Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

Right away I discovered that software was not at the top of the food chain. My people didn’t work in headquarters with everyone else. Instead they were exiled a few miles down the road to an abandoned shopping center. They shared a building with the cable-cutting operation. The programmers created software while listening to the constant CHUNK, CLUNK, CLANK of the cable-cutting machines. I learned that the previous year there was talk of moving software all the way up to Maine. A crazy idea — luckily it fell through.

For you non-computer people you need to understand that separating the software people from the engineers who design the hardware was very wrong. Software is the heart of a computer. A computer is useless without the basic stuff that my people developed: the operating system, programming languages, data management software, communications, etc. But DG didn’t see it that way. Its roots were hardware. Software was a necessary evil, created by hippy-freaks.

— Bill Foster, who joined Data General in 1976

It is done. As the playing of Ferret was a saga that lasted six months, you should read the prior posts in order before this one.

From the Computer Museum History Center.

I had left off last time on a space station, the Liberator, invaded by ooze; we needed to escape through a teleport, but we couldn’t get it working. There were three parts to the issue.

First was something the Ferret Authors hinted at directly via email, although not through the game:

The Liberator is a high security area so you need all protocols in place.

This was referring to an event long back in Phase 10 where we found a communicator, which notified us that we had “failed to register with The Department”.

The communicator emits three short beeps followed by: “Area Scan commenced. Scan Completed. One humanoid detected in vicinity. Continuing. Automatic Personnel Identification Procedure initiated. APIP completed. Continuing. Agent identified, Darkins, B. O. Message Retrieval Service activated. Standby…. Latched. Continuing.
This is your automated message service. You have one new message as follows: Darkins, you have failed to register with The Department for an excessive period. According to standard protocol you must text the first 8 characters of your Security Pass Number to 80085 immediately, whereupon you will be notified regarding your court hearing. Failure to comply will result in immediate termination. This message has been deleted automatically”.

I had tried, at the time, to type 80085, and a few random security pass numbers besides, but never got anywhere; I assumed it was essentially a goof. But apparently, this was the part of the hold-up for reaching the glorious finale.

One thing I did manage to wrangle out is the likely possibility the Security Pass Number we wanted was way off a pass back in Phase 1.

This is because the message specifically said “first 8 characters” which only makes sense if a.) there’s things other than just numbers and b.) there’s a natural cut-off at 8, which there is for the pass. In other words, we needed to send

R4E339I0

to the number 80085.

Mustelid discovered we needed to dial the number 80085 followed by whatever ID number we needed all in the same string. However, the string

80085R4E339I0

does not work; there’s a second trick that also must be applied. We already had needed to use a special “old cell phone text message” style to put in some codes, where pressing 2 once could get an A, pressing 2 twice could get a B, and press 2 thrice could get a C.

So 80085R4E339I0 is close, but the part after the 80085 must also be given in text message code. The letters were simple enough to change to numbers (R, for instance, becomes 777), but still,

type 800857774333394440

doesn’t work. The digits got converted but not the numbers! In the “text message mode” typing “4” once would be assumed to be the letter G, not the digit “4”. The way to make it through (and I realized this due to behavior on an old phone of mine) is to keep pressing: once you’ve cycled through the letters, you make it to numbers. That is, 4 is G, 44 is H, 444 is I, but 4444 gets the actual digit “4”.

-> type 8008577744443333333333999994440

Typed.
The communicator emits a beep followed by a series of tones. After a short pause you hear a voice that says “Confirmed”.

Phew. All that work for a minor message that only affects things at the very end of the game.

With that out of the way, we needed to then set something or another in the navigation room, followed by using the teleport. The old “mica rectangle” that had been used to activate the controls at the lake were useful here; you can put it in a slot at navigation, then type ESCAPE FROM HOT ITV as the destination. (We learned this from doing anagrams of Blakes 7 epsiodes, and if you don’t remember how that goes, I’ll link to the post from last month.)

Lude
Navigation. West. Keyboard. Slot. Ooze.
Exits: —W ——– —
-> put mica in slot
Done.
You are starting to feel hot.
-> type ESCAPE FROM HOT ITV
Typed.
Faintly, off in the distance, you hear “Confirmed”.

Then, wearing a teleport bracelet from all the way in phase 9, you can re-use the mica rectangle at the teleport room.

Thatch-Wade
Teleport. East. West. Up. Bench. Control Panel. Slot. Ooze.
Exits: –EW ——– U-
Score increment of 20 points.
You are starting to feel very hot.
-> PUT MICA IN SLOT
Done.
You feel as though you have been through a slightly strange, out of body, experience.
Escape from hot ITV
You are in the escape pod for a high-gain constant acceleration max-thrust Interstellar Transport Vehicle. Affixed to the floor is a square object with an ornate hatch. On the hatch is engraved a logo. On top of the object is an illuminated red button marked “Initiate Launch Sequence”.
There is an embroidered sampler here
There is an elm trunk here
Score increment of 50 points.

There’s still an obstacle here: the button just goes “Click.” when you press it, no launch! The hatch is from the “Ferrigo Energy Utility Corporation.” which specifies to “Use approved fuels only.”

You might remember from back on the ground level there was a whole scene with a train crashing revealing some irradiated pellets. Through cunning trickery I was able to carry the pellets without dying of radiation sickness by putting them in a leather wallet, but an update to the version of Ferret from the authors put a stop to that technique, so either there was another way to carrying the pellets or they were a red herring.

They were a red herring.

The whole point of the train scene was to pick up the timber shards that result from the door of the warehouse crashing in. You have to take those shards up to the spaceship.

-> open hatch
Opened.
-> look in hatch
Peering inside you can see:
a fuel chamber
-> put shards in chamber
Done.
-> close hatch
Closed.
-> push button
Click.
An ethereal voice intones “Starting automated launch sequence.”
There is a shallow rumbling followed by a gentle grinding.
The voice continues: “Initial checks complete. Status is: ‘continue’.”
The volume of rumbling increases as does an incidious vibration.
A siren blast makes you jump. An unpleasant odour pervades the escape pod. “Launch sequence interrupted. Invalid parameter setting. Attempting shutdown. Cannot complete shutdown as program ‘sludgepest’ will not terminate. Would you like to terminate ‘sludgepest’ manually? Error, user requires termination not interrogation. Semantic overload. Who wrote this code? It’s rubbish. Abort sequence. Fail over. Fall over. Start again. Rebooting.”
Suddenly there is a jarring thump as the escape pod cover is explosively ejected from the ship, rapidly followed by the escape pod. You start to feel light-headed (and light-bodied) as the escape pod is blasted into free space. You lose consciousness for an indeterminate period of time. As you drift back into the land of the living (if you can call this living) you are overwhelmed by feelings of inner knowledge, but also the need to, to, what is it, er, wait! As the Guru says, wait and enlightenment will follow. There is another sensation. You sense the need for a new beginning, to start over. You intuit that you will gain new knowledge by revisiting and reviewing your journey as in rereading an old diary can shine new light on past experiences and yield new insights. Anyway, enough of this woo, woo, the launch sequence appears to have failed but at least you escaped. But from what and to what?
Escape from hot ITV
You are floating through space in the escape pod from a high-gain constant acceleration max-thrust Interstellar Transport Vehicle. Affixed to the floor is a square object with an ornate hatch. On the hatch is engraved a logo.
On top of the object is an illuminated red button marked “Initiate Launch Sequence”.
There is an embroidered sampler here
There is an elm trunk here
-> examine sampler
OVNER NA WYR OVN
-> examine trunk
The wooden trunk is heavy and about the size of an old-fashioned Dansette gramophone player. Engraved into one side of the trunk is the word AMGINE.

(The sampler’s message is Welsh, “Fear that knows no fear.” I take a Welsh sidetrack later, as you’ll see.)

Waiting long enough then results in The Final Challenge, and things were about to get very strange indeed:

The klaxon repeats its earlier trick, and so do you, followed by a disembodied voice intoning: “Red Alert! Red Alert! Routine surveillance has detected an automatic teleport rescue scan. The living contents of this vessel will be teleported to the nearest habitable planet or spacecraft. Locking on to scan. Prepare for automatic teleportation in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 seconds.”
You feel disoriented (what a surprise), very tired and the need for sleep….
Quarantine Central
A featureless, senseless, disorienting, isolating chamber.
Score increment of 20 points.
The Guru incants:
111. Lastly, if the end is opaque, compare Phase 16 room manes with Blake’s 7.

This is a lot to take in:

a.) This is the final room, where we are supposed to do one thing to win.

b.) This one thing related to the “Guru incant” message. The game has entered “Guru” mode, and if you restart from the beginning, every time your game’s score increases you get one of the “Guru” messages. This means you have to play all the way through, all over again, from the beginning.

Resuscitation Chamber
This room contains a number of box-like machines. There is a door to the west. To the left of a display are three illuminated buttons, one red, one orange, one green. In the centre of the room, atop a metal plinth is a large chest. The lid of the chest is closed. Fixed to the side of the chest is a brass plaque.
Exits: –E- ——– —
There is a large box here
The Guru incants:
80. a science fiction book had saved Darkins from starvation in the tiny

Even worse….

-> hint
GLORY(ULTIMATE) = POINTS(MAX) & MOVES(MAX(2500)) & SOLUTION(FINAL)

c.) As the hint from the final room indicates, we need to have all the points and have an optimized turn count.

Part c was a little tricky on both counts. I already had part of a walkthrough written, and it took about an hour or so to write one for the rest, and then another hour to optimize my gameplay. My walkthrough scrounged every item possible like a packrat, since it was unknown what items were needed to solve what. Now that we had finally solved things, we could start to ignore picking up certain items (like the picnic box I carted all the way from phase 8 to phase 17). You also don’t need to hit any “information” things whatsoever; there’s nothing where information changes on a piece of paper between playthroughs.

In addition to optimizing, we were missing 30 points. The authors gave over a list of their point values at each phase which led us to realize we weren’t done yet with the Reactor.

Control Centre
You are in a brightly lit, partially derelict control centre set in solid rock. Most of the apparatus has been destroyed, however some still appears viable. There are three buttons, coloured red, orange and green; two switches, coloured blue and yellow; two knobs, one green, the other red; one lever and two digital gauges, one orange, the other blue. There is a steel door to the east.

This was a phase which consisted mainly of manipulating a device which opened doors on a grid; the main goal was to find a rod which could then be used to unlock a door.

I’ll discuss the pink rooms in a moment.

There were some fun deaths involving wandering in the nuclear area too long or opening too many doors (causing a meltdown) but this was otherwise one of the easier Phases, and it didn’t seem like it held any secrets. However, along the edges of the reactor proper, there were a series of dark rooms. Back when I first passed through the phase I checked through every single dark room and found nothing. What I did not do is check if the dark rooms had anything unusual happen if you tried other exits.

-> w
Nuclear Core
You are in a very warm room.
Exits: N-EW ——– —
-> n
You are in the dark.
-> drop orange pin
Dropped.
-> d
You are in the dark.
-> get orange pin
Taken.
-> drop orange pin
Dropped.
-> u
You are in the dark.
-> get orange pin
I can’t see anything like that around here.

To parse what just happened: if you go down in the dark room you loop back to the same room. If you go up you end up in a different room. (I had to boot up an old version of Ferret to test this — the current build doesn’t let you pick up dark things in rooms.) This meant I was onto something, but I needed to bring light to the dark room. The nuclear rod (the one we got to open a door) turned out to be the answer:

-> get rod
Taken.
A terrible feeling of nausea radiates through your body.
-> n
Dark Tunnel
-> l
Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock, with a stairway leading up.
Exits: -S– ——– U-
-> u
Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock. There are stairways leading up
and down.
Exits: —- ——– UD
-> u
Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock. There is a stairway leading down.
Exits: N— ——– -D

It only glows if exposed to enough radiation, so for the first time around I had to actually hang it in Death Area for a little bit to make sure it got glowy enough. (More safely, you can just drop the rod, leave to the dark room which is safe, then come back and get the rod all charged up.)

Unfortunately, the above sequence leads to a dead end!

-> n
Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock. There is a stairway leading down.
Exits: -S– ——– -D
-> d
Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock. There is a dark stairway leading
up.
Exits: —- ——– U-

However, there were other dark rooms, so I just needed to test … all of them! By tediously switching around doors using the machine (you can’t just open all of them because it causes the reactor to melt down).

This took a while; I found the right room second to last:

In my defense, it is a little harder to get to than some of the other rooms because you are at the limit in terms of number of doors you can safely open. Finally making it through:

Dark Tunnel
You are in a gloomy tunnel cut in sheer rock. There is a dark exit to the
south, and a brighter exit to the north.
Exits: NS– ——– —
-> n
Cutting
You are in a rock cutting. There is a dark tunnel to the south.
Exits: NS– ——– —
-> n
Cutting
You are in a rock cutting.
Exits: NS– ——– —

This gets absolutely nothing except for 30 more points. You can pass through to end up at the very start of the level and walk back round to the door that needs the rod to be unlocked. But remember, those 30 points also give a Guru message!

51. near death experiences appeared to mitigate against the annual review. The

I suppose now is the right time to explain the Guru messages. They don’t appear in order; for the first 87 they appear in alphabetical order as you’re playing through the game, but the numbers easily let you sort them into a story afterwards. After 87 they can be found directly in order (although some puzzles can be done in slightly different sequences, so even then there can be a little jumbling).

This is brilliant and awful at the same time. Brilliant in that the story of the game is recounted in a way that has us recount our steps, and awful in the requirement of forcing players to play the whole game over again. I’ll get back to this point, but first, let me give the entire Guru story. Feel free to skip down past the quote, though.

1. Bob Darkins couldn’t remember. That was the problem. A
2. vast void, no content, no context, no reference points. The fall from grace
3. that consisted of tumbling free from the resuscitation chamber was the
4. start of time as far as Bob was concerned. He had no option, he had to get
5. on with this life or perish. According to the plaque on the resuscitation
6. chamber the unknown virus might make perishing the odds-on favourite but he
7. didn’t even know if the plaque applied to him. He realised that his amnesia
8. was not absolute, as he could read, but the extent of his memory loss was
9. unquantifiable without further data. He wasn’t sure he even recognised his
10. own name.
11. Darkins had led an extraordinarily ordinary life. His only claim to fame
12. was that he had managed to contract an unidentifiable virus which had
13. completely baffled the medical authorities. At the time the process of
14. freezing bodies until a cure could be found for any untreatable ailment was
15. gaining momentum and the associated costs were tumbling, especially for the
16. rogue outfits that simply dumped the frozen bodies. Darkins invested a
17. small inheritance on his personal incarceration and hoped for the best.
18. Apart from hosting a malignant foreign body Darkins possessed a very vivid
19. imagination, far too vivid for his own good.
20. The complete lack of bodies was a mystery. Darkins had not seen a single
21. human, alive or dead in his travels. Apart from the occasional skeleton
22. there was very little evidence of life, current or previous, on the planet.
23. The escape from the house had been difficult. Vague recollections of bombs,
24. timers and ticking triggered partial memories of special operations, armed
25. forces, military intelligence and the overwhelming need to follow orders.
26. Maybe that explained the pass he found belonging to the Militech, was he a
27. member of a military research team? Was the house a research facility, HQ,
28. barracks, safe-house or what? Too many questions. The strange place with
29. the circular arrangement of rooms was a concern. It appeared to be
30. protected by a strange force that compromised the magnetic field of the
31. area and its surroundings. Could he have received special training that
32. allowed him to find the way through? Would he ever find somebody that could
33. answer his questions and fill in the blanks? Those mazes and tunnels added
34. to the feeling of being tested. Was he still in training or was this a real
35. mission on enemy territory, possibly a foreign research installation. That
36. would fit. But what is the objective? Would he know when he found it, or
37. would mere survival be the prize? The cathedral was a total anachronism.
38. Darkins could not remember religion be practised in his lifetime, or was
39. that just the amnesia. The monastery accentuated the mystery. Was he on a
40. different planet? The computer devices built into the pins indicated a
41. significant level of technology but nothing that exceeded his experience or
42. advances that could have been made while he was frozen.
43. Darkins was an average family man, some would even say militantly dull. A
44. mousey wife, 2 mousey children, a suburban dwelling with 3 bedrooms, 2
45. cars, 2 jobs in his life, 3 best mates, 2 glasses of wine a day, his whole
46. life was counted in 2’s and 3’s.
47. The revolving walls stirred memories of his training. Eliminate the
48. impossible, then work on the possible. If there’s no exit then make one, as
49. he had to do in the ravine. Thoughts of surveillance intruded. Was he being
50. watched, assessed even? Surely this isn’t a performance appraisal. No, the
51. near death experiences appeared to mitigate against the annual review. The
52. transporter curtain was a concern. What fragments of physics he could
53. recall made any form of matter transfer impossible, or brought death in an
54. instant. Assuming that event was some form of teleportation then that would
55. indicate this was a different planet, or worse, a different universe.
56. But the coloured rooms were more reminiscent of Ancient Egypt, maybe the
57. planet had a rich history of many lost civilisations like dear old Earth.
58. Was the shimmering curtain some form of trickery, an illusion possibly?
59. The Nuclear Core indicated an industrialised civilisation at least to the
60. Third Universal Technology Level, reinforced by the use of multiple forms
61. of transport such as trains, planes and helicopters. But then some areas
62. were definitely Universal Era Stage 12 Impressionist (a shop selling furs,
63. for example) virtually prehistoric by modern reckoning. Where was this
64. analysis coming from? Darkins must be experiencing flash memory post-trauma
65. refreshment syndrome causing isolated synaptic connections to join into
66. larger configurations.
67. Was it 42 or 43? The answer could determine if Darkins was in his home
68. Universe or a near parallel clone. The relationship of 43 (or 42) to the
69. Great Universal Model of How Everything Works and Why (GUMHEWY) is unclear,
70. even today. The number 17 appears to have more influence than any others in
71. the latest research.
72. Alien presence was quite apparent. The automaton and cyborg were
73. definitely unearthly, possibly indicating post-apocalypse invasion or, at
74. the least, visitation. The drongoid could have been some form of genetic
75. and radio-active mutation, it certainly belonged in the horror comics.
76. There were so many inconsistencies, teleportation mixed with shops from the
77. pre-harmonised era, archaic office blocks with sentient post-modern
78. architecture. It didn’t make sense.
79. The most remarkable episode had been in the escape pod. Only the memory of
80. a science fiction book had saved Darkins from starvation in the tiny
81. life-raft floating in space. He had recalled how an escape pod had
82. activated its survival beacon which had been traced by an automated
83. recovery drone, which, once it located life, automatically honed into range
84. and teleported the body to the nearest habitable planet. If only he could
85. remember the sequence of actions that was needed, maybe he had done what
86. was required inadvertently without realising the consequences. He did,
87. however, remember the piece of text that had led him to the solution:
88.
89. Shell rocks Home would have illuminated
90. Rues cocoa tune Slip could have sniffed it
91. Coone club Imports would have got it last
92. Lip rim paw Hole could have smoked it out
93. Yes, let wimp Order would have been spiffed off
94. Cure hero Pilot could have sensed the plot
95.
96. There was a common theme there somewhere. For the life of him he struggled
97. to find it. In the beginning there was a pod for resusitation, now there
98. is a pod for rescue, is that the link?
99.
100. The thoughts of the Guru so enunciated are an intimate description of your
101. recent times which form an allegory for life: birth, the adventure of the
102. journey of life and place of final rest, safe, free from disease. To reach
103. your destiny you will need to expostulate according to the following code:
104.
105. _4_55_91_17
106. 31____92_72
107. 93____84_51
108. ______48__6
109.
110. Unfortunately, not all of the code survived the ravages of time….
111. Lastly, for those with OCD, compare Phase 16 room manes with Blake’s 7.

Remember, Ferret is divided into “phases” due to the technical requirements of the Data General Eclipse 16-bit that it started on. The phases were all given to different authors who worked essentially independently, so while there was clearly some coordination going on, there was also a random smattering of genres in the post-apocalyptic world, and the Guru section here gives a chance to try to gather all the threads together.

Thoughts of surveillance intruded. Was he being watched, assessed even? Surely this isn’t a performance appraisal. No, the near death experiences appeared to mitigate against the annual review.

The ultimate goal at the end is given as a sort of transcendence: “The thoughts of the Guru so enunciated are an intimate description of your recent times which form an allegory for life: birth, the adventure of the journey of life and place of final rest, safe, free from disease.”

I (and everyone playing along, although I gave a save file if someone wanted to skip ahead) finally made it to the last room with full points and a low enough turn count for the final victory to be at hand. And then … we were stumped. For quite a long time. I immediately suspected the numbers in the code referred to Guru lines, but I originally was thinking of whole words. It took a little while to come across the idea of just using the initial letters…

sics
a_la
y_an
__ic

…and, then what? This gets, if reading top to bottom, left to right, SAY _I___ CLAISANC where Google Translate determined Claisac meant “weed” in Welsh.

I and others did a deep dive into Welsh; I tried looking for a five-letter word that would fit in the blank where the second letter was “I”. This got nowhere for a long time.

The Guru text mentioned “not all of the code survived the ravages of time” so I assumed that was referring to the blanks. In addition to the Welsh-diving I spent a long time trying to find a numerical pattern to recover them.

The wrong assumption was that the missing code was in the blanks. The blanks are intentional! The code is missing lines below.

As theorized by Sha1tan in the comments:

sics
a_la
y_an
__ic
__mt
___u
___a
___r
___y

That is:

Quarantine Central
A featureless, senseless, disorienting, isolating chamber.
-> say i claim sanctuary
‘i claim sanctuary’
The disorienting feeling you are experiencing crystalises into a total sensation of discombobulation. You feel, sense, hear, you can’t tell which, an ethereal voice. Thoughts form in your mind and you realise you have reached a point of completion, an all-consuming peace pervades your soul. You have arrived. The end is nigh. Well done, the puzzle is complete, you can sleep peacefully again, no more to be troubled by the furious, ferocious, bare-fanged Ferret erupting from your frightening nightmares.
Phase 17 (Illumination)
Mode: Guru
You have scored 1670 (out of 1670) points in 2439 moves.
Rooms visited: 769. Rank achieved: Chief.

The End.

(As pointed out by the authors after, just typing i clai sanc into Google will immediately get that as a suggestion. I never thought to try it; that required realizing “i” was a complete column as opposed to a letter followed by three missing unknown letters.)

…

Let’s back way, way, up, to the philosophy of art.

Is there really any such thing as good or bad art?

At its most radical, we can say all aesthetic judgements are entirely arbitrary, and for the aliens of Zebulon V, maybe the work “Spewing Rubik’s Cubes” from Boston’s Museum of Bad Art is a masterpiece.

This sort of radicalism is particularly puzzling in the case of games: it is quite possible to have a game that nobody can play, perhaps due to a crash, or an almost literally impossible puzzle. It seems like on technical grounds alone, there has to be some kind of judgment.

And yet–

I’ve discussed before The Tower of Druaga. It’s a Japanese arcade game that is near-impossible to win on one’s own, because many of the 60 floors require doing arbitrary actions, like not touching a chest until after killing monsters in an arbitrary order. The video below gives an entire walkthrough with explanations.

Yet, people have beaten the game, and still beat the game. It was intended for arcades, as a collaborative effort. Sheets and notebooks were placed at the arcades and as people discovered new things, they got added to the sheets, so the next players could get a little farther, and discover something new. It was game as community effort.

Actual Druaga arcade sheet. From @waisar on Twitter. The historian Alexander Smith thinks that the secrets and warp pipes of Super Mario Bros. were directly inspired from Druaga.

So with that preface, this all means some of the moves in Ferret might be a bit more reasonable under the aegis of community: no, you don’t have to actually make a walkthrough, because there are multiple other players, all who can help provide what they already have. (One of our actual players, K, never used save files, but instead did a running walkthrough; this was made easy through some tools the games provides.) Some outrageously difficult puzzles are less outrageous when multiple people are passing the same steps.

Well, some. We still needed hints quite a few times. I am still hesitant to judge “good or bad”, just “different gameplay experience”. I do think there are points the game went too far; I won’t recount the sins of the Mastermind puzzle again, and the mathematical puzzle involving pipe flow was almost unbelievably cheeky, even with the “mass mind” approach.

I showed this to some people who weren’t playing; they assumed there was some sort of joke or trick. There isn’t. The authors sent me a full mathematical solution.

Still, the whole point of stretching boundaries is to have a different and unique experience, and Ferret provided that. It did essentially topple Quondam as the world’s most difficult adventure, although in a lateral way that makes them hard to compare. Quondam had every single step fraught with peril, in a manner of horror vacui; by contrast, Ferret has many large open spaces, and is completely unafraid to toss out red herrings.

Ah, the red herrings. I’m still not sure what to think about them. I think the ones that landed best had some “resolution” despite being red herrings, like the code from the sewer that deciphered an entire fake floor code much later. I can think of a couple other cases where I’d be hesitant to take the herrings away, because they gave certain puzzles an edge (like the 2s and 3s lines from Guru, which felt out of place and were tempting as puzzle fodder but entirely irrelevant to the solution). Some herrings really did seem like loose parts and wasted time. I still haven’t come up with a way to articulate which is which, but that’s because no adventure I’ve played before has ever had so comprehensive a catalog.

I’m sure there’s more to be said about so dense a game, and maybe the players — who numbered among the many — can give their thoughts in the comments. (Even if you only provided a single comment way back months ago, you were part of the game-space, so don’t be shy!) For now, I really am tired, after six months of this epic that took 40 years to write, and I think I’ll be taking that place of final rest now.

(Prior posts on Ferret here. Also, I semi-spoil the endings to some 70s TV shows.)

No progress, alas. We have failed to reach the endgame.

Sorry, Link.

I thought of maybe likening this post to the ending of Blakes 7 (which has a super-high body count and the evil Federation wins) but maybe The Little House on the Prarie is more appropriate. After 8 regular seasons and a 9th “New Beginnings” Season there were some TV movies, including A Last Farewell, where an evil tycoon buys up Walnut Grove. The response of the townspeople is to blow everything up.

Having the sets blown up meant that it was of course the last piece of Little House of Prairie TV made, but oddly enough, it was not the last TV movie. Despite shooting earlier, the special Bless All the Dear Children showed after the explosive finale.

Such as it is here: we’ve been playing Ferret since the start of October, all the way to the end of January, setting a new record (Warp, even given the fact I broke it in two parts, took three months to finish). The patience of my dear readers desperately hoping for an Apple II game with a soothing phosphor beam or maybe some janky ZX Spectrum art has been pushed long enough, and I need to write about new games. But we really are one room away from the endgame (we know this, not just guessing) and we have some folks determined to see things to the end, so action will continue in the comments here.

How do we know we’re one room away? Well, in an earlier version the authors made an error which let us jump into phase 17 early. I’m going to wait until the last post proper to share too much, but you land in the escape ship we’ve been trying to get to, and end up in a disorienting place similar to Adventure 550. Then something slightly unhinged happens and maybe even transcendental which seems to be some sort of grand meta-puzzle. So it is worth waiting for, and I’m hoping to write up The End, on, say, February 28. (No promises, though. Maybe it’ll even happen sooner.)

Anyway, on progress: we kind of devolved. The game was updated today to 10.30, and we found that the trick of putting radioactive pellets in a leather wallet no longer worked to protect us. (I mean, fair, that wouldn’t work in real life: but the game has had a few bits of science fantasy so it didn’t feel too absurd either.) So that means we are back at square one as far as what to do with the broken warehouse.

Shadow of a Warehouse
A large open area exhibiting the ground shadow of an immense warehouse. The remainder of the warehouse is to the south. To the north is a fenced lane. To the west is a set of railway tracks, to the east is the rear end of a train locomotive which appears to be sinking very slowly into the ground.
Exits: NS-W ——– —
There are some shards of timber here
Score increment of 10 points.
-> s
Warehouse
A large open area in the remains of an immense warehouse. There is another
large open area to the north.
Exits: N— ——– —
There is a thallium receptacle here
-> open receptacle
Opening the thallium receptacle reveals:
some radiant pellets

Maybe the pellets are a red herring and we really want some broken wood? Maybe there’s some alternate way to carry the radioactive material with us? (If the latter is true, we could just use a prior version to make it through.)

Incidentally, the update did fix the map, so we can reach all the rooms whilst in space that we are supposed to. As predicted, the Escape from Hot ITV room is the missing one, although now you can see the location via asymmetry:

I don’t have too many other insights to share. I’ve tried naming locations to teleport to in every way I can think of, and typing in the same manner. I’ve tried stuffing various random items into slots rather than just identity cards and those don’t work either. I’ve tried eating the ooze.

Not such a good idea. Your stomach starts to implode. You are being positively gut-wrenched. As you start to suffer from severe convulsions you realise that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to eat something that might be poisonous.
It’s time to meet the big Ferret in the sky.

I’ve tried various actions with the space suit, but there’s no pockets in the suit and you can’t wear the teleport bracelet at the same time as the suit.

Finally, I tried various whacks at the mysterious Blake sarcophagus message. Let me just give all that text again, in case any puzzle solving maven has some idea even if they’ve not been playing Ferret at all.

Clue #1

The sarcophagus glisters and sparkles in a most tremendous way. You are bedazzled and, not to a small degree, hypnotised by the beauty of the object. Strange that such wonder should be associated with the morbidity of death. Any road up, you may be interested in the inscription on the side of the gaudy object which reads:
The Most Exulted
The Highmost
The Leader of Freed Men
The Champion of the Underdog
The Most Betrayed of All
Put to Death this Day
ABCDXY0123789
By Federation Termination Order
May his Magnificence Rest in Peace

Clue #2

Mong the Magnificent, King of Throb, Ruler of the Vibrations, Artisan of the Pulsating Wobblers was universally revered for his insights into the art of personal pleasure, usually of an exotic nature. It is assumed that he had discovered some incredibly good blow before coining this wonderful quip, full of deep thought and liberating enthusiasm:

“It could be that 0123789 is a number pure and simple, representing, say, the number of days since a given start point, possibly denoted by some other equation. Alternatively, it could be symbolic, with, for example, 9 and 0 denoting some simple code, one that often stares people in the face.”

Or, just maybe, Mong has sustained such physical and mental abuse in pursuit of hedonistic pleasure that he had gone completely barking.

Clue #3

Yo, ya kno’ that Graham geezer and his massive number. Well, like, X is the spot an’ it’s the last free digits, dig it?

Clue #4

Blap, blap. This is fierce. Y, oh Y, does the posse go mental when I jive some symbols at ’em? All I said was “pi and mash”.

Clue #5

It appears that a builder from some distant time in the past (the language appears to be ancient estuarine) has left his calculations inscribed for posterity on the wall.

Wifdf = AX
Hiftf = BY
Lemff = 9782C310

Clue #6 (possibly irrelevant, but here just in case)

I need to explain this before I expire. My life’s research has led me here. Sadly, I think my mind has been failing over the most recent years, things not having the clarity they used to possess. For what it is worth, and I hope it is worth something, otherwise my life has been for nought, my findings are as follows. Please pass on to Prof. Anderson of the Anthropology Department of Springfield University if you can.
“Every story of lore had three protagonists, they say. Let’s call them A, B and C. These lovely three were not related but they were from the same family, which means they are related, if you see what I mean. The first degree of freedom is the order of significance, which, in this case only, is reverse alphabetic order with a small, but significant, amount of moistness. Now, each of A, B and C can represent an individual digit, number, equation or some combination of some or all of the parts. Suffice to say the permutations are nearly endless, but in this case, think of some bears with a propensity to sugary conserves. The second degree of freedom is magnitude, for which an analogy with the late 20th century telephone will suffice coupled with the standard innuendo. The third degree of freedom is position within the arithmetic equation (or it is not how big it is, but what you do with it, to use televisual allegory). In this case we need to look to X and Y. If X is larger than Y then B is below the line, whereas if you are playing bridge it would be definitely above the line, if not straddling it. If Y is larger or equal in magnitude to Y then all are above the line with a straightforward multiplier effect. Not forgetting, of course, the geographical offset.”

One more Data General Eclipse ad for good measure. Computerworld, Nov. 15, 1976.

(Continued directly from here.)

From Red Bubble.

Okay, based on what I know of Phase 17, we aren’t going to beat that superfast. But we’ve made enough progress we might get there by tomorrow, and that would be highly satisfying since, as earlier mentioned, I’m making my second-to-last post on Ferret tomorrow, and I will save any follow-up for when (if?) “Won!” happens.

But first: the worst puzzle in the game. And I am not exaggerating.

So: broom closet attached to a Mastermind puzzle. Hours of various efforts thrown at it by myself and others (thanks to everyone who joined it!) and the authors needed to explicitly give the solution anyway: you need to input the answer to the Mastermind puzzle but not hit the rainbow button. (The one that gives black-black-black-black.)

-> west
Broom Cupboard
A very small room with an aluminium door set in the east wall.
There is a book here
Score increment of 20 points.
-> close aluminium door
Closed.
As the door closes the floor descends taking you and the room with it.
Base of Shaft
A very small room.
Exits: –E- ——– —
-> east
Pipeline of Despair
Corridor running east west.

They explained that the general process behind the game was to slowly optimize a play-through, dropping things unneeded, until the perfect run is arrived at. But why would we expect the Mastermind mechanism to work without pushing the button? There is no clue to this behavior whatsoever. What’s more, the point increases at the Broom Closet when the game has been softlocked, which violates one of the central tenets of the game: that you can rely on point increases as a signal that you’re on the right track. It certainly has been possible to skip things, but unlike, say, getting points for a later phase (where it is obvious a skip is happening) this was a subtle and non-obvious softlock. Also remember this was 100% a secret exit, and unlike the pier which had no items at all, the book may have been considered important enough to warrant 20 points.

To explain things in a more theoretical way, dropping an elevator controlled via Mastermind puzzle is an intentional non-realistic abstraction of a puzzle into a universe (commonly known as a “soup cans” puzzle). I’ve defended such puzzles before, with the notion that movie musicals don’t wring their hands every time they stop and break out in song, and as long as a game is clearly in a particular style, having a random 15 puzzle or crypto-crossword spelled out in room tiles fits in with the story. However, such a conceit needs to recognize that the abstraction is happening and not hinge something critical on thinking of it as a realistic mechanism. As there is no realistic basis for Mastermind opening an elevator, there is equally no realistic basis for putting a “color input” in a different way operating differently! At the very least, there needs to be a solid mechanic feedback, which is lacking here: the only thing presented is the abstraction.

Let’s not linger any longer:

Vessel of Dreams
End of corridor.
Exits: NS-W ——– —
-> south
Prince of Wales
A large gloomy room. In the centre of the floor is a carved pillar, atop which is a beige ball. The ball is emitting regular light pulses which cast an eerie glow over the room.
Exits: NS– ——– —
-> south
Couloir
A long room.
Exits: NS– ——– —
-> south
Amaurotic Ambulatory
A short room.
Exits: N— ——– —
There is an identity card here
-> take identity card
Taken.
-> look at card

Not only did we get the long-sought-after identification, but on the other branch we found the questions to go with the answer key that we found a while back. That is:

1,1 First named building.
1,2 Should be repressed according to the open diary.
1,3 Age when she left.
1,4 Near at the start of work.
1,5 Movement of lunch queues.

goes with:

The clues are all about the book 1984 (which is the reason that clue was there in the first place — in order to answer these questions).

VICTORY M(A)NSIONS
BIG (B)ROTHER
TEN OR E(L)EVEN
TEL(E)SCREEN
JER(K)ED

The letters rearrange to, as expected, BLAKE, and go with ROJ BLAKE. This means the long sequence of theater (with the enormously complicated puzzle which the authors self-admit is the trickiest in the game) leading to the island and the answer key was — by appearances now — solely in order to derive the Roj Blake reference. This is deeply odd because there are enough other Blakes 7 references to catch on; people started noticing as soon as I produced map with character names, there’s the bit with the intercepted message in the headphones…

This is Civil Administration ship London. We are in transit from Earth to Cygnus Alpha, transporting prisoners to the penal colony. We have Federation clearance for direct flight, authority number K-Seven-Zero-One.”

…and there’s a paper near the same headphones that gives explicit detail:

Phases are an important part of the game as it was designed and released in batches of rooms called Phases – originally a limitation of 16-bit technology, the authors leveraged it to allow the game to continue development in an incremental fashion. 40 years (yes, 40) after inception a final release was posted with an end game – which, as far as we can ascertain, has never been cracked. The final conceit has heavy overtones of a TV series popular at the time of the games’ original release – an innovative (for British TV) series called Blake’s 7 (this was in the early Star Trek era). Players have noted that the Phase is called Liberation (Blake’s ship is called Liberator), that there are 51 rooms (with curious names) on the ship, yet 52 episodes in the TV series. Many theories have been expounded but most seem to revolve around the notion of finding Room 52 – there is a Teleport that understands the room names of the ship so that might be the way in.

We’re about to get to the boldface part in a moment.

So, with identity card in hand, we can head back to phase 16 and the lift up into space. (Which originally didn’t work, because I was carrying too much stuff — your inventory needs to be light enough.)

Bottom of Lift
You are in a small aluminium-lined room. To the south is a steel door. Next to the door is a red button, under which is a chrome plate.
Exits: -S– ——– —
Score increment of 10 points.
-> close door
Closed.
-> push button
Click.
The lift ascends.
Top of Lift
You are in a small aluminium-lined room. To the south is a steel door. Next to the door is a red button.
-> open door
As the door opens you are sucked with extreme prejudice across a room only to discover a hard surface (commonly known as a wall) to arrest your progress.
You’ve croaked like a frog (widdip).

Of course, in typical Ferret fashion, the game then causes immediate death. You need to wait a few turns for the airlock to cycle properly.

-> s
Airlock
You are in a featureless airlock. There is a steel door to the north.
Exits: NS– ——– —
Score increment of 10 points.
-> s
Airlock
You are in a featureless airlock. There is a door to the south.
Exits: N— ——– —
-> open door
Opened.
-> s
God Washed Font
Airlock. South. Small. Bare. Door. Ooze.
Exits: NS– ——– —
Score increment of 5 points.
-> s
Not Dun Cow
Antechamber. North. East. West. Ooze.
Exits: N-EW ——– —

Now things get very odd and terse, almost like a TRS-80 game. All room descriptions (except for one I’ll get to) are done in a short, single word style. All the rooms include “Ooze”.

-> s
Gauss Carhop
Corridor. North. South. East. West. Ooze.
Exits: NSEW ——– —
-> e
Lude
Navigation. West. Keyboard. Slot. Ooze.
Exits: —W ——– —

There’s plenty of rooms with items you can’t refer to (like a medical bay) and the above is the first one that seems to have a gizmo you can work: you can put things in the slot and type in the keyboard. Does that mean you insert the id card and type a code on the keyboard? Perhaps.

There’s also a room with a space suit (“Nut Boy” above, and I’ll talk about the funny room names shortly). The space suit operates like the diving suit did, where you can’t walk around while wearing it. One might expect wearing it and popping open an airlock, and there’s an escape hatch on one of the ship that might fit the bill, but the game does not let the player refer to it in the parser, so I’m guessing that’s a bust.

The third location of major interest is the teleport room.

Thatch-Wade
Teleport. East. West. Up. Bench. Control Panel. Slot. Ooze.
Exits: –EW ——– U-
Score increment of 20 points.

The slot is the only thing you can refer to. If you’re wondering where the Ooze is coming from, Up from this location gives the answer.

Senator
You are on the flight deck of a high-gain constant acceleration max-thrust Interstellar Transport Vehicle. Around the flight deck are many instruments including illuminated orange, amber, green, white, yellow and pink buttons, a slim lever, a chromed lever and a round knob. In the centre of the room is an array of flight-control positions consisting of high-backed gravity-lock seats each with their own set of controls, monitors and gauges. There are specific and dedicated seats for the astro-navigator, pilot and ship’s master. The pilot is provided with additional controls that look like counterpoise lampstands. There is a stairway leading down from the flight deck opposite of which is a deep cavity set into the hull of the ship. Above the cavity is a television screen. To one side of the screen is a vertically mounted section of a dome, the highest point of the dome pointing directly into the room. Various random light patterns play on the inside of the dome. On the other side of the screen is an area of racking containing strange devices that appear to be hand-held haircare products. Seeping through the joins of the structure of the flight deck is a most disgusting ooze; it appears to be alive as it pulsates and gradually expands across the surfaces of the ship.
The ship is throbbing gently.
Hovering in mid-air, in the middle of the flight deck, is a most awe-inspiring, pulsating plasma ball. The atmosphere around the ball is highly charged, as if with some form of electricity, creating the impression of overwhelming power and imminent danger. You feel incredibly strange as if experiencing a dream-state, is this reality, a hallucination maybe, or has something deeply alien taken control of your senses.
Exits: —- ——– -D
-> d
The plasma ball appears to consist of matter and forces hereto before unknown to your puny species. Its role in a strange life is to protect and it expedites this function with considerable flare. A flare of ectoplasm in fact, which is ejected with utmost force towards your snivelling form. You are reduced to items of matter smaller than quarks.
Quark, quark, dead duck.

If you eyeball the description carefully you’ll notice lots of buttons and some levers, but none of them can be referred to by the parser, so I’ve got relatively high certainty (let’s say 70%) that this room is a trap and should not be visited.

The problem is the ooze is also causing you to slowly die, so whatever is being done needs to be done quickly. I would assume the instructions earlier about finding the room to teleport to is the ticket. Every room available on the ship past the airlock is an anagram of the name of an episode of Blakes 7.

In Pert Mode -> Redemption
He Cared To Fly To Get With Ed -> City at the Edge of the World
Drown Bake -> Breakdown
Fakir Shares Hot Vote -> The Harvest of Kairos
Caro -> Orac
Trail -> Trial
Glod -> Gold
Lude -> Duel
South Of A Murder -> Rumours of Death

Etc. Some rooms we couldn’t get to (because of what seems like a bug, one room has an exit that loops) but managed to do anagrams of anyway by using the GOTO command and the room name and seeing if the room exists. One anagram was really stumping us, though: Voice from the Past.

Being a longer text than the others, it has many, many, possible anagrams and was resisting solution until Voltgloss noticed that the funny paper with five sort-of-cryptic clues from a few posts ago…

1. Hector can feel the pressure (8, 2).

2. Right in tout in large stream (5, 5).

3. Get away, morf back, too much heat on Independent Television (6, 4, 3, 3).

4. Top footballer, winning trophies (6, 4).

5. Bristling with fame, loves anchovies, participates (1, 6).

…had, if you take number 3 as a charade clue with no secondary definition, ESCAPE FROM HOT ITV. This is an anagram for Voice from the Past! The extra bit of effort nearly guarantees that this is the secret room we are supposed to teleport to. However, to get there, we need the teleport to work!

The most logical action, wearing the teleport bracelet (from way back in Phase 9), putting the id card in the slot, and saying the destination doesn’t work. This also matches roughly what goes on in the show, although there may be some details from said show that will help work out what we’re missing (so Blakes 7 experts still welcome!) Damian Murphy suggests in the comments to use the navigation computer first to go to a particular location, then teleporting from there.

There’s still a decent chance the text at Blake’s sarcophagus is relevant, but rather than dropping all the text again I’ll leave the link there; that has the inscription with the odd message “ABCDXY0123789” on it.

Whatever’s going on, we’ve got 24 hours to figure it out.

(Sort of. Again, I’m happy to continue in comments, but I really would like to crack into the Guru phase by January 31, it seems like it’d make a sort of capstone.)

(Directly based off my previous post.)

No progress at all! But time is tight (see above) so let me update anyway.

After a number of increasingly absurd attempts at setting the system date, and looking into creating a giant batch file script that would check every possible system date from 1984 to 1988, we received another missive from the author hivemind:

The Broom Cupboard. The answer is not related to the date and you don’t need to change the settings of your computer.

Phew. Saved by the bell. But also:

There is something anomalous about the Foyer and Broom Cupboard.

There is a very subtle clue in the first sentence/page of the book, but that wasn’t designed to be the way to solve the problem, it just happens to be there.

Hmm. Curious. Here’s the two descriptions again:

Foyer
In a derelict warehouse. Large open area. Lit through semi-transparent skylights. Main warehouse to the north. To the west an aluminium door.
Exits: NS– ——– —
-> open door
Opened.
-> w
Broom Cupboard
A very small room with an aluminium door set in the east wall.
Exits: –E- ——– —
There is a book here

I certainly fiddled more in the cupboard than in the Foyer, so spent some time looking for oddities there. On the face of it, the big difference is that one is large and the other is very small, but I already knew that. (I had suspected that perhaps this indicated the room was really an elevator, but this suspicion led to no specific action.)

The Foyer lacks a “skylight” object even though the description of skylights is identical to other rooms in the warehouse, but that seems like a glitch more than a clue.

Fine, maybe the book will be revealing? The clue was unclear if what was meant was the first sentence upon reading the book’s description, or the first page of the real book 1984, so let’s consider both.

The book is very old and appears to have been damaged by immersion in water.

I never thought much of the water here — it makes for a good way to have identify-the-book be a naturalistic puzzle rather than a forced one — but maybe there’s something more to this comment. Specifically, maybe the book was left in the broom closet intact, and was only damaged by water later? In that case, where did the water come from? Leaks in the room? The ability to slide down and get submerged? This thought led me (and others in the comments) to prod heavily and the ceiling and floor, at least more heavily than before, but nothing came out that wasn’t a default message.

We tried bringing actual water in the room (akin to the well in Zork) with no result. I even tried ritually dropping the book into the water, theoretically giving it even more damage, but nothing changed (I don’t think the physics modeling of Ferret even is handling it properly).

Fine, what about the actual Orwell book? What counts as the first page depends on what font things get printed in, so let’s just give the first three paragraphs:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

As Voltgloss observed, the bit about the lift being shut down during daylight hours might be kind of like a hint, and it does align with the room being an elevator. I then tried various ways of convincing the game the room was dark, but no joy, including absurd commands I knew just weren’t going to work, just in case there was a helpful error message.

-> cover skylight with linen
I can’t see anything like that around here.

Other efforts include getting the game to hardlock by using the cyborg. I was slightly incorrect last time about the cyborg; she does have a random chance of making it all the way up to the Foyer (I think the reason WAIT FOR wasn’t working is that she is more likely to get stuck at the Waterfall.) I tried going south and typing WAIT FOR CYBORG and the game completely locked up and I had to hit control-C to quit out. Voltgloss had something similar when he trapped the cyborg in the broom closet by closing the door. I suspect this means the cyborg still isn’t our candidate for solution, but at least crashing was a result other than futility.

I’m completely stumped from here. Usually in this scenario the issue requires something outside the puzzle, like messing with power elsewhere, but my minor attempts at doing alternate button presses at the lake yielded no results. Is there some other method to convince the warehouse that “the rave is open” so to speak and it is fine to open any kind of secret night-time passage or elevator? I can’t think of any.

ADD: We had a breakthrough due to a much more explicit hint from the authors — details in the comments. Updated save at the start of Phase 16 here for anyone playing along (note that nothing is done yet in Phase 16 in the save, including releasing the handbrake or putting in the tickets).

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

After all our efforts and travels, our final act of desperation might boil down to one room. (Prior posts on Ferret here.)

From a Data General Eclipse C/330 Computer System, via the Computer History Museum.

Before getting to the Jean-Paul Sartre simulator single puzzle of doom, I should mention we do have progress! But on the “backsolve” part of the game: how to make a projector.

Namely, Mustelid observed that the various “staffrooms” that have appeared in a few phases all have a tilted ceiling that resembles that type used with some projectors.

Staffroom
This room appears to have been used by the station staff during their rest periods. There are some basic facilities including a worktop with an opening for a sink and a broken tap. Under the opening for the sink is a cupboard. Above the worktop the ceiling is angled at 45 degrees as if the room is built under a sloping roof. There is a wooden door to the west.

Some playing around with the lit orb yielded far more results than we ever had before.

-> turn knob
Clunk.
The orb starts to emit a bright light.
-> put orb in sink
Done.
A rectangular area of the angled ceiling is brightly lit.

The fruit bowl I mentioned last time worked as a lens; if you put in one of the transparencies we’ve been toting around, symbols result:

-> put orb in sink
Done.
A rectangular area of the angled ceiling is brightly lit.
-> put bowl in sink
Done.
The rectangular area of the angled ceiling is diffusely lit. There appear to be
some symbols projected on to the ceiling.

You need to lay down both transparencies at the same time in order to get a full picture:

The map we already have, via brute force: it is the dark maze that had the leather wallet and the life vest.

It also, curiously enough, has one of the transparencies. The intended game flow (assuming you don’t sequence break like we did) is to use the bottom half of the map to obtain a second transparency, then do the combined transparencies to get the top half of the map.

The “key” (read top to bottom) is allegedly the clue we need to get at the plum ticket. We should likely say something like “state of enlightenment” at the Archive of Angst, but I wasn’t able to get it to work. I didn’t experiment that hard, though.

Archive of Angst
Cramped, poorly lit, smelly hovel. This room appears to have been partitioned from a previously larger room as, incongruously, there is a brass plate set off-centre in one wall. The plate features a grille under which is an engraved instruction. Sprayed across one wall is a graffito that reads: “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be”.
Exits: N— ——– —
-> read instruction
The engraving mandates: “State your destination”.

I didn’t experiment that hard because I’ve been focused on the puzzle of doom. Namely, trying to find the identity card in order to get into the last part of Phase 16. That is, where is this room?

Amaurotic Ambulatory
A short room.
Exits: N— ——– —
There is an identity card here

The Authors, in their mercy, have dropped notice that the Broom Closet is in fact the important place for finding a secret, and the 20 points acquired are not just from finding the book inside. (The book, a copy of George Orwell’s 1984 with a mangled cover, may even be a red herring.) So efforts need to be focused there. But there just isn’t much to say:

Foyer
In a derelict warehouse. Large open area. Lit through semi-transparent skylights. Main warehouse to the north. To the west an aluminium door.
Exits: NS– ——– —
-> open door
Opened.
-> w
Broom Cupboard
A very small room with an aluminium door set in the east wall.
Exits: –E- ——– —
There is a book here
Score increment of 20 points.

Our vision of the future showed the secret room with an entrance from the north, so assuming this doesn’t lead to something more complex, there is some way to open the south wall here.

The way to unlock the visible door was to win a game of Mastermind. So possibility one is that there’s something additional to be done at the game. It consists of a giant, 20 by 4 block of rooms.

Broom closet marked in blue.

For each row, the westmost room has a “rainbow button” that will let us register a guess, and there are “rotary switches” that allow picking colors in any of the four rooms in a row:

Theodore’s Spike
In a derelict warehouse. Partitioned area. Lit through semi-transparent skylights. On one wall a set of disco lights, rainbow button and rotary switch.
No way west.
-> turn switch
The room is suffused by a glow of Red
-> turn switch
The room is suffused by a glow of Orange
-> turn switch
The room is suffused by a glow of Yellow
-> turn switch
The room is suffused by a glow of Green
-> turn switch
The room is suffused by a glow of Blue
-> turn switch
The room is suffused by a glow of Indigo
-> turn switch
The room is suffused by a glow of Violet

I found out, via prior experimentation, that the right sequence from west to east is Violet, Yellow, Orange, Yellow. This results, when the rainbow button is pushed, an “all black” light configuration (just like the black pegs of the real game). This sequence can be delivered in any of the rows. One possibility might have been that there is really a second combination the layout switches to after the first “all black” that needs to be solved for, but no: it’s still always Violet-Yellow-Orange-Yellow. I even tried setting every single one of the rows to all-black to no effect.

This doesn’t completely discard the possibility the Mastermind is relevant, but I can say I haven’t eked out any extra clues.

Another possibility might be that the wandering cyborg (the one we killed to get an orb to solve that projector puzzle I just mentioned) could come into play, maybe having her wander into the broom closet can have some effect? But the “chunky bracelet” which influenced the movements of the automaton in phase 9 (I think? … still unclear there) does not do anything with the cyborg, and if you just sit at the broom clause at WAIT FOR CYBORG the game just says “Looks like a no-show.” If you head to the room just south (Terminus) and do the same thing: “The cyborg has just slinked into the room.” It is clear the limit of the cyborg’s range cuts off right before the broom closet.

That leaves shenanigans in the broom closet itself, literal pounding on the wall in an empty room. I’ve tried saying various words important to the book 1984 (FREEDOM IS SLAVERY), poking and prodding at each of the wall directions (you can refer to SOUTH WALL, NORTH WALL, etc.), doing DANCE and SING, and probably most absurdly yet more promisingly, changing the system clock. And yes, I mean the date/time feature on the computer I am using to play the game.

To back up a bit, there was a puzzle I solved more or less by pure luck way back in Phase 2 where a particular device only worked at a particular time of day. I only realized this because when I first played through the section I was playing during the correct time span, but when I tested the same actions later they didn’t work. Here, the suspicion is we may or may not be setting a time, but the important thing is the system date.

The reason for this suspicion is the flier I mentioned last post out in the Mastermind puzzle is in a room called Timeshift Passage:

MC Emsee and the Enormous Possie
present
A Rave to Remember
featuring
* DJ Spong
* Fardy Snapwit
* The New House Bandeleroos
* Aching Vomit and the Wretches
12th December, Late till Later
Warehouse on Conduit Road
Zonndo Promotions init
Max schtumm to avoid babylon

The 1984 book also contains a second date reference (a copyright of 1987, but based on the edition the ASCII seems to be based on that’s technically correct) and of the voucher and placard I also mentioned last time one makes a 1984 reference (kind of) and one makes a specific date reference:

A Jenny Talls’ Promotion
The Fashion Event of the year featuring:
Heady Grobuttucks
Noni Nonutts
Hugh Ampleforth
This voucher admits one only.
Non-transferable. Not for sale.
Validation Number: 55378008

Jenny Taylor’ Promotions
In association with the Rigid Digit Troupe
are delighted to announce a new collection
Juicy Lucy and the Suppurating Slits
with Hardlong Pipe and the Plumbers will play
The Come and Get It Adlib Concert
for one night only
Do not miss this once in a lifetime show
31st October 1985
An aural orgasm – The Voice of the Streets
Promoting Agents: Throbbing Vain Acts

So, I’ve changed my system clock to 31-OCT-1985, 12-DEC-1985, as well as 84, 86, and 87 permutations of the same. None seem to have any effect. I did not know what to set the timer to — none of the clues seem to be specific about that — so I tried 10 pm as a good “late till later” approximation. I also mucked about with 1 pm, in reference to the clocks ringing thirteen in the first sentence of 1984.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Of course, this sentence suggests April but… when? I’ve come up with all sorts of weird combinatorial possibilities but none of them seem justified past the obvious dates I’ve tried. I’m starting to think this is again the wrong path, especially because there are computers where changing the date that far back is not something accomplished with ease. (Also, did you know browsers will think your computer is hacked if you change your system date to the 1980s?)

And, just as a reminder, three days remain.

So painfully, painfully close.

(Prior posts on Ferret here.)

From Major Activities in the Atomic Energy Programs, January – December 1960.

We have since last time managed to wrangle through the crossword, which I’ll give the solution of first.

(As observed by a couple people, “Live back against the ten commandments” should probably be “Lived back”, so that reversing “lived” gets “devil”, otherwise “evil” would be the better answer.)

The missing clue, 7 across, is just SEVEN. It is unclear (like so many things) if this puzzle is meant to go anywhere; we’ve already had ample warning about BLAKE’S (or BLAKES) SEVEN being important, but maybe it is meant to just be a little extra. There is incidentally a signal nearby which relates; I mentioned there was an “audio guide” that activated upon wearing some headphones. At a random time while walking around there is a special message having nothing to do with the location you’re in:

There is a sharp click followed by a blast of white noise. Then silence. After a few seconds, initially faintly, then more strongly, you hear: “This is Civil Administration ship London. We are in transit from Earth to Cygnus Alpha, transporting prisoners to the penal colony. We have Federation clearance for direct flight, authority number K-Seven-Zero-One.”
The radio broadcast finishes and the original presentation starts afresh.

This is in direct references to Blakes 7; this is the prison ship that transports Blake in the opening episodes.

A moment from the first episode where they discuss lack of identification.

This all suggests “K701” will be used somewhere, but we haven’t reached it yet.

One of the other unsolved sections in Phase 16 was a “blast control” area.

Hooter must be sounded no more than minute(s) before blasting.
Wind plunger turn(s) to prime blaster rotor.
Depress plunger to initiate blast sequence.

Blasting is forbidden between the hours of and .
In event of problems call Central Mining Control Centre.
Operations out of normal parameters contact neighbourhood liaison on red.
Last safety check completed:

A nickel key (from the water maze in Phase 15) was required; after some fiddling I realized “winding the plunger” meant turning the aforementioned key, so getting the explosion to happen was a matter of guessing how many turns were required.

-> put nickel in keyhole
Done.
-> press toggle
A siren wails, echoing around the mine workings.
-> turn nickel;turn nickel;turn nickel
Clunk.
Clunk.
Clunk.
-> lift plunger
Done.
-> push down plunger
Done. After a fractional pause there is an enormous explosion in the bowels of the mine workings.

LIFT and PUSH DOWN would both be absurdly hard to find but I just used TEST PLUNGER twice causing the game to magically come across the right verbs for me.

My dilemma now was, having caused the explosion, what use it had. Nothing seemed to move or change. It took some hints from Voltgloss to move things around, and most specifically the observation that if you go down to the first branch the “boring” one which just leads to a dead and at a warehouse, you can briefly observe a railway track whilst heading to the dead end.

Lane
On a fenced lane running east west parallel to a railway track. The lane slopes down from west to east.

This track is extremely important: what it indicates is the track we’ve been riding the train on for a very long time now keeps going! Normally, if you try to drive the train past Phase 16, it just gets stuck:

You are in the cab of a locomotive which is currently resting very firmly against the buffers at the end of a siding.

I assumed that was that, but the game is being deceptive in the description here: if it were not for some blockage it could keep going farther north. In particular, by a nearby earthquake, like from a large explosion like you can cause at the blast area! However, this still seems unhelpful, since entering phase 16 is a one-way trip; however, if you think to RELEASE HANDBRAKE at the train before starting the explosion, the train will keep rolling along of its own volition.

End of Lane
On a fenced lane running north south. The southern end of the lane exhibits a ground shadow synonymous with the previous existence of an immense warehouse.
Exits: NS– ——– —
-> s
Shadow of a Warehouse
A large open area exhibiting the ground shadow of an immense warehouse. The remainder of the warehouse is to the south. To the north is a fenced lane. To the west is a set of railway tracks, to the east is the rear end of a train locomotive which appears to be sinking very slowly into the ground.
Exits: NS-W ——– —
There are some shards of timber here

I’ve gone on the record already as “preparation puzzles” being highly satisfying; this was no different, and I really do like the very subtle clue of the recurrence of railway tracks. I would be a little more pleased if the text upon trying to move the train too far was a little less deceptive.

Inside the warehouse, as our “reward” we can die again.

-> s
Warehouse
A large open area in the remains of an immense warehouse. There is another
large open area to the north.
Exits: N— ——– —
There is a thallium receptacle here
-> open receptacle
Opening the thallium receptacle reveals:
some radiant pellets
-> get pellets
Taken.

Alternately, we can take the whole receptacle along. Either way, the messages come:

You are starting to feel unwell.

You are feeling well bad.

You are feeling well dead.
Phase 16 (Liberation)
Mode: Master
You have scored 1515 (out of 1670) points in 3940 moves.
Rooms visited: 887. Rank achieved: Supremo.

Oops! Radiation safety, everyone! Which I discovered (including another insight from Voltgloss) in carrying in a leather wallet and putting the pellets inside; closing the wallet keeps them from causing damage, so we can now safely stick them as fuel somewhere.

Assuming the headphones section is a one-way “quantum echo” (and it certainly feels that way) the only thing left to deal with in Phase 16 is the lift with the mysterious NAPIVS warning.

I inquired directly about this from the authors and received a mysterious hint:

Amaurotic Ambulatory
A short room.
Exits: N— ——– —
There is an identity card here

Some further prodding revealed that if there’s a room you’re trying to find, typing GOTO ROOM will give an error if the room doesn’t exist (that is, you’re in the wrong phase) while typing GOTO ROOM in the correct phase will have the game try to pathfind a route there:

-> goto Amaurotic Ambulatory
Plotting a course…
No way, jose.

Using this trick we realized the identity card we needed was back in Phase 12, with the cyborg, waterfall, and Mastermind game. Solving the Mastermind game had unlocked a room with a book that I managed to decipher as being a particular edition of George Orwell’s novel 1984.

Broom Cupboard
A very small room with an aluminium door set in the east wall.
Exits: –E- ——– —
There is a book here

Arriving at this room gives the player some points. It is possible the points are there simply because the information about the existence of the book is simply later, but it was suspicious: could there be something more here? Unfortunately, all my attempts at prying open a secret door or the like have been for naught. I went back to the various Mastermind rooms and tried prodding at combinations to see if there was any other result to be found — maybe after solving Mastermind once it would be a totally different combo? This didn’t seem to be the case though. The sequence always remained Violet-Yellow-Orange-Yellow.

Stones and Soot
In a derelict warehouse. Partitioned area. Lit through semi-transparent skylights. On one wall a set of disco lights, rainbow button and rotary switch.
No way west.
Exits: NSE- ——– —
-> turn switch
The room is suffused by a glow of Orange
-> push button
Click.
The lights are showing: White Unlit Unlit Unlit

(That’s: one color correct but in wrong position, all other colors incorrect.)

I then resorted to going back to the broom closet and trying a bunch of words and phrases from Orwell, like IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, but no dice. The game has been decently good about cuing when there is a voice signal (although we got tripped up in the pyramid on a series of riddle rooms where the last one had no clue) and I went through nearly every strongly-associated word/phrase so I think the trick must be something else.

There’s one more possibility, and that’s the fact that the warehouse includes, randomly in one spot, a flier.

MC Emsee and the Enormous Possie
present
A Rave to Remember
featuring
* DJ Spong
* Fardy Snapwit
* The New House Bandeleroos
* Aching Vomit and the Wretches
12th December, Late till Later
Warehouse on Conduit Road
Zonndo Promotions init
Max schtumm to avoid babylon

There’s both a voucher and a placard from back in Phase 9 which seem related:

Jenny Taylor’ Promotions
In association with the Rigid Digit Troupe
are delighted to announce a new collection
Juicy Lucy and the Suppurating Slits
with Hardlong Pipe and the Plumbers will play
The Come and Get It Adlib Concert
for one night only
Do not miss this once in a lifetime show
31st October 1985
An aural orgasm – The Voice of the Streets
Promoting Agents: Throbbing Vain Acts

A Jenny Talls’ Promotion
The Fashion Event of the year featuring:
Heady Grobuttucks
Noni Nonutts
Hugh Ampleforth
This voucher admits one only.
Non-transferable. Not for sale.
Validation Number: 55378008

How does this relate to the problem? Do we wave the voucher in a particular room to get in the secret disco club underneath the disco club? “Ampleforth” is incidentally a character in 1984, someone who rewrites poetry for the Ministry of Truth, but it is hard to turn that knowledge into a tangible action in the game.

‘These things happen,’ he began vaguely. ‘I have been able to recall one instance — a possible instance. It was an indiscretion, undoubtedly. We were producing a definitive edition of the poems of Kipling. I allowed the word “God” to remain at the end of a line. I could not help it!’ he added almost indignantly, raising his face to look at Winston. ‘It was impossible to change the line. The rhyme was “rod”. Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to “rod” in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme.’

My last order of business here is to bestow a medal upon Mustelid for inquiring about bringing the remote generator and the orb together.

This marathon medal seems appropriate.

Some explanation: we’ve been still trying to make a projector, to back-solve the business with the plum ticket, with the clue that an “opaque orb” is important. There is an ultra-heavy remote generator from Phase 9 that an automaton follows around once you activate it. If you try to take the generator onto the train, and turn the knob to move the train, it appears maybe the generator is too heavy:

-> release handbrake
Done.
-> turn knob
Clunk.

The catch is the parser: it is getting caught by the fact that the remote generator also has a knob. The knob in the train is a “knurled knob” and you need to “turn knurled” in order to move the train rather than “turn knob” once the generator is onboard.

The upshot of all this is if you manage to bring the generator and orb together, turning the generator will cause the orb to glow! So we have a light source; now we just need to make a projector out of it. We can toss the orb in a “fruit bowl” which might serve as a lens, but otherwise the game is frustratingly unresponsive to any kind of command that involve combining objects (I might want to cover the bowl with linen and poke a hole, but neither is understood). Still, the projector seems tantalizingly close.

Will we get there, though? Only five days remain.