I felt compelled, after last time, to try playing the PC-88 version of the game all the way through. I come bearing screenshots and also curious differences between the two games.
The compellation came because of a conversation I had with Leigh Alexander, who made a video on Rungistan as part of her Lo-Fi Let’s Play series. She wrote the author, Bob Blauschild, and he wrote her back.
Bob wrote that he was wondering “why computer games were so expensive” so tried out Wizard and the Princess, and ended up going through all the graphic adventure games at the time. He ran out of options so wanted to make his own, so with Raiders of the Lost Ark in mind, he came up with using “action sequences and moments of possible panic”.
He also sheepishly explains the graphics were based on technical limitations at the time. The fascinating thing about the Japanese versions (all made in 1986) is that they do not have the same limitations, but they went with black and white anyway as a style. I realized I wanted to see what it looked like all the way through. This is the remake Bob never asked for but got anyway.
The parser commands are roughly the same as the Apple II game, but the distance between exactly and roughly can cause massive headaches. Right at the start, you still need to call the guard asking for food. In the original I could go
CALL GUARD
SAY FOOD
and it worked just fine. In this version, you need to type
CALL GUARD
WANT FOOD
which was enough to throw me off for a long time. The encounter with the child is still the same…
…but to dig a hole, rather than DIG WALL / WITH SHOVEL you simply can just DIG WALL.
The layout is slightly different here. Rather than spotting the snake before doing the jump over the ridge, you do the RUN and JUMP first, and there’s no “approaching ridge” timing puzzle where you have to type JUMP before the oncoming line gets too close. I can see why the bitmap style doesn’t make the moment work any more.
The snake then can appear anywhere in the desert, including at the knife. Rather than a “slither” motion the snake sprite just slides right to left.
The bear is functionally identical, although it certainly looks rather different.
The skiing segment is in, but rather than a “oncoming 3d” look, you are controlling your skier+ from above. It is notably easier here than it is in the Apple II version. (On the M88 emulator, for anyone trying it, control is with the number pad rather than regular arrow keys.)
This is followed with more or less the same area with the saloon as before, including trees you have to look at closely. The dynamite event doesn’t have the visible fuse moving, but you still need to pour water; rather than the egg dropping from above dropped by a flying bird, you catch it from a tree.
The code with the fragments used to open the lock is done exactly the same, including the parser syntax.
The raft puzzle took me a little while. You’re supposed to GET DOOR from outside the saloon first (not DOORS, DOOR) and then MAKE RAFT and finally RIDE RAFT while at the river (you can’t make the raft early, and USE doesn’t work like it does in the Apple II version).
The farmer puzzle is the same, the planes still fly overhead (as sprites now), and the cat still has a magnifying glass.
The almanac’s description, instead of randomly mentions it includes eclipses, specifically states there will be a solar eclipse today. Unfortunately I had trouble figuring out a syntax; PREDICT ECLIPSE no longer works. TEACH ECLIPSE does, though.
The gas station and house with the mailbox are the same. It’s a little easier to tell the writing is writing.
The plane puzzle works the same, except you need to FILL TANK while outside the airplane first as opposed to inside the plane (fair).
The dynamite puzzle is in; the sign that tries to misdirect you the wrong direction is not. The booze you hand over as normal, to reach victory.
While the graphics are certainly slicker-looking the loss of animation does seem to be a bit much. In retrospect, I’m not sure if all the animations would replicate in any other style; the fuse “snaking back” on the dynamite really is only effective with an absolutely clear wavy line erasing dot by dot. The snake, additionally, needs to be both simple and easy to predict to get across its full original effect.
I still salute the effort put into this, and if you (the one reading this) are really stuck on the skiing portion of the original game, maybe you should try this version instead. Just remember to GET SKI, not GET SKIS while in the cabin even though you’re picking up a pair. (?? I assume this is because of something in Japanese, can anyone explain?)
(The skiing you can see in the video above animated up to a crash; the video stops there with a loud beep.)
The plane kept being obnoxious. Lucian Smith gave a hint in the comments that I was genuinely just missing some information. Having no idea what that information was, I combed through the entire game, and had no luck.
I didn’t want to look at a full walkthrough, so I checked for any books from the 80s that covered the game. Kim Schuette had, but I’ve used his book plenty of times before, and I came across one I’d never cracked open.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
I did find out what I was missing — and I hope you all are as infuriated as I was — but first I did want to spend a little more time on the book itself, because it was published in 1984 (after On-Line became Sierra On-Line, but before King’s Quest 1) and it rather delightfully includes some contemporary thoughts about these games which are not exactly congruent to modern opinion. I’m just going to wander through a few of these and then we can get back to Rungistan.
All the games can be played with either a monochrome or a color monitor. If you have a choice, you will probably want to use a color monitor to fully appreciate the fine pictures in some of the games.
I love the advice that you need to go out of your way to upgrade to color. On a number of the games the authors again emphasize they play particularly well with color (Rungistan, the book says, works fine on a black and white screen).
In the area of hi-res puzzle solving adventures, Sierra On-Line stands out. They offer seven of these adventures, far more than any other company. The graphics and playability are uniformly good.
Uniformly good, eh?
Time Zone is a crowning achievement in adventures. Both the puzzles and the graphics are of the highest order-and there is enough here to keep you busy for quite a long time.
I probably liked Time Zone more than anyone who has played it in a long time, but it is boggling to me even in 1984 to claim the puzzles and graphics are of the highest order.
The game includes some simple animation. The full screen can change several times for a single move, to give you the feeling of actual motion. This is fun for a few turns, but it becomes repetitive and boring fairly quickly.
This is about Mask of the Sun, which the authors also found brutally hard. They linked Rungistan’s animation, which they called “top-of-the-line”. Sherwood Forest, which we haven’t gotten to yet, incidentally wins the “fast graphics award” for quick load times.
Speaking of Rungistan, let’s get back into it–
I was struggling to control a plane, and went off to look for directions. It turns out they are here, at the mailbox:
You see that line on the ground? I did suspect already it was something, and ran through
LOOK LINE
LOOK GROUND
LOOK MARK
LOOK FLOOR
LOOK VALLEY
LOOK ENTRANCE
LOOK DOWN
and even, yes
LOOK WRITING
and in each and every case, the game responds I DON’T UNDERSTAND. (Except LOOK DOWN, where nothing happens, I don’t know why.) I discarded the line as just a graphical feature.
The book I mentioned, bafflingly, mentioned graffiti. I went back and finally hit upon LOOK PATH:
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
The graffiti has the word “NESSEN”, which is simply directions for the plane. So type N, E, S, S, E, N after FLY PLANE, and you’ll land safely.
This is nearly at the end. There’s a blockade of boulders, where, mysteriously, the dynamite that previously explodes in your hand now will pause after you light it, letting you THROW DYNAMITE and get away as there’s a fuse-shortening animation.
Step away, step back: the road is clear. Then you head south to a minor trap.
Remember, you are facing south. It may appear “west” is the way you want but the directions are reversed.
I understood the trick but I wanted to see the death text anyway.
Going east, the correct way, is the final obstacle: a guard at a gate. Here I found I needed the booze-that-makes-you-go-blind, not the empty bottle.
LIFT GATE (which took a while to find) will let you plow to the end.
I honestly on the balance had fun, even given the moment of infuriation. But let’s talk about softlocks. It’s the same sort that show up in the biome journey of Wizard and the Princess, but made even more aggressive.
I’m acclimated to the games of this era (much like the four authors of the book who have nothing but praise for the early Sierra games) so I was immediately planning and expecting that a biome journey would lend itself to such behavior. With the bottle at the very end, which could have tripped me up, I already had two save files running with the anticipation I’d need either one or the other. I was even anticipating the possibility of simply having to repeat the game: that was how it went sometimes, just like replying the early levels of an arcade game. Solving the game isn’t about the immediate moment, but correctly choreographing an entire sequence of moves.
I am still fully aware it is not a wise design choice. It does lend itself to some unique effects — every choice is a tradeoff rather than fully good or bad — but I have a hard time imagining where I’d use this kind of linear softlock in a modern game.
As a historical artifact, I do want to emphasize the animation in Rungistan is integrated in a novel way; Mask of the Sun approached the same ideas but not as fully. I’m especially curious what Bob Blauschild has in store for his other 1982 game, Critical Mass, which switches the action to color.
From Mobygames.
BONUS POINT 1: As observed in the comments for my last post, this doesn’t really seem to be central Africa (as the instructions say) or any continent in particular given the “-stan” ending and the sahuaro cactus and the El Presidente reference and so forth. (Tucson has Mount Lemmon so you can go skiing, technically. In the deep winter.) The game leans into the smörgåsbord-of-locations idea heavily enough I suspect identifying a continent was a late addition.
BONUS POINT 2: This was published in Japanese by Starcraft for various systems. The screenshots are neat; they took black and white as a style rather than a fast-Apple-II-animation restriction and ran with it.
I remember this game very well! My late father played all night with one of his friends, and got to the end, only to realize they’d failed to pick up an important item early in the game. My father, instead of re-doing the entire game, figured out how to hack the save-game file and put the item into his inventory. Then reloaded the game and finished it!
Part 3 starts at the side of a river. I had a mouse, catcher’s mitt, bottle of booze, egg, and stick of dynamite in hand.
The river is immediately next to a farm. This is the first (and possibly only) Time Zone-esque “big regular grid” map of the game.
Before you get anywhere, though, you potentially die of hunger.
The egg (caught raw out of the sky) works: it is described upon being eaten as a “GOOD EGG, AND GOOD FOR YOU!” You might the think the crops in the field work but the farmer grows poisonous rutabagas.
You can meet the farmer himself who “LOOKS TIRED FROM HARVESTING CROPS” and HELP FARMER.
This is unconventional parser use but I managed to run across it anyway. I don’t think I’ve ever made a term for this kind of situation; I suppose a scenario puzzle will do. That’s where you have details line up to put the player in a specific (possibly cliche) situation and they simply need to react accordingly. Hezarin had a bit (which I did figure out) where you are prompted in a way encouraging you to SURF.
Now you’ve virtually overshadowed by this, arguably the best breaker of the millennium. What about it?
>SURF
You hold the plank out in front of you and throw yourself flat out on it.
Hezarin had another bit (which I most definitely did not figure out) where you were supposed to CHIMNEY up a shaft, which I think was the author invoking a similar logic — this was a situation they know what to do with just from scenario recognition, but not everyone has mountaineering experience.
I bring up all this because we’re going to have another, much more outrageous scenario puzzle shortly.
Moving on: we’ve eaten our egg, gotten some money for harvesting poison rutabagas, and can travel on a road. The road eventually leads to a cat holding a magnifying glass.
You can trade the mouse to the cat for the glass, and then use the glass to light the dynamite.
THE DYNAMITE BLOWS UP IN YOUR HAND.
This might be helpful if you could light the fuse with the dynamite on the ground, but the game doesn’t let you, so I’m not sure what to do here. I haven’t found a good candidate for exploding yet anyway.
Moving to the west is a guard tower. There’s a helicopter that loops overhead (as an animation) and you have to wait for the helicopter to be positioned near the guard.
Incidentally, all along this section there are sometimes guard planes; if you see one you need to just walk the other way, and then go back. The plane will be gone.
Past the guard tower is a plane on the ground.
North of the plane is a gas station, and the game lets you BUY GAS, but you don’t have a container for it.
This is true even if you’ve drank the booze way back when you first found it leaving you with an empty bottle. (If you wait until after the river trip to drink the booze, the effect is incidentally much different, but we’ll get to that.)
The trick here is to first find an ALMANAC off one of the roads (none of the other roads have such a side exit, so this is a “secret item”…
…and south past where the plane is parked into a “jungle” area. Go in too far and you’ll be hustled into a pot.
This is the second scenario puzzle. In such a position the cliche is to impress the natives (this happens in Return of the Jedi, for instance, where Luke levitates C3PO to impress the Ewoks). We’ve got an almanac with information about eclipses. So:
I get where the author was going with this given the comedy aspect, but could we have one African game (aside from Egypt) that’s cannibal-free? Erf.
Moving on, if you fill the plane with gas you’ll still get a message that you need a pilot’s license to fly, nevermind we’ve cared about other local laws being broken before. If you walk back to the gas station and go west you can find a guard’s house, and in the mailbox you can find the pilot license you earned by reading that HOW TO FLY book way back at the start.
The absurdism is great, and I’m guessing people did not get seriously stuck here. Checking a mailbox is much easier than predicting eclipses.
Finally with the gas filled in and the license in hand you can FLY PLANE. And if you’re like me, die shortly after.
I have found this section baffling. Upon takeoff, typing N shows a level horizon. You’ll get banking if you type E or W:
If you bank in the same direction more than one turn in a row you turn the plane upside-down and crash. If you type S while level N you try to do a 180 degree maneuver and crash. From the banking W, you can only safely type either N or S.
But what do all these directions mean? They seem to be relative to the plane itself, so N is just “move the plane forward”… maybe? But if you do W then S you also have a level plane horizon and can keep going S, but you aren’t driving the plane backwards.
Also: where am I flying to? There’s a button that lowers gear and you can LAND PLANE while fuel starts running out, but every time I’ve tried it I have crashed in the desert. I assume I need an actual airport or some analogue. There’s no way I can find to look at the ground and spot landmarks, so I am flying blind. My best guess is to go in the direction of El Presidente’s budget cuts and the cat and keep flying that way, because maybe the road picks up again (built from both ends like the Chunnel, possibly).
However, I still am not 100% sure which way the plane is facing on take-off, and what the actual effect of the “E” and “W” are in terms of positioning, and if “one turn flying = one space moved on the regular map” or any of those things. I feel like maybe I’m missing some information here.
You can incidentally literally fly blind. I mentioned the booze you could drink upon initial discovery leaving an empty bottle. If you wait, the booze makes you go blind instead. If you drink while in mid-flight, you crash.
I have two save files, one with a empty bottle and one with the full booze, and I have to keep going in parallel until I figure out what the item is for.
PC-98 cover, from the Starcraft translation, via Mobygames.
I talked about “exploration” last time but this ends up being more of a “series of unfortunate events” type game, or as I termed it regarding Wizard and the Princess, a biome journey. The big difference between Rungistan and Wizard (and Rungistan and any text adventure game I’ve played, really) is the heavy reliance on timed events; more than half the puzzles involve typing something in response to an event happening on-screen, and if you are too slow you’ll die.
And if the puzzles don’t kill you, the skiing mini-game might.
The above map shows where we left off last time; the Courtyard is the exit from the prison, and just to the east is the snake where you need to not type while it goes by. Just to the south is a noose and you need to grab the rope.
The rope doesn’t get used until later, and this implies something about the game design: it is cheerfully willing to let you softlock if you miss something. I’ll show getting past the “gorge” on the map in a second, but that’s a one-way trip, so if you somehow skipped getting the rope (or the mouse back at the cell) you’re not going to find out until later. (I’ll take a closer look at this when I get done with the game — I’m not even sure how long you’re supposed to hold the mouse because I haven’t used it yet!)
I then got stuck at a gorge which was “10 feet longer than the world record for standing broad jump”. I initially dismissed the verbosity here as a joke, but it actually is a serious hint: the jumping is described as a “broad jump” meaning the game is interpreting the jump as being done in place. You can explicitly RUN and then JUMP.
But make sure you back up to where the snake was first before you start running!
The running is represented by the edge getting closer and closer; the game requires typing JUMP and then hitting ENTER fast enough in real time. It is not possible to jump “too early”.
The next section is thankfully a little more straightforward (…I think, there’s still the possibility I missed an object).
There’s a knife laying around in the desert and then you need to climb a ledge. Halfway up is a cave with a bear.
KILL BEAR with the just-picked-up knife does the trick. HUG BEAR does not.
The writing on the wall gives instructions which will be pertinent shortly:
Just past the bear is a bridge. Upon stepping on the bridge it sways, and then, in real time, starts falling away.
You need to type JUMP WEST to get off. I was stuck here longer than you might think just because I had got on the bridge via CROSS BRIDGE and thought I was still going north, when the game had invisibly turned our player character to the east.
You can now THROW the ROPE that you hopefully grabbed (otherwise, softlock) and climb your way across.
Up higher it starts to get cold.
There’s a cabin nearby described as “impossibly locked” but fortunately you can can just smash in the door to get in and find some skis.
And now we reach the one part of the game I had heard about beforehand: we have to go back to the snow, GERONIMO, and start skiing. This is an action mini-game.
You just use the right and left arrow keys to steer. I died quite a bit at the start before I realized the game wants you to steer between the trees, not to the far left or right of them. Then it took me only two more goes; it helped to discretely tap the arrow key and count rather than just “push and hold” and hope for perfect alignment.
I saw one account from someone who liked this game but never got past the skiing. This isn’t that far in the game, still; even when people liked these games at the time, they may not have gotten close to winning!
The section after the skis was the hardest I’ve done so far. In particular, one pattern the game previously established gets broken, and one of the puzzles is tough on top of the parser input being ambiguous (in other words, it’s hard to tell if you have the answer wrong or you’re entering the answer wrong).
The pattern that gets broken regards the random environmental scenery. I had examined each and every cactus in the desert and was told it wasn’t important, so by the time I got to the mountains I stopped trying. This was a mistake.
The canteen can be filled at a nearby river — which we’ll be coming back to shortly — and used in a scene with a REBEL GUERILLA.
The fuse starts disappearing and explodes if you don’t stop it in time; you’re “frozen” and unable to run away.
The solution is to POUR WATER with the canteen, but I encountered the fuse before the canteen, so spent a while fruitlessly trying actions like STOMP FUSE and THROW DYNAMITE. This made the puzzle feel different than the timed puzzles before; the bridge and gorge just demanded you type JUMP and have the wits to think about it; here, being an object-based puzzle, I was wanting to run through a lot of possibilities to test especially knowing I might have the right answer stymied by the finicky parser. I appreciated the timed aspect adding drama but it made the puzzle a drag until I had the right item.
Past the rebel is a room with more trees; LOOK TREE reveals a catcher’s mitt and the text “L7” written on the tree. I did not at first interpret the text as letters. The “merged” aspect made them look like part of the graphics, maybe, or at least some kind of arrow symbol, and while they play into a puzzle I haven’t shown you yet, I admit I didn’t make the link until HINT PLEASE told me they were connected.
The catcher’s mitt can be used a bit to the west where a bird drops an egg. Again I found the timed event before the object that would help solve it, and again I was trying fruitlessly to type catching the egg in various ways — and even various times, thinking maybe I needed to hit ENTER right before the egg landed — and it made the puzzle less pleasant than it could be. At least I suspected early here I really needed an item, although I was envisioning a pillow.
The bird is mid-draw. It is hard to get “perfect” frames when the continuous motion is happening, since the game is constantly doing redraws. Mask of the Sun had some screen-flipping tech that made the animation smoother but it likely wouldn’t be able to handle the full range of motion this game does. Honestly the Rungistan tech is extremely good for the era and I’ve not felt any delays at “authentic” machine speeds.
The catcher’s mitt is off course the right item, and lets you CATCH EGG. Now I have an egg. I don’t know what to do with it.
Other than the river, canteen, mitt, rebel scene, and egg scene, there’s a saloon.
When trying to open the cabinet, the game says there’s a lock in it; when trying to open the lock, the game replies
HOW ?
This is where the bad parser comes in. This is another one of the two-part prompts where you are supposed to respond to HOW, but I concieved of this as being something like TURN DIAL or ENTER COMBINATION or even TURN LEFT or the like, setting off a sequence. No, the game actually wants a string typed out in a very specific way. Sample: L2R2L2. In general, by having both a real puzzle and a parser puzzle, the game provides a second-order puzzle, where two probabilities of a potential solution are being multiplied in the player’s mind, making it miserable to solve. I ended up getting the right string to type from a walkthrough (I eyeballed it vaguely enough to not know what the numbers were).
You can look at the horns and see L14 clearly; you can look at the liquor and see 21.
This is a timed event asking you to type REPLACE the same time you are grokking the fact 21 is written on the bottle. (As I was stuck, I thought briefly maybe the one was an I as in the letter I.)
The register has the most important message.
I might have thought this was brilliant if a.) I wasn’t dealing with the parser issue and b.) the L7 clue way back at the tree was a little better-drawn to make it clear what I was looking at. But in summary, we have clues giving:
L14 (from the horns)
L7 (from the tree)
21 (from the bottle)
4R (from the register)
The idea is that in all cases we are seeing part of a string which represents the lock combination. With the slip of paper, there’s even more information if you look at the picture carefully.
The slip originally had the entire code on it, but is ripped. You can see traces of the number before and the number after in the picture. So the actual code, all together is
L14R21L7
That is, you can tell the R is being followed by a “2”, meaning the “21” goes there, L14 and 4R are overlapping to produce the initial part of the string L14R. A different framing might help; I suppose the idea of the codes being placed at random is also a little absurd (including on a far-away tree) but I’m at least willing to accept the game is in the alternate-adventure reality where codes can be slapped on any surface whatsoever from any distance at all from their targets (see: the Rhem games 1 through 4 inclusive).
The cabinet, incidentally, has booze. I haven’t used it yet.
Now we come back to the river. I was originally going to give up there and ask for help, but I combed through the early parts of the game and decided I hadn’t missed anything, so checked very carefully if anything would remotely respond to the possibility of being formed into a boat/raft. (For example, if you try to read the books in the cell again, the guard just confiscates them, but the shelf left behind can’t be referred to.) Since I had no luck there, I re-checked the latter part of the game, and noticed how the doors to the saloon where essentially flat pieces of wood. MAKE RAFT. “With what?”
Since I had read the book on navigating riverways, I could successfully use the raft, landing on THE SOUTH SHORE OF THE RIVER.
The game somewhat politely takes away some objects from your inventory along the trip. I assume this is to prevent solutions to things that are not intentional by using items from prior sections, but it does reduce the combinatorial explosion on the player’s part as well.
It is possible to reach this point and have skipped all five of the items listed (mouse, mitt, booze, egg, dynamite). I’m still paranoid I’ll need to loop back to the past to nab something I missed, and then have to do the skiing all over again, but I’ll just keep hope for now I haven’t softlocked.
Let’s skip from our cavalcade of obscurity over to something at least a few more people have heard of. Escape From Rungistan tells the story of a tourist (controlled by us) visiting the fictional country of Rungistan.
This game forms some core memories to Apple II buffs; an academic blog post theorizes the following:
So student #1 will let loose in a class discussion with what is probably a brilliant analysis of Aristotle’s Poetics as applied to Escape From Rungistan which he/she plays religiously every evening on an Apple II emulator. But after they’ve finished speaking, since no one else in the class has ever played Escape From Rungistan (or heard of it)* there is an awkward silence.
(*Okay actually that’s not 100% true. I’ve played Escape From Rungistan.)
It’s on the syllabus, week 3, after World of Tanks and before Spacechem.
The game inspiring such writing — even in a theoretical imaginary student sense — means it must have had a publisher with decent reach, and indeed it did: Sirius Software.
We’ve played Sirius Software before with the Tim Wilson games: Kabul Spy and Blade of Blackpoole. This game starts the ouerve of a different author, Bob Blauschild. Bob seems to have been another outside contractor (like Tim Wilson) who I think (but alas can’t confirm) is the same Bob Blauschild who worked in analog circuit design around the same time. At the very least, Rungistan represents some technical chops, as it is made in a combination of assembly code and BASIC, and relies heavily on animation, heavily enough that animation becomes part of the puzzles of the game. (One of the first video results for this game includes in the title “you got Quick Time Events in my text game”.) The Mask of the Sun had some animated puzzle moments but that game was made by a team whereas this was one person.
Some frames from the initial animated sequence.
It also represents technical chops because the game has extremely gnarly copy protection; it breaks all standard cracking tools and 4am’s essay on the issue is worth a read.
What happens when a drive doesn’t see a state change after the equivalent of two consecutive zero bits? The drive thinks the disk is weak, and it starts increasing the amplification to try to compensate, looking for a valid signal. But there is no signal. There is no data. There is only a yawning abyss of nothingness. Eventually, the drive gets desperate and amplifies beyond reason and starts returning random bits based on ambient noise from the disk motor and the magnetism of the Earth.
Seriously.
Returning random bits doesn’t sound useful for a storage medium, but it’s exactly what the developer wanted, and it’s exactly what this code is checking for. It’s finding and reading and checksumming the same sequence of bits from the disk, over and over, and checking that they change.
So after our protagonist’s ill-advised visit to an unfriendly country somewhere in Africa, they find themselves in a cell awaiting execution, and you take over from there.
Note the game not only has animations but music at appropriate moments; I’ve got about 30 seconds worth from the opening in the video below so you can hear what it’s like.
The two books shown above (the book on “navigation of Rungistan waterways” and the “book of aviation”) likely provide a method to explain our avatar’s proficiency in vehicles later, despite being a tourist and not James Bond.
After this I was heavily stuck; the sink doesn’t work, we are too weak to move the bed, the window is too high to reach. I was so stuck I used a feature the instructions mentioned: HINT PLEASE, which told me I could CALL GUARD. I had already tried YELL and gotten beaten by a hose, but I guess I was supposed to yell more politely.
The food was an arbitrary guess — any puzzle that asks for a noun that the player hasn’t seen yet has the difficulty multiply by at least double — but there’s a mouse that occasionally is animated walking by and I suspected I’d get some cheese if I asked, just because that’s almost guaranteed from adventures of this era.
The guard brought a tray…
…which had STEAK, a CANDY BAR, and as predicted, some CHEESE.
The steak you can just eat to get stronger (you’ll see why in a second). The cheese goes to the mouse and then the mouse can be picked up; you need to time typing GIVE CHEESE to be when the mouse is visible and walking in the cell.
With the steak eaten, you have enough energy to MOVE BED; the game asks where to specifically, so you have to say TO WINDOW.
You can then STAND ON BED to see out the window, and see a child outside. The child is afraid but you can hand over the candy bar and he’ll toss you a shovel.
I was stuck for quite a while after because of the parser. Trying to DIG FLOOR and DIG WALL and so forth didn’t work. (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND.”) I finally broke out my verb list and found it to be no help whatsoever. The game sends any misunderstood input to the same set of messages (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND” or “THAT WON’T WORK. TRY SOMETHING ELSE.”) making it impossible to tell if CUT BED is misunderstood because it is considered nonsense, or if CUT is just never a verb in the game. This sort of information-protection can make sense with nouns (and modern Inform even defaults to it) but only accepting very exact phrasing means the game has trouble giving specific feedback on why things go wrong. If you try to EAT BED a good response is saying the bed isn’t edible; while “I don’t understand” is technically correct it also is much vaguer, and I could see being led astray by being slightly wrong about how a parser command is phrased.
I finally went back over the previous events; I contemplated how the game already had me asked about FOOD despite it not being a listed noun. Maybe I needed to DIG TUNNEL, thus using the word tunnel without prompting? The game then asked me WHERE? I tried typing DIG TUNNEL ON WALL and the game asked me WHERE? again.
After five more minutes of fussing I remembered the bed wanted the command given in two parts (like a Scott Adams game).
Following the sage advice to go north:
OK, I expected that. Going east instead:
This is animated.
As long as you do nothing while the snake animation is happening (it goes all the way across the screen from right to left) you can make it past safely.
It looks like we’re in for a bout of exploration (and probably random deaths). This seems like a good stopping point. I’ll report back in the grisly details next time.
Renga in Blue 