right item.
Past the rebel is a room with more trees; LOOK TREE reveals a catcher’s mitt and the text “L7” written on the tree. I did not at first interpret the text as letters. The “merged” aspect made them look like part of the graphics, maybe, or at least some kind of arrow symbol, and while they play into a puzzle I haven’t shown you yet, I admit I didn’t make the link until HINT PLEASE told me they were connected.
The catcher’s mitt can be used a bit to the west where a bird drops an egg. Again I found the timed event before the object that would help solve it, and again I was trying fruitlessly to type catching the egg in various ways — and even various times, thinking maybe I needed to hit ENTER right before the egg landed — and it made the puzzle less pleasant than it could be. At least I suspected early here I really needed an item, although I was envisioning a pillow.
The bird is mid-draw. It is hard to get “perfect” frames when the continuous motion is happening, since the game is constantly doing redraws. Mask of the Sun had some screen-flipping tech that made the animation smoother but it likely wouldn’t be able to handle the full range of motion this game does. Honestly the Rungistan tech is extremely good for the era and I’ve not felt any delays at “authentic” machine speeds.
The catcher’s mitt is off course the right item, and lets you CATCH EGG. Now I have an egg. I don’t know what to do with it.
Other than the river, canteen, mitt, rebel scene, and egg scene, there’s a saloon.
When trying to open the cabinet, the game says there’s a lock in it; when trying to open the lock, the game replies
HOW ?
This is where the bad parser comes in. This is another one of the two-part prompts where you are supposed to respond to HOW, but I concieved of this as being something like TURN DIAL or ENTER COMBINATION or even TURN LEFT or the like, setting off a sequence. No, the game actually wants a string typed out in a very specific way. Sample: L2R2L2. In general, by having both a real puzzle and a parser puzzle, the game provides a second-order puzzle, where two probabilities of a potential solution are being multiplied in the player’s mind, making it miserable to solve. I ended up getting the right string to type from a walkthrough (I eyeballed it vaguely enough to not know what the numbers were).
You can look at the horns and see L14 clearly; you can look at the liquor and see 21.
This is a timed event asking you to type REPLACE the same time you are grokking the fact 21 is written on the bottle. (As I was stuck, I thought briefly maybe the one was an I as in the letter I.)
The register has the most important message.
I might have thought this was brilliant if a.) I wasn’t dealing with the parser issue and b.) the L7 clue way back at the tree was a little better-drawn to make it clear what I was looking at. But in summary, we have clues giving:
L14 (from the horns)
L7 (from the tree)
21 (from the bottle)
4R (from the register)
The idea is that in all cases we are seeing part of a string which represents the lock combination. With the slip of paper, there’s even more information if you look at the picture carefully.
The slip originally had the entire code on it, but is ripped. You can see traces of the number before and the number after in the picture. So the actual code, all together is
L14R21L7
That is, you can tell the R is being followed by a “2”, meaning the “21” goes there, L14 and 4R are overlapping to produce the initial part of the string L14R. A different framing might help; I suppose the idea of the codes being placed at random is also a little absurd (including on a far-away tree) but I’m at least willing to accept the game is in the alternate-adventure reality where codes can be slapped on any surface whatsoever from any distance at all from their targets (see: the Rhem games 1 through 4 inclusive).
The cabinet, incidentally, has booze. I haven’t used it yet.
Now we come back to the river. I was originally going to give up there and ask for help, but I combed through the early parts of the game and decided I hadn’t missed anything, so checked very carefully if anything would remotely respond to the possibility of being formed into a boat/raft. (For example, if you try to read the books in the cell again, the guard just confiscates them, but the shelf left behind can’t be referred to.) Since I had no luck there, I re-checked the latter part of the game, and noticed how the doors to the saloon where essentially flat pieces of wood. MAKE RAFT. “With what?”
Since I had read the book on navigating riverways, I could successfully use the raft, landing on THE SOUTH SHORE OF THE RIVER.
The game somewhat politely takes away some objects from your inventory along the trip. I assume this is to prevent solutions to things that are not intentional by using items from prior sections, but it does reduce the combinatorial explosion on the player’s part as well.
It is possible to reach this point and have skipped all five of the items listed (mouse, mitt, booze, egg, dynamite). I’m still paranoid I’ll need to loop back to the past to nab something I missed, and then have to do the skiing all over again, but I’ll just keep hope for now I haven’t softlocked.
Let’s skip from our cavalcade of obscurity over to something at least a few more people have heard of. Escape From Rungistan tells the story of a tourist (controlled by us) visiting the fictional country of Rungistan.
This game forms some core memories to Apple II buffs; an academic blog post theorizes the following:
So student #1 will let loose in a class discussion with what is probably a brilliant analysis of Aristotle’s Poetics as applied to Escape From Rungistan which he/she plays religiously every evening on an Apple II emulator. But after they’ve finished speaking, since no one else in the class has ever played Escape From Rungistan (or heard of it)* there is an awkward silence.
(*Okay actually that’s not 100% true. I’ve played Escape From Rungistan.)
It’s on the syllabus, week 3, after World of Tanks and before Spacechem.
The game inspiring such writing — even in a theoretical imaginary student sense — means it must have had a publisher with decent reach, and indeed it did: Sirius Software.
We’ve played Sirius Software before with the Tim Wilson games: Kabul Spy and Blade of Blackpoole. This game starts the ouerve of a different author, Bob Blauschild. Bob seems to have been another outside contractor (like Tim Wilson) who I think (but alas can’t confirm) is the same Bob Blauschild who worked in analog circuit design around the same time. At the very least, Rungistan represents some technical chops, as it is made in a combination of assembly code and BASIC, and relies heavily on animation, heavily enough that animation becomes part of the puzzles of the game. (One of the first video results for this game includes in the title “you got Quick Time Events in my text game”.) The Mask of the Sun had some animated puzzle moments but that game was made by a team whereas this was one person.
Some frames from the initial animated sequence.
It also represents technical chops because the game has extremely gnarly copy protection; it breaks all standard cracking tools and 4am’s essay on the issue is worth a read.
What happens when a drive doesn’t see a state change after the equivalent of two consecutive zero bits? The drive thinks the disk is weak, and it starts increasing the amplification to try to compensate, looking for a valid signal. But there is no signal. There is no data. There is only a yawning abyss of nothingness. Eventually, the drive gets desperate and amplifies beyond reason and starts returning random bits based on ambient noise from the disk motor and the magnetism of the Earth.
Seriously.
Returning random bits doesn’t sound useful for a storage medium, but it’s exactly what the developer wanted, and it’s exactly what this code is checking for. It’s finding and reading and checksumming the same sequence of bits from the disk, over and over, and checking that they change.
So after our protagonist’s ill-advised visit to an unfriendly country somewhere in Africa, they find themselves in a cell awaiting execution, and you take over from there.
Note the game not only has animations but music at appropriate moments; I’ve got about 30 seconds worth from the opening in the video below so you can hear what it’s like.
The two books shown above (the book on “navigation of Rungistan waterways” and the “book of aviation”) likely provide a method to explain our avatar’s proficiency in vehicles later, despite being a tourist and not James Bond.
After this I was heavily stuck; the sink doesn’t work, we are too weak to move the bed, the window is too high to reach. I was so stuck I used a feature the instructions mentioned: HINT PLEASE, which told me I could CALL GUARD. I had already tried YELL and gotten beaten by a hose, but I guess I was supposed to yell more politely.
The food was an arbitrary guess — any puzzle that asks for a noun that the player hasn’t seen yet has the difficulty multiply by at least double — but there’s a mouse that occasionally is animated walking by and I suspected I’d get some cheese if I asked, just because that’s almost guaranteed from adventures of this era.
The guard brought a tray…
…which had STEAK, a CANDY BAR, and as predicted, some CHEESE.
The steak you can just eat to get stronger (you’ll see why in a second). The cheese goes to the mouse and then the mouse can be picked up; you need to time typing GIVE CHEESE to be when the mouse is visible and walking in the cell.
With the steak eaten, you have enough energy to MOVE BED; the game asks where to specifically, so you have to say TO WINDOW.
You can then STAND ON BED to see out the window, and see a child outside. The child is afraid but you can hand over the candy bar and he’ll toss you a shovel.
I was stuck for quite a while after because of the parser. Trying to DIG FLOOR and DIG WALL and so forth didn’t work. (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND.”) I finally broke out my verb list and found it to be no help whatsoever. The game sends any misunderstood input to the same set of messages (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND” or “THAT WON’T WORK. TRY SOMETHING ELSE.”) making it impossible to tell if CUT BED is misunderstood because it is considered nonsense, or if CUT is just never a verb in the game. This sort of information-protection can make sense with nouns (and modern Inform even defaults to it) but only accepting very exact phrasing means the game has trouble giving specific feedback on why things go wrong. If you try to EAT BED a good response is saying the bed isn’t edible; while “I don’t understand” is technically correct it also is much vaguer, and I could see being led astray by being slightly wrong about how a parser command is phrased.
I finally went back over the previous events; I contemplated how the game already had me asked about FOOD despite it not being a listed noun. Maybe I needed to DIG TUNNEL, thus using the word tunnel without prompting? The game then asked me WHERE? I tried typing DIG TUNNEL ON WALL and the game asked me WHERE? again.
After five more minutes of fussing I remembered the bed wanted the command given in two parts (like a Scott Adams game).
Following the sage advice to go north:
OK, I expected that. Going east instead:
This is animated.
As long as you do nothing while the snake animation is happening (it goes all the way across the screen from right to left) you can make it past safely.
It looks like we’re in for a bout of exploration (and probably random deaths). This seems like a good stopping point. I’ll report back in the grisly details next time.
It turned out last time I still wasn’t thinking aggressively enough. I was at a gift shop with some crosses, and while I could break a security camera, I could not then take the cross without the shop minder knowing and calling the police, resulting in my avatar being riddled with bullets.
It did occur to me that one of the guns at the scaffold would be useful, but those set off an alarm system that I had no way of disarming. What did not occur to me is that cannon that I already used to shoot a student’s arm off was portable.
The actual cannon used at a historical marker at the College of William and Mary.
Yes, you can GET CANNON, walk your way over to the shop, then SHOOT CANNON AT LADY. The game, rather brutally, states NOBODY NOTICES and you have to LOOK at the room again to see your result.
The rest of the game went quickly.
First the silver cross can (as I theorized) be used to protect against the spirit at the grave.
This opens a secret path to the church, which is otherwise impossible to enter. An organist took the book I gave and handed over some keys.
The keys can then unlock the gate at the palace. Going in you find a Queen Anne Chair, which based on the hint from the grave, can be moved to find a secret passage.
The next room has a bed, where GO BED will reveal yet another secret passage.
Finally going north leads to a maze, and the map from the store is sufficient to make it through. You don’t even need to think about dropping items or wandering.
So I’d like to draw attention back to the Microdeal cover, which also was used for the C16 version of the game.
I kept waiting for the butcher to appear, but there is no butcher! I went back and searched and found the scene in question really involved the tavern, if you try to dine and run without paying, but that’s not remotely the same thing:
My guess is there was some disconnect between the marketers and the people who knew the game. If anything, we are the butcher. We brought a giant cannon into a gift shop to blast the store owner in order to steal a cheap silver cross.
No wonder the police were gunning us down on sight.
We’ve had amoral characters before, and to paraphrase my previous writing on the subject, I’m fine “role-playing” a particular type knowing ahead of time what’s going on; what turns out to be distressing is playing mostly “myself” only to find I need to resort to cold-blooded evil halfway through a game. Here, though, everything was short enough I never had the wind-up, and the satirical nature just makes the whole thing come off as a goofy historical in-joke. But what did people think at the time?
Your Commodore, June 1985.
They, er…. quoted back the marketing copy without playing all the way through the game. At least they tested to make sure the tapes worked, since the Commodore version of Adventure 1 was busted. Commodore User (August 1985) gave the exact same feedback about the non-working tape, and the exact same reproduction of marketing copy without ever wondering where the butcher was.
So I guess they thought: since Williamsburg Adventure was budget software, the only worry was if the game was able to start.
Williamsburg is a small Colonial Town where there is hidden the Golden Horseshoe, your goal is to find and bring home the Golden Horseshoe. Beware Evil Spirits, and the Ghost of Bruton Parish, your adventures will get you shot by the Police, chased by the Butcher, and lost in the Maze, will you get the Horseshoe??? Only your Dragon computer knows!
Look, marketing copy is hard. At least the cover of Microdeal’s version of this game is one of the most memorable we’ve had all year.
From World of Dragon.
Microdeal we’ve had before with Mansion Adventure, as first published by Chromasette in January 1982. (Chromasette was a Tandy CoCo spin-off of CLOAD, the TRS-80 tapemag.) Microdeal published the game in the UK for the Dragon, a Welsh machine mostly but not entirely compatible with the CoCo. Mansion Adventure was a curious choice to kick off a series because it was extremely short and almost devoid of traditional puzzles; it was all about picking up clues to a numerical sequence and applying them.
Microdeal’s Adventure 2 we’ve also played: Adventure in Ancient Jerusalem. That game was “traditional” but had serious gameplay issues, especially with excessive death traps. The version Microdeal published was not from the July 1981 CLOAD, but from Chromasette, in the August 1981 version.
This game is given on the Microdeal cover as Copyright CLOAD 1981, but didn’t actually get published — and only in Chromasette — until September 1982. I’m going to put both 81 and 82 in my post title but still sort it with the rest of my 1982 games.
The author, given in the source code, is Mike Hughey.
The address of King George is more important than usual, as it is close to the real Williamsburg, and the game’s locations are based on the real Williamsburg. He also shows up in the yearbook for the College of William and Mary in 1982, which makes a physical appearance in the game.
The best comparison I can make is with Nijmegen Avontuur. That game was similarly based on a real town and had you hunting a single treasure. I got hung up early on imagining I was in a real town and wasn’t aggressive enough, despite the presence of such items as a bazooka. In Williamsburg, the same thing happened: I started off too “peaceful”, but this game clearly means for you to go full Grand Theft Auto and cause as much carnage as possible on your way to obtaining the Golden Horseshoe.
The note about “two-word commands” will become important later.
This is a good contrast with my last game (The Paradise Threat); that game had a high density where every room had something in it (even what seemed like an ordinary hallway room had a secret). This game has some locations like the starting one which are just room descriptions, but I think this may be because of the town-modeling idea: the action starts set on Duke of Gloucester Street, with some of the corresponding locations going off of it.
The starred locations all make an appearance, as well as the Governor’s Palace.
Even though everything is highly compressed from the real map, the author clearly felt some streets representing connective tissue were necessary; you start on Duke of Gloucester south of the Governor’s Palace and just east of the Church, but you have to pass through “Palace Green” going north to arrive at the front gate of the Palace.
Without that extra room there it might have felt (to the author or anyone who knows the area) that the map was a bit too far awry, having the distance west to the church and north to the palace be “identical”.
Typing LOOK GATE mentions “a keyhole” but just typing OPEN GATE or UNLOCK GATE (even without a key, I haven’t found one yet) just states “O.K.” The gate doesn’t actually open; it seems that a “you failed” message was never properly put into the logic here.
You can scoot to the west of the gate to a wall, and try to GO WALL to climb it, but disaster results:
The rather aggressive police gives our first hint this might be Grant Theft Colonial but let’s do the two puzzles we can pull off acting like a normal tourist first.
On the east side of town (see above) there’s the King’s Arms Tavern. Our inventory starts with a fifty dollar bill so we can eat there.
I’m not sure if you’re supposed to eat the dinner yet, but you are supposed to pay for it, because the waiter gives you back a quarter and informs you the only place you can spend now is at Scribner’s. This generous (?) hint leads the player over to obtain a map.
The object name describes it as a map to the Maze.
And here I was stuck quite a while after. There’s a music shop that needs a ticket to enter, the capitol needs a ticket to enter, and there’s a student hanging out at William and Mary College. There’s a gift shop with some cheap crosses that you can’t buy…
…a church that I am unable to enter…
Parser issues, or does the game just not let you go in?
…and a graveyard that can kill you.
Yes, only STONE works even though it is described as a GRAVESTONE.
A cross might protect me from this?
Where I finally managed to nudge ahead progress was a the College of William and Mary.
You might think to SHOOT CANNON to get the student’s attention, but that does nothing. Now we come to the breaking point.
Keep in mind our author was a student, so he’s got satire on his mind here. Our author also “forgot” about the two-word instruction because we need to break that.
The student leaves behind a STUDENT ID. This ID lets you get in the “ticket” places for free, that is, the capitol building (which has nothing of interest) and the music store (which has an organ book you can just take).
I haven’t been able to get anything to happen with this at the church.
Still with the notion of violence-is-the-way, I was able to make a smidge more progress on the gift shop.
So I can bust the security camera but I need to get the lady distracted, perhaps?
No clue where to prod otherwise. I haven’t mentioned the stockade (at the real-life courthouse) but that just has some guns that are alarmed and you will die if you try to take any.
This does have walkthroughs (multiple ones!) so I have a fallback but I’ll keep at it for a while longer. Still, if someone knows this game I will take hints of any kind as long as they’re encoded in rot13. I’m especially curious to know if the church-entering is truly prohibited or it requires a serious game of guess-the-noun.
It’s pretty clear, reaching the end of the game, that Jyym Pearson was just goofing around. All of the remaining puzzles were absurd in some way. I almost feel like he was trying to channel William Denman (of Med Systems who published this, and made the Asylum games) but Asylum did it better somehow. Also, Denman makes a actual cameo.
From 80 Micro, 1983 Special Edition. “Winston Churchill, Abe Lincoln, and Groucho Marx guide you to ways to remedy your mistakes and save Paradise.”
Continuing directly from last time, I had killed a demon who had left behind a hand.
If this was a “closed room” puzzle it wouldn’t be too terrible; the problem is I wasn’t sure if I was missing an item from previous rooms (I was, but it doesn’t affect this puzzle). With a hand and the objects being held the only one that goes together with it is the gold ring. PUT GOLD RING ON HAND:
Arbitrary un-clued magic for the win! Buckle in everyone, it’s only going to get weirder from here.
This screenshot shows all my items shuffled over.
I didn’t have much to work with other than a door with a plate. Nothing seemed to help from my item stock, so I went on another trip trying to look / listen / smell all the rooms to see if something new came up. I don’t think this was a new thing; rather I missed it because the placement is so utterly absurd:
This is just a random hallway room right before the Nazi hall with the timber. This captures the spirit of bombing every single direction in every single room in Zelda 1 just in case you missed something.
I get what’s going on, here: the author is trying to squeeze nearly every single room into having something of interest, and out of the “opening area” this is the only one that was “just a hall”. This still is, in a narrative sense, absolutely silly — we’re supposed to be getting help to save Heaven, yet this particular help can only be received by listening in a very particular room. This is decidedly crossword winning over narrative (except the crossword isn’t really a crossword but rather a puzzle requiring random-search).
PUT MAGNET ON PLATE:
A few more steps leads to a crevice where you can use the board again, and a steel door the requires the tiny key that previously worked on the desk. (Again, any manner of narrative is just being pitched, since the tiny key previously worked on the door Eichmann was sitting at.)
Inside the development room are a bunch of programmers chained to computers and William Denman, who leads you back out.
The steel door then can no longer be opened, and this is the end of the line.
I was quite stumped but I went for the structural solving juke: there had to be a reason for this section. Doing yet another pass through all the previous rooms yielded no new things, so there was still a secret to be found. Back at the crevice, which I hadn’t bothered doing a LOOK at (given it is a repeat) there’s the message that SOMETHING’S HERE. You need to CLIMB CREVICE (not the board).
Doing this action kills you on the other crevices. This is a “repeated element” fakeout puzzle where an author looks like they repeat an element but there is a subtle difference.
This puzzle wasn’t terrible, even in the confines of the parser, but it gets followed by something absolutely as off-the-wall as humanly possible.
ABE’S VOICE CRIES,Did you listen
to Marx, he knows the clue.
I spent some time hanging out a the opening (where Groucho Marx is one of the crowd of people in the conference room) thinking I had missed some interaction or clue. No, the game railroads you into typing LISTEN to get any effect.
What the statue looks like, from Lucifer’s Realm.
I guess the mindset to be here is like original Adventure (where I genuinely liked the PLOVER puzzle); in that game, though it set you up with magic words to begin with making it possible to have a lateral connection. Here, this is the only magic word in the game. Just type on its own, without applying the verb SAY to it: GROUCHO.
Yes, that’s genuinely the ending. You then get sent back to the bearded man at the podium.
Things gets rather meta.
“God” continues:
Nothing that has happened to you since your death has been real… It’s been a test !
There are no heavens or hells here
Every man makes his own,in his own mind….
You’ve passed your own test…
Congratulations…
HE TAKES YOUR ARM, LEADS YOU TO A DOOR AND SAYS,
I’ve many marvelous things to show you,come.
Congrats! Now buy our other games!
Now, I admit The Prisoner had a similar ending and I wasn’t grouchy about that one, but this is a game with a universe that started with a promising and unique atmosphere (Lucifer’s Realm) and even Paradise Threat had some promising moments going in, but it started to get more and more arbitrary before falling in a pile of bits and bytes. Asylum had a consistent tone going for it where “you’ve escaped the game” or “you just met the programmer in the Asylum” both seemed to fit; The Institute had a similar angle going but again themed everything appropriately. So I don’t think a meta commentary on “you’re just playing a game, ha ha” is inherently a bad thing it came off here more as an anticlimax than anything real.
Pearson has one more game to go (The Farvar Legacy) where we battle the undead. Maybe this time he’ll stick the landing.
NEXT: A short game supposedly set in a real location, followed by Sirius Software.
I had left off being baffled by a board (obtained from a pile of lumber) and some quicksand. My issue was half with the parser and half with visualization.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
To be specific, from the room marked YOU ARE AT THE EAST END OF THE VALLEY typing LOOK gets the message that
TO THE E A PILLAR SITS
IN A MUDDY FIELD,THE VALLEY BENDS S.
My assumption was that I go east to the quicksand, use the board to stabilize the way, then proceed further east on to the pillar. That assumption was wrong.
You need to DROP BOARD to the west; if you then LOOK the game says
THE BOARD FORMS A BRIDGE
TO THE PILLAR.
For this to make any sense to me physically — remember, we’ve been toting this bridge around — I suddenly visualized the “pillar” much different than I originally did; something fairly low. Let me invoke the power of Microsoft Paint to show what I mean:
This jives enough with the text descriptions to work for me, but I still couldn’t get across the board. A “normal” game would just land you on the pillar if you try to go east, but nope, you just go in the quicksand.
Fortunately, I had the power within me to “test every verb I have encountered in the game”, so I was able to stumble upon … CLIMB BOARD? Really?
I guess my visualization should have been such that the pillar would be much taller, so the board is more at an angle, but how would that make any sense anymore given this would indicate a board taller than a person? Incidentally, CLIMB BOARD is also the way to get back; there really is no consistency in this game in how to travel (CLIMB STEPS but just going WEST to go back, in another instance).
I had the suspicious powder and only one real obstacle, getting the key from Eichmann.
What he looked like in Lucifer’s Realm.
I took it back to the room with the secretary and the secretary was gone, but there was still a tray full of food there. Time for some poisoning!
Some more wandering — and finding the Nazi guard I had knocked out by scent had been replaced —
— and I rather delightfully found an unconscious Eichmann. I rummaged through his desk (applying the TINY KEY given to us by Jyym Pearson on the phone) and found a SKELETON KEY; we’d already been warned ahead of time by Abe Lincoln this would go back at the door in the haze.
Taking the key back leads to a trap, but the kind of trap that is easy to avoid as long as you haven’t been discarding your starting inventory items.
I was then in darkness in what appeared to be a maze and dutifully started dropping items and mapping out exits. However, I soon realized the items I dropped were simply disappearing, so this had to be a gimmick rather a maze. Applying all my senses, I tried LISTEN.
This had to be referring either to the gold ring or helmet. With the helmet off, typing LOOK gave the description of a breeze from above, so I tried UP to no avail, and also CLIMB UP (“YOU’LL FALL”), FOLLOW BREEZE (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND”), CLIMB (with no target: “YOU’LL FALL” again), GO TO BREEZE (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND”), JUMP (“IT’S TOO DANGEROUS”), ENTER PASSAGE (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND”), CLIMB PASSAGE (“IT’S TOO DANGEROUS”), JUMP PASSAGE (“IT’S TOO DANGEROUS”) and then UP again for good measure.
After a reset just in case I made a typo on something, I finally found you’ll move farther if you:
LISTEN
DROP HELMET
LOOK
LOOK UP (not just look!)
JUMP (only immediately after doing LOOK UP)
As far as I can tell, if you miss your opportunity to jump, even though you still feel the breeze, you’ve softlocked the game. It’s great to have all this combined with a tricky parser, right? I knew LOOK UP was used previously by Pearson but it still isn’t an absolute standard of mine to test (maybe has only gotten used in 5 games so far from 1972 to 1982)?
The dark figure will run south to a brick wall with a window; there’s guards there that will kill you if you don’t still have on the UNIFORM. (I should incidentally point out I’m maxed out on inventory at this point; you have to take another loop to get here, so I brought the BOARD, PACKET of seeds, and TINY KEY over on an extra trip after intentionally dying in order to teleport to the start. So dying isn’t technically a completely negative thing in this game.)
From here there’s a crevice to the east, and you can use the board to get over (I suspect many players left it behind at the pillar so would need to return for it).
Then comes an ancient door (neither skeleton key nor tiny key work)…
…so you can veer south to find a dragon. The dragon is sleeping and no threat as long as you don’t try to hurt it or CLIMB it. (Why would you try to climb it? You’ll see in a second.) Heading south from the dragon mysterious leads to a “DARK MOIST PLACE” which I believe is just supposed to be literally inside the dragon. I tried dropping the sleeping powder there to make the dragon extra-sleepy but no dice.
Trying to drop the powder here into the mouth doesn’t work either.
Testing out various actions, I noticed DIG mysteriously told me “O.K” rather than denied my action. The last place this happened was somewhere soft enough to plant seeds, so I tried it again (“THE PLANT GROWS UP AND OUT OF SIGHT”) and then typed CLIMB. Oops.
The command defaults to the dragon. I was genuinely confused here for a bit because I thought the dragon was eating me because I made noise climbing up the plant. I finally found the eating to happen again when I tried CLIMB DRAGON and connected the dots.
The plant needs you not have much in the way of inventory, so you have to do the “drop everything, grab one item” shuffle, but it fortunately doesn’t take too long.
Along the passage I found a dead Nazi that did not react to any of my commands other than UNDRESS NAZI (I was told there was a quota of only one naked Nazi in this game). I highly suspect something useful is there but my verb-fu is failing yet again. Just a bit south is a Nazi demon, who is easily dispatched by your sword:
The demon may be ambidextrous, but one more slice kills the demon outright, leaving behind a severed hand. Unfortunately I am unable to pick up with the hand or interact with it in any way, and I’m stuck to the left by another locked door (again non-responsive to my current keystack).
I think the next step here is likely to comb over all the rooms again in case a new latrine has popped up or Jesus has made another call somewhere.
My biggest issue is I’m worried I might have a solution (like the powder does go with the dragon) but I’m fighting with the parser enough that I pass by thinking I’m wrong and waste time. Not my favorite scenario to be in but I’ll plug through. I’ve incidentally finally caught up to Will Moczarski, who (other than the demon) managed to get to this place in a single post.
This is, without question, one of the worst parsers I have dealt with in a long time, and that includes all the other Pearson games. I had numerous points where I knew what I wanted but couldn’t communicate, or where I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing.
First off, a little theory. I’m going to explain how the “rulebook sequence” in the parser for Inform 7 works (which is as modern as it gets) just to give a sense about the problem of message priority. From the Inform 7 handbook:
First it makes sure it knows what the input words are, and that the command makes grammatical sense … If there’s a typo in the input — or even if the parser knows all of the individual words but doesn’t understand how they’re strung together — the parser will reject the input before anything happens. Assuming the parser can figure out what the words are, and that they’re in a grammatical form that the parser knows, Inform starts processing the action.
The game then checks Scope to see if your item being referred to can be seen (or if it is a case where it makes sense to refer to something even if you can’
>open gate
You can’t see any such thing.
(You also get the same message if you try a noun that isn’t in the vocabulary — the game is trying to prevent “noun hacking” here to find objects that you haven’t seen yet.)
Once past that phase, things get more complicated:
There’s a Before section, which is checked before anything else. This triggers before any checking of the world environment, so this is for responses that override even checking if an action is plausible; it just checks if a verb is trying to be used. Suppose the player tries EAT CHEESE. A player controlling an alien with no mouth might just immediately be told they have improper anatomy; even if the cheese is in a locked container, it is much more logical to just say the action will never work.
The game then passes through an Accessibility check; even if the target of an action is “in the room” with the player it might be impossible to reach. So here is when EAT CHEESE might inform the player that the cheese is locked away and you don’t have any way of getting at it.
This is followed by an Implicit action check. This accounts for circumstances where the player expects item-juggling to be handled automatically, like unlocking a door with a key that is held in one’s pocket; the game can automatically take the key out of the pocket rather than force the extra steps, and will be explicit about this happening with a message like “(first taking the key out of your pocket)”. In the cheese-eating instance, if the cheese is close enough to reach, the game might have the player first pick it up before eating it.
Then comes the rulebooks Instead, Check, and Carry out. This is the “central” part of the parser and includes more specific checks like the cheese you’re eating is really a rock (which you find out by trying to eat it). Finally there’s an After section (there might be a chain reaction of other things after successfully eating the cheese, for instance).
This structure has been designed after a lot of experience with parsers having strange messages because of priority issues. Not every condition has been obvious. If you try to EAT PRIME MINISTER and there isn’t a single government official in sight (perhaps the Prime Minister walked to a different room and the player didn’t notice), the best response is to say you don’t see the Prime Minister, not “don’t be a cannibal”. The cannibal message feels appropriate but implies the Prime Minister is visible; the player then may try to GIVE LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER and be confused.
The Paradise Threat has (in addition to other parser sins I’ll get into) some priority issues. Suppose, having seen some timber described you try to GET TIMBER and you’re holding six items. The game will go
ONLY SIX ITEMS PLEASE.
This implies “you’d be fine getting it, but only if you reduce your inventory”. So you do some item juggling and try to get the timber now, getting
IT’S NOT A VISIBLE ITEM.
Clearly, the fact that the timber is not considered “visible” is the more salient fact than the player’s inventory capacity. The game is essentially checking conditions in the wrong order.
I’ll hit other issues in context, let’s get back to the action–
Last time I had dropped off a wood box to get consumed by termites but couldn’t get at the result. I waited around a very long time and nothing happened. I had neglected one of the other Pearson tendencies: to have time pass based on entering certain locations. That is, in most games, if you have a timed event, you might think to type WAIT sufficient times and the game will move on; in the case of The Paradise Threat, sometimes you can hang out for many turns and find nothing will ever happen. The game is waiting for you to move to some other specific part of the map, and passing throw room X will cause the time-passing condition to happen in the earlier room Y.
I went over to the arrow-killing room, stepped back out (as long as you immediately go west you don’t die) and then found the termites were finally done with their snack.
The packet had seeds, so I took them to the soft area I was able to dig. After PLANT SEEDS I had to walk around a bit more; the “arrow-killing time pass” seemed to do the trick again.
There’s a cliff described as also being at 30 feet, so you have to wait around for the plant to get that high.
Before showing the result, I should mention I elided something important on the parser: PLANT SEEDS. PLANT is not understood as a standard verb elsewhere. Hence it turns out that this is a game with a “standard dictionary” of verbs and response to when they don’t work, but also a bespoke set of verbs-with-nouns that will work only in the particular cases they are intended. In that parser diagram, you have to imagine a brand-new list of phrases which all get interpreted on their own outside of the main structure.
PULL, which I originally thought didn’t work, works specifically here: you can PULL ROPE to get the crossbow to launch early.
TWAANNG…..THUMP !
This disarms the trap that had been stumping me. Looping back around to the trap and the next room:
If you just drop the scepter it disappears. The logical step to me seemed to be to attach the ivy to the scepter, but I went through
TIE IVY VINE
ATTACH IVY VINE
WRAP IVY VINE
ATTACH SCEPTER
PUT IVY VINE
and many other permutations before arriving at the exact phrase TIE IVY VINE TO SCEPTER. This is the only way to do the operation. TIE IVY VINE along just gets “I DON’T UNDERSTAND”; trying to TIE IVY VINE TO SCEPTER while anywhere other than this specific room also gets “I DON’T UNDERSTAND.” This is about as mind-bogglingly misleading as a parser message can be, especially because it isn’t playing guess-the-verb, it’s playing guess the phrase.
Essentially, the “bespoke phrase” part of the parser skips any of the kinds of checks a good parser might have and only looks for: are you in the right room with the items, and have you typed the exact phrasing? If so, go on, otherwise, go to the generic non-understanding message.
You have to incidentally JUMP to get back (both JUMP VINE and JUMP IVY VINE work; the game inconsistently will sometimes need the two-word version of the noun and sometimes not). This reflects one of the other issues with the game, that map traversal requires very specific phrasing and reversing directions isn’t consistent. Normally, when outside a cave with steps, even our lower-tier parser games would accept at least a subset of GO CAVE, U, E, ENTER CAVE, GO STEPS; you have to CLIMB STEPS exactly. Trying to CLIMB STEPS to go back has the game say
YOU’LL FALL.
being of course the exact same steps we just climbed up. No, you have to go WEST to go backwards. I have to essentially glance at my map every time I pass back and forth to make sure I’m typing in the right word. Door to the east? OPEN DOOR, not EAST. Going back, OPEN DOOR fails — “you can’t” — and you go WEST instead.
Once in the hall, the game takes a moment to go meta.
ANSWER PHONE:
However, trying to make the conversation go further I was stumped; LISTEN gave me I HEAR NOTHING COMPREHENSIBLE; trying to ANSWER the phone again did as well. I assumed I was in another part of the game which required exact phrasing, so I ran through about 30 phrases before looking at the phone, which (after what looks like a cut-off conversation) has a tiny key.
Moving along…
From Lucifer’s Realm.
…I came across a Nazi guard at a door. Trying to KILL GUARD (we have a sword, after all) gets
YOU’RE TOO KIND.
which is the default “kill but not understood” response. If you TALK GUARD…
…only then do you have the opportunity to KILL GUARD and finally be understood. However, the guard just blasts you with his gun.
Being stuck I let the death happen, since that just warps you to the start, and explored around a little, keeping in mind Pearson was going full steam now on the “timed events” that were really dependent on you reaching some farther location.
As typical, it took an infuriatingly long time to figure out how to get into the hole (CLIMB HOLE) and then you just find out it is a latrine. The smell is enough to kill the guard if you go for a round 2.
We’re about to see a bunch of Nazis and none of them have this reaction.
Heading past, you get into a “huge hall” and a “reception room”. Taking the reception room first, we are encouraged to come back later, which sounds like another “timed” event to me.
There’s food on a tray we can access, so I assume he hasn’t actually started lunch yet.
Back in the huge hall, I did a LOOK HALL and found some lumber. LOOK LUMBER reveals a board.
Yet again I had enormous parser struggles, finally landing on PULL.
The board seems like it’d help with the quicksand, but no dice. I tried about 30 different parser commands, gave up, and went to check if Will had already gotten that far in his first writeup.
That’s not the case but moving on I find that I can indeed drop the board and thus access the quicksand room without sinking. I can thus reach the pillar and pick up some powder.
DROP BOARD, then go EAST? Nope. Drop board before arriving in the quicksand room, then going east? Nope. Not
CROSS BOARD
STAND ON BOARD
STEP ON BOARD
WALK ACROSS BOARD
USE BOARD
GO TO PILLAR
etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. Still no idea what to type even though I’m following Will’s exact directions.
We’re mostly past this nonsense in 1982; the only parser from that year of comparable badness I remember is Grandell Island. What’s so baffling here is I certainly don’t remember this much trouble from the prior Pearson games. I think the author is trying hard to make a “compact” game where every step is interesting but the end result is that every step I can only manage on the fourth or fifth parser attempt.
In a stark reminder of how different two experiences of an adventure game can be, Will Moczarski reports he finished this game in a handful of hours. I have put significant effort in with no real progress. This may be a matter of the Atari version of the game being more obscure, or me missing one single verb or object in the right place causing a cascade, or just bad luck.
I have found things in the rooms I’ve already mentioned but none of them have allowed me to pass my two main obstacles, the quicksand…
…and the arrow.
To be absolutely thorough, I made sure to LOOK in every room using every plausible noun as well as LISTEN and SMELL. The first useful LOOK was in the very first room of the dying land, where I did LOOK PLANT on the supposed plant-life and found an IVY VINE I could take.
Although the game is finicky and requires you type IVY VINE in full, not IVY or VINE, otherwise you get the weird sensation of typing TAKE VINE and having the game tell you it isn’t visible despite it being listed as visible.
The vine is described as “long and slender” and I assume will be a rope at some point. The next room over I found — again in the plant-life — a fallen-over tree with termites. However, I could not get anything else to happen with either TREE or TERMITES, and that’s after forming my standard verb-list and testing everything.
A quick aside on the testing-list: while it certainly is useful to instantly have at hand the game lets you TURN, PUSH, and MOVE things, forming this kind of list also helps get a sense of what the parser responses will be like beforehand, which can prevent chasing phantoms. For example, just typing PUSH by itself gives
OK..OOMPH..SO WHAT?
which is detailed enough it might be a cue in some games that the action is right, just you need some assistance, like the truss in Pythonesque. Since this is clearly a generic not-even-type-an-object message, its appearance should not be marked as remarkable at all. Similarly, THROW with no verb says
IT BOUNCES BACK AND OUCH!
which means you aren’t supposed to be improving your aim: you’re just barking up the wrong tree.
Returning to the game, the tree gave me no joy, and moving on to the very next room yielded a pillar.
I think from the description the pillar is supposed to be adjacent to the entrance to the quicksand to the east, or at the quicksand itself somewhere? Either way I cannot refer to it (again I ran down my verb list).
In the quicksand itself you get one extra message about how “you’re either shrinking or sinking” before you die. This indicates there should be an opportunity for extrication, but the way the parser works is odd: it intercepts basically everything I’ve tried to type except for dropping items. This includes some logical self-rescue attempts like THROW IVY VINE.
Moving south, to a misty haze, I technically found two things. One, by using LISTEN, was the voice of Abe Lincoln.
The other, just by typing LOOK, was finding an ancient door in the ground. The door is unfortunately locked.
To the east is a truly odd location: a field of soft earth where DIG (which normally fails to work) will “succeed” but with no result in the room as a consequence.
I tried DIG ten times just in case it was one of those cumulative dig puzzles (although so far games have gone that route have had an item you can find on turn 1, but a second item you can find on turn 2). My guess is I will be told in the future somehow I should dig here and that’s when digging will become useful.
Climbing up to where Demon Trivia was, I found nothing useful, so I started trying at the arrow room some more. Again, the weird “dropping takes no time” element of the parser game up…
…but otherwise, any other parser action at all resulted in death. (Including making a typo and putting in DRP HELMET trying to get the screenshot above.)
I feel like I’m missing something simple and fundamental like an exit. The diagonal directions do work but none of them have revealed a “new” direction, they’ve just duplicated the cardinal directions, so I have declined to map them.
Please no hints for now, unless you don’t know the answer and just want to speculate. I’ve seen this game described as “outtakes from Lucifer’s Realm” so it genuinely might be short, but that’s only true if you’re making forward progress!
BONUS ADDENDUM: While reviewing this post for typos, I thought to drop the wood box with no seams at the tree with the termites. The termites swarmed the wood box, but then I was unable to open or take it; LOOK WOOD BOX gets YOU CAN’T SEE IT WELL. So I’m doing something right here but I need to tweak my implementation somewhat.
However, someone else was being a worse person: Hitler.
Hitler wanted to raise an army against Satan, so Satan gave notice that stopping Hitler would be worthy of a a ticket up to the pearly gates.
While you needed to give over a powerful “Deecula” statue in the process (see gloating above), you managed to stop Hitler and gain the favor of both Jesus and Satan.
The end result is that Hitler’s army gets kicked out of Hell, so he decides to turn his fury towards Heaven instead. To save Heaven you have to a final showdown with the Führer of Evil himself.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
The Paradise Threat by Jyym Pearson picks up directly where the game Lucifer’s Realm leaves off, and marks the next step in Will Moczarski’s marathon of Med System games over at The Adventure Gamer. Just like with Lucifer’s Realm we are going to both be blogging it at the same time (his first post is here). He will be playing the TRS-80 version and I will be playing the … Apple Atari version.
Sorry, Apple II superfans: this one didn’t get illustrated like the last game. Text-only, making graphics with the power of your imagination!
Before really getting rolling, let’s briefly review the prior Jyym Pearson works, and most particularly the quirks and tendencies that need to be kept in mind while playing one of his games.
Authors can of course add things to their style, remove things, and do one-off experiments, but they do tend to have certain “signatures” that are visible if you consider an oeuvre in aggregate. In Pearson’s case (with his sometimes collaborator, Robyn) he always has very intense use of the LOOK command. Getting through sections will often involve intensely applying LOOK to each and every noun mentioned, and then to nouns mentioned by using LOOK. Earthquake San Francisco went into shaggy-dog-joke territory, having a CREVICE with a QUARTZ with an INDENTATION with a FLAT SPOT with an OBJECT with a DIAMOND, requiring you to apply LOOK at every step in the chain.
LOOK UNDER is rare but did show up in The Institute.
Pearson also appeals to more than just visual senses; LISTEN was required to localize a child in Earthquake, LISTEN was used to find a dripping sound in The Institute. Lucifer’s Realm had multiple uses of SMELL.
While Escape from Traam was essentially linear, Pearson gradually started to add non-linearity by requiring re-visits to old locations; for example, Lucifer’s Realm had an early encounter with Beelzebub giving general quest information. Late in the game, upon encountering Jesus, he says you should speak to the “evil one” again, requiring a re-visit all the way back to Beelzebub.
With all this preparation I’m still probably going to get crushed somewhere, but that’s how adventure games go. Noteworthy is that this is the first time I’m playing the non-graphical version; I could tell from comparing the TRS-80 and Apple II versions of Lucifer’s Realm that puzzles sometimes went under revision. Here we’ll just have to deal with version 1.
The game starts almost like it ought to be the epilogue to the prior game where you get your long-deserved rest; you rise up to a tunnel and get led by Winston Churchill into heaven who ominously says “only you can help us”.
Abraham Lincoln shows up shortly after to explain that Hitler’s army still has the power of the Deecula statue and is now veering towards heaven. Because we were the one that restored the statue in the first place we are (by some mystical rules) the only ones who are able to destroy it.
The game thus rather generously starts you with a GOLD RING, HELMET, SCEPTER, and SWORD, essentially the Armor of God. At the very first room where you can really start acting (the peaceful meadow) if you LOOK you’ll see something floating in the river, and you can find a wood box that way.
Proceeding further leads to dead lands.
I don’t have much of a map done yet.
Early on you can land in trouble in some quicksand; I haven’t been able to get out and I suspect I might need an item I don’t have yet. Veering away from the quicksand to the south leads to a demon who asks you trivia.
Yes, really, trivia.
He says,Welcome to the new quiz show LET’S MAKE HIM SQUEAL.
Thus you need to know (or be willing to look up) what the capital of Ecuador is and how many yards are in a mile. This is not a moment Pearson has had before but it makes me wonder if the pattern will be demons trying to trick us and play games rather than having to do that much in the way of physical combat.
Past the demon is an ancient stone door.
I was unable to get through, so I stopped to LOOK (as is the Pearson Way) and immediately died.
We are apparently immortal and I could see this getting exploited in a puzzle somewhere. This seems like a good place to leave off for now. I need to do my verb-testing run and of course LOOK and re-LOOK in every location for clues.
I’ve finished the game, and this continues directly from my last post.
British schoolchildren (Andy Stoneman, Luke Youll, John Shaw, David Graham, Steven Iveson) using a Video Genie, from the Mirror, 1981.
I left off on the edge of a cliff where the game hinted I needed to use a “wishing staff” but I was unable to do so. The game needs, admittedly logically, the verb WISH. I am still unclear what action is really being taken by the player. I can concretely visualize “wave” or “shake” or even — to cause the wishing staff to shrink back to a normal staff — the verb “rub”. Does wish involve saying some magic phrase, or is it reflective of an internal state of mind? This is not purely theoretical: I know from experience I have a harder time summoning up such verbs when they occur.
The game is also finicky about how the item is held. You must be holding the staff to use wish (and then the game will have you drop it); you must have the item dropped to be able to use “rub” and undo the wish.
Crossing over reveals a “dynamite shack”. Despite visible threats to the contrary it will not tip over no matter how hard you try to whack at it.
The dynamite turns out to be what we need to break into the glass dome, but we need to be able to light the fuse on it first with a match (hence needing both a match, and a thing to strike the match on to light it). The switch either causes some pipes to make sounds (if you type OFF) or water to start running (with ON). I tried each and then running all around the map until I could find a result. With the water ON:
Just in case you want to see the result without the jacket on:
“scoulded most heinus” is a terrific one for the collection.
I was stuck a long time here and ended up finally prowling through source code. I didn’t hit much enlightenment other than finding there were multiple “cave” rooms. My prior attempts at poking in the dark cave led me to breaking my neck. Here is when I needed to take a leap of insight/faith.
We have seen many, many different methods now of coping with darkness. Darkness will randomly kill you if you are in it long enough (Crowther/Woods Adventure); darkness will kill you upon one step (Zork); darkness will kill you if you go “down” while it is dark (Ferret); darkness is safe as long as you don’t run into a wall (Scott Adams). Given this was designated as an Adams tribute, I should have figured it would be the last case, but I was originally treating the darkness more like Zork.
The other thing is: “exploring” in the dark in the Scott Adams games was always a sort of hack. In Savage Island, Part 1, you could technically skip solving a puzzle via tediously mapping through the dark, but it was obviously not an “intended” solution, so here, I was treating the darkness in a similar way. This was a mistake.
You have to feel through the darkness in this game.
This means, essentially, you have to map your way through with random fatal falls. There is the unspoken rule in some games that this level of randomness means you have reached “brute force” and need to lean off, but it doesn’t take long here if you start mapping to find some “strange oozy mud” which glows in the dark.
Here’s the map I made, including the “stubs” I added when I fell in the dark:
To the south you can pick up a match (as long as you’ve swapped the geyser from below-ground to above-ground) although you still need a way of lighting it. To get that you need to first get by a “large rock” in the cave. You are explicitly given the hint to try to “prise” it but I was having no luck. I realized the fact I could undo the wishing operation meant the staff was a likely candidate tool, and indeed:
The next step uses an object I only mentioned incidentally: a bone that’s sitting at the scary altar from last time. Past the rock is a valley of bones, so I tried (based on the game’s text) to return the bone back home.
The empty match box has the standard-issue friction surface on the side, which is sufficient to light the match. So we can take match, box, and dynamite back to the glass dome to win the game. (Mind you, this still took me a while, I tried commands like STRIKE MATCH and the like which were not understood; the game wants you to skip all the implicit action and go straight to BLOW DOME.)
Go bowling forever, I guess.
I’ve been wondering, from the author’s note in my last post about trying to publish the game, who he tried to publish with. The TRS-80 was not prolific in the UK; if you saw one, it was often the cheaper clone system Video Genie (seen at the top of this post) instead of the proper Radio Shack system. Even given the clone presence, there wasn’t a giant stack of publishers to choose from like with the ZX-80/81/Spectrum; really the most likely possibility is Molimerx, which published the early Howarth work and also Temple of Bast. I wouldn’t say they were overwhelmed with adventures, though. My guess is if Paul Standen accurately reported that they wanted “arcade games” because of having too many adventures, it was rather that Golden Apple was not quite at the same standard as the other games. Or maybe the swearing and tone weren’t respectable-commercial enough. When in the dark you are told you “can’t see shit”; this is not the sort of message that would appear in any “respectable” adventures until, maybe, the late 90s? (I’m thinking Little Blue Men by Michael Gentry of Anchorhead fame, and Chicks Dig Jerks by Robb Sherwin who went on to make games like Cryptozookeeper.)
This game isn’t interesting as a grand moment in game design (although the philosophical handling of darkness was accidentally of note); it does give another good data point of what a schoolchild’s real game-writing was like, with the attitude of the “Adventure narrator” cranked higher in intensity and lower in maturity.
Just a joke bit.
Coming up next: A sequel, where we must battle against Hitler one last time.
Renga in Blue 