Archive for the ‘circus’ Tag
I had only one (1) puzzle to go. (My prior posts on Circus are here.)
Before explaining, I should mention something about my job.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I work for a company in Europe. We have both European and US clients. I quite routinely will work on two projects in one day, meaning midstream I need to swap my spelling conventions, so instead of analyzing someone’s work I am now analysing it. I have gotten decently good at swapping continents at will.
With Circus, I had received a snorkel from a seal lion, and had surmised there was some petrol hiding the generator but I just needed to get it out. I mentioned, in passing in my last post, the possibility of siphoning some petrol.
I have never, in any of my business dealings, had to spell the word “siphon”.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
That was it. That was the only puzzle. The game wanted “syphon”. Unless you count having yet another parser struggle spot right after as a puzzle.
The rest is straightforward: short the circuits as I mentioned before (you need to be holding the spanner/wrench, though) and book it for the car, taking off while everything explodes.
You might ask: what about the hacksaw and the cannon and the net? Those were, according to Dale Dobson, part of alternate solutions, but I’m honestly confused about them. To place the net you need to ERECT NET (more parser loveliness) and you can then fall off the tightrope safely, but why fall off the tightrope? Why break into the maintenance shed for a hacksaw? (It can’t be the chest — you have to get into the chest to get the tool to break into the maintenance shed, unless I’m missing something.) The cannon is especially baffling as there really is plenty of time to just walk out, flip on your cool shades, and let the cursed circus explode behind you.
it’s amazing when an adventure game makes you feel like Indiana Jones
too bad it was Indiana Jones trying to spell “Jehovah”
— Voltgloss in the comments to my last post
Unfortunately there was no extra dose of Evil tangling up the plot, unless you count the major parser issues (at least six of them). There was a lot of potential that just never had a pay-off; it’s like if Something Wicked This Way Comes didn’t have Mr. Dark.
Jonathan Pryce as Mr. Dark, who was also in Brazil as Sam Lowry and recently was David Cartwright in Slow Horses.
This game does seem to be remembered fondly by children, so I should add of all the Howarth games so far it was the most fun to “noodle around” in; it’s a place to explore without too many stopping points like Avventura nel Castello. Even though the enigmatic feel might dissipate in the end, your average 6 year old might have never beat it, meaning the game holds onto its mystery.
Coming up: returning to Crowther’s Adventure, the very original before Woods, as history has been found since I last wrote about it, including a 48-page document that has only recently been unearthed.
I am likely just a few puzzles away from the end. (Previous post on Circus here.)
Via World of Spectrum.
In the the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Elementary, Dear Data (season 2) Data tries to play a Sherlock Holmes themed simulation on the holodeck but runs into an issue: the computer mashes all the previous Conan Doyle stories, ChatGPT-style, such that Data knows exactly what the solution is to the mystery he’s given. Hence what ought to be a jaunt lasting many hours is cut into a minute.
Data, Geordi, and Doctor Pulaski in front of a sign indicating The Red-Headed League, giving away significant details of the mystery.
Circus has a related issue. The design is fairly wide-branching (in contrast, with, say, the heavily linear Arrow of Death games), meaning it is possible to access many puzzles at once and solve them in any order. One of the very easiest turns out to be the method of destroying the circus.
Specifically:
STEP 1: Pick up the whip, out in the open in the circus tent.
STEP 2: Go over to the tiger and use the command CRACK WHIP (that exact verb was what I was missing before).
STEP 3: Go down beneath, where you’ll eventually find some terminals and a blueprint. The blueprint says that shorting the terminals will cause a detonation sequence.
STEP 4: SHORT TERMINALS, run away, and boom.
There is still of course a problem given that end screen: there’s still no way to drive away with the car without the petrol. But in a dramatic sense, it feels very weird to have a method already for blowing up the cursed circus (which didn’t involve anything mystical) and just need to get fuel. I was expecting the Evil to somehow interfere.
It is still possible the Evil might interfere because there’s a whole sequence with the cannon that otherwise doesn’t make sense. For the moment, though, the story tree feels a little deflated compared to the high I was on last time. A good analogy is how Geordi and Doctor Pulaski reacted when Data solved the newly constructed mystery instantly. It isn’t like the game is over, but I feel like I’ve skipped to the end nonetheless.
Let’s get to that cannon:
Launching it “splatters you against the canvas”. I had already experienced using the trapeze to get up to the canvas roof, but hadn’t been able to do anything with it; I was trying to open a hole with the penknife that the player starts the game with. I just needed to CUT CANVAS, not CUT ROOF (sigh).
I had trouble getting back, and I think I must have mistyped something before, because I tested again trying to get back on the trapeze (ENTER TRAPEZE) and it worked just fine. Then SWING TRAPEZE a second time lands the player back where they started, so it is possible to go back to the cannon with a cut-ceiling and die again:
Now, I already suspect what I need to do. If you LOOK ROPE it turns out to be a SAFETY NET, so I need to drop it in the right place, but I have no idea where the landing is from that description so I’m going to need to test everywhere I guess (and hope DROP NET is the right command and I’m not supposed to use something fancy). Why do the launch anyway, though? If you set the tent to blow up you can just walk to the exit. Maybe, if you have the car filled up, there’s one more spirit-obstacle that appears that threatens you, and finally Only a Little Evil becomes Actual Evil.
In the department of other-stuff-I’ve solved: I mentioned last time a chest I couldn’t open. OPEN CHEST says “Nothing Happened!”, UNLOCK CHEST gets the response “I don’t understand what you mean”, and SMASH CHEST says
How destructive!
The latter is the worst message of all: it essentially conveys to the player that violence is not the answer and they’re barking up the wrong tree. Yet, the answer is destruction, as you are required to specifically type KICK CHEST.
You can just feel my goodwill for the game soaking away.
With the slippers on, it is now possible to tackle the tightrope, and at the end there is a metal rod. So Matt’s prediction was kind-of on but reversed.
The metal rod isn’t used for tightrope walking at all, though. Back outside the circus tent there was a maintenance door where all the various destroy-verbs (including KICK) don’t work. However, if you are holding the metal rod and try to OPEN DOOR, it works, revealing a HACKSAW:
I don’t yet know what the hacksaw does. I did also figure out the water tank, which had some entirely different cryptic parser shenanigans.
Typing EAST enters the player in the water location, and makes it seem like they are swimming automatically. SEARCH WATER and so forth yield nothing. However, if you type SWIM while you are already swimming (?!) a sea-lion is revealed.
Bringing the fish over (which I previously assumed was for the tiger, but nyet) and feeding the sea-lion yields a snorkel.
To summarize: I have a hacksaw and a snorkel I haven’t used yet. I have a cannon where I can launch myself to the outside, but I don’t know the landing spot to put a safety net (assuming that’s even the intended act). I have yet to get the petrol for the car to escape. The generator is still broken (mentioning the lack of a cable) but it may be there’s petrol in the generator and we’re just supposed to get it out (siphoning with the snorkel, maybe?) but I haven’t gotten any commands like SAW GENERATOR to yield fruit, so I must have a puzzle or two still outstanding.
A good ending might rescue the game, but for now, the parser deception did not make me happy.
Circus is the next of our Mysterious Adventures, and allegedly better than the last, Pulsar 7. According to the author it is his favorite.
Circus comes to mind as the effort that satisfied me most. (Nobody collaborated with me on the one BTW – entirely my own effort). Can’t think exactly why it’s my favourite, but I did think it was cool that a number of people felt it was somehow reminiscent of “Something Wicked This Way Comes” by Ray Bradbury.
— From an interview with Brian Howarth
I don’t have more history to share at the moment that hasn’t been in my previous Mysterious Adventures posts; eventually Brian will form the company Digital Fantasia to sell his own games but that doesn’t come until 1983.
As is typical of spooky protagonists everywhere, our car has run out of gas on a strange road. We go exploring and find, strangely, an abandoned circus.
Despite us seeing many spooky domiciles games, this one feels a little different; there’s no immediate vampires or clowns with axes chasing the player around and there’s a genuine attempt at a slow burn. Something Wicked This Way Comes doesn’t start with a circus, but rather a storm, where near the end of the fourth chapter there is the incidental smell of licorice and cotton candy.
You can first go south back to the road to visit the car. Going all the way back there’s a hole for petrol, and a boot that is not described in the text version; fortunately, I was playing the graphical version so it was prominent enough for me to try opening it.
The boot (or TRUNK, the game is nice enough to have US/UK synonyms) has a spanner (wrench) and a flashlight, which supplements the player’s starting inventory of car keys, a penknife, and an empty petrol can. We’re better equipped than a doctor dropped off on a secret operation by the Air Force!
Staying outside the circus…
…to the east there’s a generator which needs a cable to be fixed, and a field with a shovel. The shovel digs up a “starting handle” which I presume goes to the generator, but I don’t have a cable yet.
To the west is a maintenance wagon with a locked door. The resistance to my attempts to break the door or pick the lock suggest a key simply comes up later.
Heading inside the tent, having the flashlight on is required.
Again, slow burn: there are no obvious mystical things going on. A clown will occasionally appear and run away, and I’ll show off what happens after the tour:
To the east of the entrance is, straightforwardly, a tank of water you can enter (but DIVE doesn’t work). To the west is a closet, a chest which I can’t open, a clown costume which we’ll get back to, and a whip.
Headed into the ring, there’s a rope you can pick up and two ladders. One leads to a tightwalk (walking leads to death) and another leads to a trapeze. I was able to SWING TRAPEZE to find a new “room” where I was swinging near the roof, but I was unable to do anything yet from there.
Off to the west there’s a freezer with some fish, and off to the right there’s a cage with a tiger. I assume whip + fish + tiger can get something interesting but I haven’t experimented enough yet.
To the north side of the tent there’s another ring where the clown starts appearing (“Clown runs off!”) and a cannon adjacent. You can climb in the cannon and pull a lever to launch it from the inside, which kills you.
If you go back and wear the clown costume, rather than the clown running away they hover nearby instead, and point at the ground. A note appears.
That is, even though we are not technically trapped (we can still walk back to the car just fine) and there are no immediate threats in the circus, the circus is nonetheless cursed and our fate is to destroy it.
This is far stronger (so far) than Howarth’s last game. Somehow the sparse Adams-minimal prose works together with the premise better than any of his regular fantasy games. I also like how there’s a reason for open exploration which nonetheless promises we’re going to get layers as we figure out a mystery, something akin to Voodoo Castle requiring the player to enact a ritual.
Mr. Crosetti looked at the pole, as if freshly aware of its miraculous properties. He nodded, gently, his eyes soft. “Where does it come from, where does it go, eh? Who knows? Not you, not him, not me. Oh, the mysteries, by God. So. We’ll leave it on!”
It’s good to know, thought Will, it’ll be running until dawn, winding up from nothing, winding away to nothing, while we sleep.
“Good night!”
“Good night.”
And they left him behind in a wind that very faintly smelled of licorice and cotton candy.
— from Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
Renga in Blue 