Archive for the ‘catacombs’ Tag
I have reached a point where I started to think I was hitting at least one of the “broken moments”, and after doing some more research I ended up reading all the way through this thread discussing the issue.
There’s enough “open threads” to the game that it is a mystery what might be caused by broken source code and what might be caused by our inability to solve the last lingering puzzles. From that thread, someone hacked the game in order to get a “dark hooded figure on horseback” to appear (which seems to be bugged to never appear).
>EXAMINE FIGURE
You have looked upon the Dark Angel. This is the angel of death: to be more specific, your death. It has cost you your life to look upon it.
If you avoid the death, the horse will drop some manure that will be useful later. Without that item it drops a whole chain of puzzles from being solvable, and there’s one moment after (testing with hacking in the manure in one of the rooms) where the game just outright crashes.
I’ll try to report what remains in the game that I needed to and was able to solve (less than I thought!) followed by what maybe is happening with the broken parts.
Returning to parts that did work — I had quite thoroughly checked all cardinal directions on my map, but I hadn’t tried all permutations of GO or ENTER or the like that seemed logical, and I realized at a lake, I had neglected to SWIM.
Instead of going east into the purple mist (which teleports you to the castle, as shown) you can dive and find a “plug” at the bottom of the lake, but let’s save the plug for later and explore the castle:
On the outside portion there’s a garden that will be important later.
Soon after I hit one of the gnarliest, most extreme examples ever of the Parallel Universe Problem. (Condensed: imagine you go from A to C in an adventure, with no issues. You restore a saved game. You try going from A to C but you get stuck at B, which you didn’t get stuck at before. What was different? You’re in a parallel universe but it is non-obvious what changed. That’s the Parallel Universe Problem.) I cheerfully explored around castle Gargantuan, including visiting a portcullis…
To either side of the portcullis stand two huge and imposing statues, their arms raised and holding huge swords.
…and went in what I thought in was another direction, to explore even more of the map.
Lots of juicy things over here: an emerald in a fireplace…
…a zombie nearby a weird room with a purple sphere…
…a flamethrower which explodes when you try to use it…
…and a decently clever way out, where you spot the same purple mist that teleported you to the castle, and jump on down to what otherwise seems like doom.
Mid-exploration I was wanting to try bringing in a different object, so restored a saved game and went through the swimming process again and…
…got stopped by the statues. First of all, I didn’t even know by going south I was entering the portcullis, I somehow had assumed it was to the north (given there is no description of opening and the like, it was a puzzle I had earmarked to check out fairly soon). Second, I was utterly baffled why I got stopped on one run-through but not the other.
Fortunately, there’s not that many items in the game, and some more experimentation revealed I had the cloak with me and worn on my first trip through, which makes the statues let you through. So I had solved a puzzle without realizing I had solved a puzzle!
Returning to thwacking at various puzzles throughout the game, I found that back at the church where there’s a rope at the bell, you can CUT ROPE rather than ring the bell. The rope then works at a railing up higher, allowing you to steal a minute hand off the church clock (which is a treasure).
Not really stealing, remember. This all goes to the altar.
I was now truly stuck — including puzzles from last time — on the spider, the creature, and the geyser. I also now had a flamethrower, zombie, garden, and purple sphere all puzzling me. I also found if I dived into the lake I could find a plug which the game suggests you can pull but I had no way of doing so.
Roger Durrant suggested in comments I check out the “Crystal Grotto” some more. I ran across a completely undescribed “wall” while poking around:
There doesn’t seem to be any way to reveal by normal means there’s a special “wall” object; I just was prodding for secret passages and gave the noun a try, despite it being unmentioned.
The tap will cause boiling water to start flowing. This affects the geyser out past the Charon area, and lets you go on through to a sewer and a train line:
If you avoid reading the warning sign (which only applies if you’ve read it, like Wile E. Coyote) then you can find a platinum cup, which was visible earlier as being on top of the geyser, then escape entirely through the geyser hole itself.
So all that was handy, but I was still horribly stuck, and I finally got around to reading that entire thread I mentioned at the top of this post. There I found I was stuck exactly where everyone else was, namely:
a.) the flamethrower doesn’t seem to do anything useful; it seems like it ought to fry the spider but it doesn’t work (the thread indicates some way to fix it with the pen so at least it doesn’t blow up, but I never could find the right verb combo for that; since it doesn’t work anyway, I didn’t try too hard)
b.) there seems to be no purpose to picking up the critter (that prevents you from picking up the harp, sticks to you when you try to set it down, etc.)
c.) there seems to be no purpose to killing the vampire (the stake does nothing)
d.) there seems to be no way of pulling up the plug
From game hacking, we know pulling up the plug lets you enter Neptune’s realm, which has a trident which is a treasure, but also, importantly, lets you enter Elysian and bypass Charon. This lets you also keep the coin (assuming the route can even be taken).
The missing and buggy-to-obtain manure can be dropped at the garden, to then obtain a purple cube which the gardener gives you, which can be taken to the purple sphere to get the purple sphere, and then have the game crash when the zombie tries to follow you.
Some or all of this might eventually be fixable by hacking the game to its intended form, so I will leave this game off on an open question mark for now. I’ve touched all the treasures but I don’t feel like optimizing a “run” when the run is obviously incomplete. I will keep an eye out for updates (or the PET version of Catacombs miraculously being found, although that one has been sought after now for a long, long, time).
Let’s return back to 1982 for now, shall we? I’ve got a trio of short games up next in the hopper (one where we need to pull off an assassination in a hospital) followed by an investigation game for Apple II which starts with a dead hitman in a hotel room.
I’ve made a smidge of progress nibbling at the edges, enough for an update.
The tough thing about writing about adventure games is how often progress isn’t plot really as much as baby steps not made with any continuity, and certainly not delivered in a way that lends to clean narrative.
For example, one of the things I tried that failed was handling the spider and web. I had a matchbox and I thought perhaps I needed to bring it over to causes a fire (I’ve set many a web on fire now in adventures) but I hadn’t opened the matchbox yet. It only contains one “spent match”!
Additionally, the web and spider both were parsing LIGHT in such a way I suspected fire was the wrong direction (LIGHT WEB: “The web can’t be lit.”) so I decided to go a weapons route instead.
So, a sword isn’t a weapon? That’s curious. (Neither is a wooden stake, which I’ll get a hold of later.) The parser message does suggest that the right weapon will work, as trying to kill random objects doesn’t provide a similar response (“I think you should see a psychologist about your kill happy tendency!”)
The next thing I had earmarked to try was filling the glass carafe with holy water, which I had more success with: it worked! I then took the holy water over to Dracula, where I struggled for a while with verbs (POUR WATER didn’t work, either before or after waking DRACULA) finally coming up with throwing the entire carafe (you can’t just throw the water):
The wooden stake is the only thing achieved from this, and I haven’t used it for anything yet. I still have the suspicion Dracula gets some other use before getting taken down.
Despite what seemed like a fairly robust parser, I was running into enough verb difficulty I decided I need to do my big list again:
That’s pretty sizable, but it is interesting how much I’m still running into gaps; for example, there’s a puzzle with a geyser and a hole (still haven’t solved, but it seems like the hole needs blocking) where I tried to INSERT CLOAK (which of course isn’t understood).
I incidentally went on and tried my “extended comedy list” of verbs that I’ve really only seen in one place (mainly because it was discussed in comments recently), and guess which verb I found?
I suspect this is fishing and not sailing a boat, but with this game who knows?
One other extended verb I tested was STAMP, being hinted at from the inscription at the catacombs. I had originally assumed an item that you then stamp things with, but the response indicated STAMP was standalone:
Little happens except your foot is smarting a bit.
Oho! I expected to try it in the catacombs and die (given the warning) but I got the same response. Not Subterranean Encounter style to the warnings, then. After some experimentation I found STAMP worked at the Cube rooms, allowing teleportation from one room to the other.
This doesn’t unlock anything new (you can simply walk between the cube rooms), but I suspect later there will be good logistical reasons to do this.
Having done all that, I browsed back in the sea of green verbs and looked for anything helpful. I was staring at the very first word (CUT, I have no idea why I have it first) and realized I could try it back at the grass at the Elysian Fields:
If you try to visualize in a completely literal way this makes no sense — an entire supernatural field, and scissors will really reveal a secret item? — but I think this suggests not to get too fixated on physical reality in this game, and as long as two things go together in some sense (cutting and grass) they might be a solution to a puzzle.
Speaking of puzzle solutions, another verb that struck me was PRAY, which for some curious reason I hadn’t tried yet at the lost souls.
The failure to enter the gates shown above might be necessary at some junction for logistics purposes, but there is a way through the gate — you just need to open that Good Book from the church.
Yes, the furry ball seems to mostly serve as a way to prevent you from picking up objects, much like my own cats. If you go down you’ll land in front of the church.
To recap what’s needed for this part of the narrative
a.) you need to hand a coin to Charon to enter the land of the dead
b.) you need to cut grass at the Elysian Fields, the immortal rest place where the heroes go, with some scissors, in order to find and take a large diamond
c.) you can then pray to get sent to heaven, and use a Good Book to enter within
d.) then use the opportunity just to swipe a golden harp and get away
A fun clash of kleptomaniac adventurer and religion. (Although remember all treasures go to the altar! The instructions even chidingly remind you that the treasures aren’t really yours. I think it best not to read too much into the symbology of it all.)
I’m not left with much to ponder over: just the spider and the geyser and the small creature. Maybe the creature and the spider will fight, I haven’t tried that yet. However, being a hunt-the-object adventure there are no doubt some hidden puzzles, so I should probably comb over the whole map again looking for things to poke at.
If nothing else, I should try putting together gathering all the treasures I’ve managed so far into one “run” to see where I’m at scoring-wise (technically out of 250, although remember due to bugs potentially only 240 are possible). The inventory limit is pretty tight so this is one of those games where you solve the puzzles first and then do the “real walkthrough” where you only take the items you need when you need them.
This continues directly from my previous post, although a brief technical note before getting to the blog post proper: there is a saved-game feature but it is very fussy to get to work on DOSBox (Canalboy in his instructions says it took five hours to figure it out). I am sidestepping all that entirely with the emulator DOSBox-X which has very good save state features so I can ignore the issue.
…
For any large-scale and relatively wide-open treasure hunt, the first order of business is mapping things out. Let me take you on a tour.
From a pamphlet advertising the Classic Quests.
The game starts at a church, and all treasures go on the altar.
There are a few dark niches which require a lamp we’ll get to fairly soon. It is in one of these niches that I ran across my first death.
You are in a high ceilinged chamber, there is an exit to the south and a dark passage leading up. The west wall looks as though it used to contain some kind of doorway, but not now. There is a rope hanging almost in the centre of the chamber, it disappears up into darkness.
>U
It is very dark in here.
>U
Something nasty in the dark has found you very tasty. You are between a hard place and a rock, with flames rising om the ground all around, seemingly fueled by the very rocks themselves.
When you die you go to Hell, and this might be like Acheton where there could be a way out. This is indicated by a Good Book elsewhere in the church.
The “entering Heaven with certain holy writings” bit at least suggests it might be possible to go to Heaven on death rather than Hell. The “defiling the holy altars” part incidentally also indicates swearing at the altar will also kill you; this is true, but not with the word “shit”, which is apparently a noun rather than a verb (it maps to “manure” which is an object, and I think the one that’s supposed to be buggy).
Nearby the Good Book — on the opposite side of an Aisle — is a podium hiding some keys. Open questions are:
there’s a font with holy water, where is there a container that allows getting it?
and
is there some secret associated with the “west wall looks as though it used to contain some kind of doorway”?
The holy water I incidentally suspect will got to a vampire we’ll see close to where the lamp is, and the west wall I suspect is one of those secrets that gets resolved “from the other side” (that is, this is a placeholder for arriving via elsewhere on the map) but with less confidence, as there’s some nonsensical map connections elsewhere.
(Nonsensical map connections are more of a schtick in ’77-’82 games than they are in ’86 games, but I suspect the geography is mostly matching the original. However, I’m going to try to avoid speculating too much about the early version of the game because whenever I play Brian Cotton’s next game, there’s both early and “revisited” versions so I can compare so I can get a sense of how much fiddling was going on.)
Popping around outside there’s a graveyard I got lost in last, but the maze is fairly small (don’t worry, there’s a bigger maze later) and I was able to get to a tomb, which unlocks with the keys.
Just inside there’s a closed coffin with a lamp and sword. I can’t confirm — that’s not a bizarre combo to just come up with independently — but I’m wondering if there was more influence from Zork than Adventure on this game. Zork had some religious bits with the Land of the Dead, but original Adventure is squarely secular (resurrection in that game is from the computer-narrator itself).
To the east of the coffin is Dracula. (Guessing it was his original hang-out point, but the big stake in the chest messed with his sleeping arrangements.)
Dracula doesn’t immediately try to kill you (“Count Dracula is looking around to see what’s for tea.”) so may have some utility behind putting him down again (you can’t stab again with the stake, alas). You can run away and he doesn’t follow, although he does take the stake from you, so there doesn’t seem to be a reason to wake him up early.
Just a bit farther there’s a coin marked OBOLUS and a ferry at the river Styxx. The coin can go to Charon for a one-way trip.
The “you can’t carry anymore” in the screen above hints at the fact there’s a fair number of items and the inventory limit is pretty rough. Based on Roger Durrant there’s going to be a lot of strategic juggling to get the right items to the right places. It isn’t done by absolute number of objects either, items have weight, so a cloak is heavier than some keys. Have I mentioned yet — like Zork — there’s limited battery to the lamp, so the whole game is under a timer?
The area isn’t large, or at least I haven’t made it large yet. The fuzzy ball covers a slab which indicates to watch for the fuzzy ball’s mother, and if you try to set the critter back down it just jumps back into your arms.
Is there something hidden in the grass at the Elysian fields?
How do you deal with the geyser?
You can also land yourself in a room just described as “Lost souls” with no apparent escape…
All about can be heard the wailing and gnashing of teeth of many lost souls, who cannot find their way to heaven or anywhere else.
…leading to the natural question: is the lost souls room just a trap or is there a way out?
Ignoring the river and proceeding on, there’s some catacombs. I have the “maze with no other purpose to be maze-y” rooms marked in blue.
There are two mysterious rooms that are “almost perfect cube[s]” where the north wall has a “shadowy figure”. What can be done in the cube rooms? Next to ne of the cube rooms is a “glass carafe” and a ruby. I have not yet had the opportunity to test if the carafe works on holy water.
There’s an “ancient room” with a message
N- S-AM--NG -N THE -ATA-OMB-
which I assume says NO STAMPING IN THE CATACOMBS, which is fine because I haven’t run across anything to do stamping with yet. I assume this is to prevent the traditional item-dropping solution to the maze, but honestly wouldn’t using a stamp be more clever?
One last section I explored — an offshoot of the catacombs — was a crystal palace.
There’s a treasure room with a “warning to all those who wouldn’t be king” adjacent to a room with some laundry. If you try to leave, you get told “not yet cretin”, but the laundry has a crown hidden within. If you wear the crown you can get out of the “cretin” passage.
The only real puzzle otherwise is a spider (“hairy with lots of legs”) with a web blocking one direction.
I scissors on me so I can safely say they aren’t the answer to how do I pass the spider web? It may be none of the puzzles are that hard individually but the logistics of solving order is where the real suffering lies.
For me to be sure, I have to solve a real puzzle first (I don’t count the crown or mapping out mazes as puzzles). Maybe next time?
The old Gothic church, so the locals say, used to have a veritable labyrinth of passages beneath it, but the whereabouts of the entrance to the passages has long since been forgotten. The church itself has fallen into disuse for a variety of reasons, the main one being the sinister aura that surrounds one of the large tombs in the church graveyard. The church’s treasures have long since disappeared without a trace.
An ancient local legend, all but forgotten now, tells of a vast underground land inhabited by weird monsters guarding wonderful treasures. Could there be any connection between this legend and the lost treasures? By the way, if you do find any treasure, take it back to the church, and lay it on the altar – after all, it doesn’t belong to you!
CATACOMBS is a large and complex adventure which is definitely not for beginners. Many of the puzzles to be solved are unusual, with ingenious solutions, and will stretch your imagination to its limits.
This is a game I vacillated on if I was even going to play it or not (or at least, play it anytime soon).
Back in the halcyon days of January 2020, when I was generating my 1981 list of games, one of the prominent “lost game” companies was Supersoft. We’ve seen them before with Hitch Hiker’s Guide and the saga involving a lawsuit.
They were not the only adventure game Supersoft published that year, and a Personal Computing Ad from November 1981 lists
Hitch-Hiker’s Guide £16
Goblin Towers £14
Cracks of Doom £14
Catacombs £27
Weird Wood £25
Cornucopia £35
Three of these are by Brian Cotton, and all are lost in their 1981 form (Commodore PET). Goblin Towers exists in a later 1984 form for C64. Brian Cotton eventually (through 1981-1982) had a series of five games (Catacombs, Witch Hunt, Cornucopia, Forestland, Goblin Towers) where I had them sorted as either 1984 games or “lost”.
Based on the earliest advertising anyone has been able to track (“anyone” mainly being Gareth Pitchford) Catacombs was the first of the games and started being advertised March 1981. The timing here — that is, the exact month of March 1981 — has an enormous amount of significance, as our Quest for the First Britventure in 1981 mostly stopped at The Golden Baton and a May 1981 ad. Our quest would have ended there had it not been blown away by the existence of A. Knight’s Galactic Hitchhiker from 1980. But Galactic Hitchhiker was a one-person-game sold by a one-person-company, that is, not sold by a real “professional” distributor like Molimerx or Supersoft.
By having an ad date of March 1981, Catacombs is the first original “professional distributed” British adventure game.
And… we don’t have the original anymore, nor the early C64 version (which, based on the Cotton games we do have, probably just involved copying the source code from the PET verbatim). There was yet another version made as part of a “Classics Revisited” set from 1986/1987, for a wide variety of platforms…
…but at least for Catacombs, those versions were all lost too in 2020. I had Catacombs sorted in my “I guess we’ll never see what it’s like” folder, marked with grim digital red. There I thought it would remain, until in 2022 a collector stepped forward and uploaded the entire Classic Revisited set to oldgames.ru (in DOS format). Suddenly, as of September of last year, it became possible to play all of them.
This stuck me with a dilemma; Catacombs is extremely important in British adventure game history. We can say British adventures on personal computer started with Galactic Hitchhiker but British adventure games as an industry started with Catacombs. But is it worth it to play a “remix” which I knew to be different?
Eh, whatever. I’ll be getting to playing this in the 2030s sometime anyway, might as well check it out early.
Some quick history on Supersoft before starting the journey–
Pearl Wellard (left) and Peter Calver (right) were accountants in 1978 who both worked at the same company. The company obtained a computer (a PET, the “proper business computer” of the Trinity) and the pair was the ones who ended up setting up the system. After that they got hooked enough to start writing and selling their own PET software under the name Supersoft.
There wasn’t software for the PET in those days. There were only about 1000 PETs in the country.
The pair ended up giving their jobs up after 18 months to work at Supersoft full-time.
Our turnover in the first year was £2000 — in the second year it increased to £100,000.
There’s not a great deal of info on the duo’s early years otherwise (Peter has done interviews, but mainly because of their purchase of Audiogenic in the mid-80s. Who cares about that old PET software, right?) I did want to share a bizarre excerpt I found from a freeform “gossip column” in the January 1981 issue of Personal Computer World, that is, from two months before Catacombs got published:
Supersoft’s Peter Calver has a PET name for partner Pearl Wellard. Pearl has threatened the Editor with all sorts of dire horrors if he reveals that it’s Pearl*****. (A prize for the first correct entry.)
I think we’ve had enough preface, but I should add one other thing: based on the thread at CASA, one puzzle has a bug that makes it unsolvable and one puzzle is currently unsolved. This is a hunt-the-treasure game where you are supposed to gather everything together, type SCORE, and pat yourself on the back for a job well done, so there’s no “ending text” anyway (people have extracted the text to confirm). I think the max score is ~240 out of 250? It is difficult to check without spoilers.
For my first session I decided to explore freeform, without even making a map, just to see what I was up against. Poking in the church I quickly found the altar where the treasures were destined to go (at least according to the ad copy in the catalog).
I found a notice board which felt Zork-ish.
Trying to wander away from the church, all I found was a maze.
Avast, casual exploration foiled! … I guess I’ll whip out the maps and start taking in things seriously next time, and share what some of the puzzles are like.
(In the meantime, could someone let me know what the actual theoretical high score is, given the bug?)
Renga in Blue 
