Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game; my previous post is needed for context.

The creatures here all very standard-issue (troll, dragon, minotaur) and the author even has in the title (“Odysseys” plural) the implication that this is a mash-up of sorts, but at the very least I think we can pin him on thinking of Clash of the Titans (1981).

Medusa lining up a shot, from Clash of the Titans.

Continuing from last time, I had a flying horse, minotaur, dragon, and zombie horde to deal with. All were linked to the same thing: I had neglected to try climbing the tree the horse was tied to.

Not sure why I missed this. I almost always immediately try climbing every tree. Probably I got distracted by there being both writing and a flying horse tied to it.

While that was extremely easy (“easy”) to find, much harder is that the sword itself hides a secret, but I didn’t discover that until later. For now, I used it to kill the minotaur…

…and the dragon (which I had put to sleep, but couldn’t sneak by).

Killing the minotaur allows grabbing the *PERSAIN RUG* and that’s that. Killing the dragon allows going south by it, reaching a lair with a chest of coins…

…and a whole new area.

Down the stairs (I like the description, even with no change in action it makes it more vivid) you can go east, arriving under the chasm that required waving the sword to jump over (regular jumping didn’t work because it was too big a gap). Eventually this leads to a magma river, which is small enough to jump over.

We’ll get to the LEMON WALL hint in a moment.

This is followed by a locked brass door (key from near the zombies works) and the lair of Medusa.

The crossbow is very unusual and not from anywhere other than the author’s imagination; the idea of Medusa having a bow isn’t unprecedented but it doesn’t show up in any other adventure I’ve seen. It does show up in Clash of the Titans which only came out two years before, hence my suspicion.

The original Medusa model at a museum, via Reddit.

It immediately occurred to me the chalice that is very shiny at the zombies would be helpful, but I hadn’t taken down the zombies yet. It’s possible you’d have the item before seeing the Medusa, but it isn’t likely, because the LEMON WALL hint is needed. Dramatically, it’s much better for the player to wander into the lair early and only have the resolution later (otherwise she ends rather quickly!)

Armed with the cryptic GO LEMON ROCK! DIG LEMON WALL! message and the shovel I still had from digging up the flintrock, I wandered about looking for an appropriate room, and came across limestone. Lime is kind of related to lemon, it was worth a try?

With the silver cross, the zombies could be driven back. Prior to D&D I want to say crosses only worked on vampires, demons, and the like, but D&D made it so they worked on all undead.

The shiny chalice works predictably with Medusa.

This is everything from the cave; the only thing unused is a “cloth rag” that’s just sitting out in the open. Only the flying horse remains.

Pegasus from the movie.

This is where I was horribly stuck; I tried HELP in every room fishing for information, and found, while at the top of the tree (with the magic sword) the message:

WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH THE SWORD? (AS IN MOTION)
IT’S MAGIC, YOU KNOW!

Just like a wand, you can WAVE SWORD; this reveals a pair of spurs. Then you can SPUR HORSE while riding:

The falling down while wrangling is reminiscent of the movie, where Pegasus takes some work to capture. The bridle doesn’t appear until after you’ve tried the spurs.

The bridle that appears can be tied to the horse so that you can actually hang on the second time around.

This is where a third, possibly non-existent game in the Herrick Venture series gets mentioned.

The temple has an Oracle guarding a golden idol.

Keeping in mind the author is modifying details (bow to crossbow, Pegasus starts tied up) this may be from another Harryhausen movie, referencing the Oracle of All Knowledge from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

From the official comic of the movie.

This is still a very different circumstance and a simply delightful puzzle; if it wasn’t for the fact I was reduced to essentially one item, maybe not so delightful, but all that was left was the cloth.

Now the golden idol can be taken without complaint.

I delivered everything to the temple (including the MAGIC WAND and MAGIC SWORD which count as treasures) but I was short one treasure. I correctly guessed I missed another dig location, and went on a shovel rampage before finding back at the desert you can dig up a crown.

And that’s it for the works of Richard Herrick, Jr., unless the GHOSTTOWNS game was actually finished and somehow surfaces.

Despite this being a retro-step for the author (old school treasure hunt vs. the first game’s escape) it did come off as more skillfully crafted, with a relatively open map yet where the player still gets nudged into backtracking (like the key from the zombie area to get to Medusa, and then the hint from that area to get a secret SILVER CROSS item, and then the SILVER CROSS to get the chalice from the zombies, and then the chalice to defeat Medusa). The spelling errors were sloppy but the writing at least attempted to be more vivid than your standard Scott Adams game (enabled by having more memory space). There were no moments like where sleeping on a bed or running a sink causes a completely random item to appear.

The magic words had random effects but the reference to WORDS OF TRAVEL AND MANIPULATION and the fact there were four of them all contained together made them feel using them like “experiment” rather than “frustratingly testing everything everywhere”. The quicksand clearly needed a magic word, and there’s no reason PRESTO would be the one, but it wasn’t hard to just run through the list and test them. The original D&D campaign that Crowther played in had magical experimentation; it works on tabletop because of the flexibility of the player trying just about anything they can think in order to draw out what an item’s properties are. When this was translated into the rod of Crowther’s Adventure the concept became more obscure; other authors have tried to reproduce the technique with varying levels of success. Somehow the balance held here, perhaps by leaning heavily on prior reference (Alice, Sinbad, having a magic wand used to get over a chasm just like Adventure) but also by having the magic words apply to specific obvious dilemmas (unlike some other games where magic words could be used in entirely random places).

I suspect Richard Herrick was a spirited teenager with commercial ambitions who could never pull them off. It’s always possible some magazine or fan club publication will surface in the future with more information. For now: one more random British game, with more drama to the backstory than you’d expect VIC-20 software to have, followed by an obscure Apple II game by a famous company.

This is the follow-up to Herrick Venture #1: Escape.

Unfortunately, I have not found any more historical material since last time, so I generally just have to hope Richard E. Herrick Jr. is alive and tries to Google himself sometime (which has happened before with other authors!) Unlike the first game, this only has a BASIC source version, and while Escape slightly broke the 16k limit (18337 bytes) Land of Odysseys busts it entirely, at 25859 bytes. The game is still stylized around Scott Adams; Adams went with his particular style for technical reasons, but even with more memory space the author is choosing to stick with it. (This sort of “legacy started for technical reasons but held after even when those reasons went away” applies elsewhere in game design history, like pixel art, although 32K still isn’t that generous.)

Source.

Escape involved getting out of a house alive. This game clings back hard to the roots of Scott Adams and Adventureland, with the goal of collecting treasures and returning them to a starting location.

The temple has a mirror which hints at “Alice”, indicating it can be entered, Through-the-Looking-Glass style.

I AM IN A SECRET ROOM. VISIBLE ITEMS:

LARGE MIRROR. VIAL FILLED WITH A WEIRD POTION. *MAGIC WAND*

The vial is another Alice in Wonderland reference, which we’ll see payoff in a moment.

Going just outside the temple lands you in a “forest” with a “large rock”. Looking at the rock and then moving it reveals a DARK HOLE.

The dark hole has a *PEARL NECKLACE* (the second treasure, after the magic wand) and a piece of paper which reads “trolls are afraid of magic”.

Heading west of the forest leads to a tiny door with a DRINK ME sound, and you do the predictable thing:

Predictable, but still enjoyable enough. The game does get harder later.

Inside the door is a “small room” that has a troll, a book of magic words, and a golden medallion (treasure 3). Oddly, the troll’s fear of magic extends to the book that is in his lurking place, and trying to pick the book up is enough to scare it away.

The book mentions “hocus-pocus”, “open-sesame”, “abracadabra”, and “presto”, all which will show use in a little while. This is like getting the book of spells in Enchanter but you have to randomly guess what each one does. The game is tight enough it isn’t that frustrating but — let’s get to their use in context.

First off, you may notice the small room has no exits.

>SAY HOCUS

OK

HOCUS

******PUFF!******

This teleports the player out back to the path, where they can pick back up all their stuff like their magic wand which maintained normal size as they were shrunk down.

To the east of the temple/forest is a “swamp” with strange gas and a pool of oil; I haven’t used the oil for anything but the gas will come in handy later (you can GET GAS while holding the vial that used to have potion in it). From there you can exit north and south, both which represent magic word puzzles:

North is simply quicksand you can get out of by using the PRESTO word. There’s a *BAG OF RUBIES* there to add to the collection.

South is a log cabin guarded by snakes. For whatever reason — in practice, just experiment with all four magic words whenever there’s a puzzle — ABRACADABRA is effective against snakes.

The log cabin has a “piece of steel” and a “shovel”. The shovel can be used to dig up a random room (between the starting forest and the tiny door) which has “flintrock”; these can then be used to LIGHT the LAMP found in the starting room.

Speaking of the lamp, you can also — taking a cue from Adventureland — RUB it to get another treasure. Unlike Adventureland you can’t rub it twice to get a second treasure.

The room above incidentally has the first thing in the game I have not resolved yet: the winged horse. You can untie it from the tree, and sit on it, but none of the words I’ve tried or actions I’ve attempted have gotten the horse to take off. There are puzzles not resolved by just using magic words!

Or maybe I just haven’t found the right magic word yet.

East of everything is a mountain with a suspicious crack. OPEN SESAME reveals a cave (ever since King’s Quest V I’ve been paranoid that this leads to a timed puzzle where the cave will close behind me, but the cave seems to be permanent).

On to the cave, where I’ve got three open obstacles.

To the north is a sign that says “DRAGON SLEEP” which is a hint for dealing with the actual dragon to the south. Suspicious, I went back to the gas out in the swamp and did SNIFF GAS, which worked (!) and let me know it made me feel slightly sleepy. Since I had some gas in my vial, I could throw it:

Unfortunately, trying to walk by wakes the dragon up briefly and it inadvertently fries you. I’m not sure if the goal is to tiptoe softer or if there’s a method of doing away with the dragon for good.

Heading back to the cave entrance and going due east, there’s a chasm blocking the way, easily resolved by doing WAVE WAND (I’d been carting the wand around this whole time waiting for it to get applied somewhere).

Further east are some corpses and a shiny chalice. Taking the chalice does not go well.

I was hoping maybe I could get the dragon together with the zombies and have them cancel each other out, but no dice yet.

The third unresolved obstacle is a minotaur, in a “labyrinth” to the north.

In the rooms marked Labyrinth they include all exits N/S/E/W/U/D and any not on the map are just loops. It’s like one of the old Greg Hassett mazes.

The minotaur doesn’t kill the player right away but they can chase. I have yet to get anything good to come out of that but I also have yet to experiment; I felt it was a good time to come in and report.

The minotaur is guarding a Persian rug, but I have to deal with this problem first.

So to summarize, I have a winged horse, dragon, minotaur, and set of zombies to deal with. I need to re-check my magic words (I used them, but maybe I mis-spelled them or need to use a different timing) and then get more creative from there.

I will say I’m finding this more pleasant than Herrick Venture 1, despite that game being more strictly mechanical (not fantasy puzzles). The general implied narrative of Herrick Venture 2 has been more colorful and I’ve found it more interesting — at least from the author’s minimalist style — to get surrounded by zombies or chased down by a minotaur than run over by a car.