I’ve finished the game. This continues directly from my previous post.
Fortunately, I was just having some bleed-over trauma from The Sands of Egypt, and the rest of the game went smoothly. (Well, except for a moment at the very end.) To continue directly, I had been misinterpreting this scroll:
:read scroll
It says,
“PHLURF” is the key to this adventure.
:say phlurf
Oops! Your magic is not too accurate.
You will have to find the key for yourself!
I read this as “the magic word didn’t work, you need to revise what you said, or find some item to enhance your capabilities”. Instead, the way to read this is “yes, you cast the spell, but it didn’t turn out accurately, and it made a key somewhere which you need to find”. That is, a key appears in a different place and you just need to find it, so solving the puzzle just involves via walking back to the crocodile moat:
You are on a grassy knoll south of a huge castle. Between you and the castle is a moat full of crocodiles. A tree now spans the moat creating a bridge. A path goes east.
There is a gold key here.
I admit I did not solve the puzzle, but just was wandering in case I missed something, and had to puzzle a bit why the gold key was sitting there.
The gold key goes to the chest I’d been toting around, so another puzzle solved right there:
:unlock chest
A wizard’s staff falls out onto the floor!
Suddenly a voice says,
“This can free anything from the tightest of situations.”
This immediately suggested the stuck ruby.
You are in the Priest’s chamber. There are many sacred objects and prayer books here. There is a curtain to the south.
Imbedded in a quartz slab is a sparkling ruby!
:wave staff
The quartz disappears and the ruby falls to the ground.
Which of course immediately suggested the statue with the missing ruby.
:insert ruby
You feel the floor give way beneath your feet as you fall down into a dark and gloomy dungeon. The ruby bounces off your head and lands on the floor beside you.
You are in a dark and gloomy dungeon. A horrifying skeleton is chained to the wall and is looking down at you with haunting eyes. There is a hole in the ceiling to the north and some kind of equipment to the west.
There is a ruby here.
This leads to a new small area.
The only purpose down there, other than the authors describing a grim torture room (very teenager vibes) is to find a pool of oil, where you can FILL FLASK to get a flask of oil. To get out, you climb a latter, and unlatch the hatch that leads to the weapons room from the other side.
The oil goes to the rusted door, leading to some royal chambers:
This room is the holding place for the Royal Crown Jewels. The plentiful supply of gold, silver and precious jewels must be worth millions! There are rooms to the west and south and an open gate to the east.
There is a royal crown here.
:w
You have entered the King’s chambers. His closet contains only the most elegant of clothes. His beautiful brass bed is covered with white silk sheets. You can see the setting sun through the huge bay window. The room exits to the east.
All you need is the royal crown. The game doesn’t let you take the treasure or even touch it, really. You’re not here for treasure, you’re just exploring and passing through. (I love how explicitly and vividly the treasure is mentioned in the room description only to have it be utterly unimportant.)
The crown goes back to the cathedral with the gold ring. This is the only slightly unintuitive puzzle but given the gold ring is what immediately occurred to me, that’s only slightly.
:drop crown
The crown glows white hot as the altar suddenly begins to rise towards the hole in the ceiling. When the platform completes its ascent, you find yourself in a room high above the cathedral.
You are in a room resembling an attic. You are still standing on the altar, but your surroundings have changed greatly. Dust is everywhere, and the room has a smell of mildew. Light is coming in from the east.
Just to the east of here is a room with a window overlooking a village, and a rug that seems to be moving.
You are looking out of a large French window. You can see a small village in the distance. Under your feet is an Oriental rug that seems to be vibrating. The room goes in to the west.
And here I was stuck for the second time for a long period. Clearly I was meant to use the rug as a flying carpet, but my failure to SIT RUG and MOVE RUG and TAKE RUG and so forth led me to be confused.
:examine rug
I don’t understand.
:use rug
I don’t understand.
:fly rug
I don’t understand.
The problem is, again, this is a Sands of Egypt-style parser — almost every failure to do something is mapped to “I don’t understand”, and not to any clarity why something didn’t work. A good parser is about handling and re-directing failure easily and transparently; if the player types something “wrong” but their situation is clarified it can stall them for five seconds, if they type something “wrong” with no feedback they might be struggling for 10 minutes.
The winning solution was to just type FLY on its own.
:fly
You almost lose your balance as the rug takes off and glides through the window. The rug takes you over an immense field to the town, where the people eye you very suspiciously.
And that’s it! This game really emphasized the points I made recently about how a less robust parser can still work as long as the game sticks with very simple puzzles. The only problem is it is still possible to get stuck on a simple puzzle (in this game, one which involves walking into the right room) and then the player is free to type all sorts of absurdities in an attempt to get forward and then the parser is back to being miserable again. Still, I think all the games from Crandell and Peterson have fallen on the safe side of the valley. That is, in the development of ambitious adventure authors, a valley metaphor is appropriate:
(Yes, I could have made this look nice in Figma, but Microsoft Paint was calling to me.)
Mind you, some authors have played enough adventures that they start directly in the deep hurting section, and Infocom pretty much had their parser mastered straight out of the gate. What I’d really like to see is an author progressing all the way from the left side to the right side, but we’re just not deep enough into adventure history for that to happen yet.
Medieval Castle marks the last of a trilogy by De Crandell and Joe Peterson, who wrote an “Explore” system for the TRS-80 as a system for their games. They were private rather than distributed, and only placed on the Internet much later. (See: Enchanted Cave, Lost Mine.)
“Medieval Castle” was the final in the “trilogy” of our late-nite teenage adventure creativity. This one forced us to add even more features to the language, and I believe it really became “sophisticated” with this one. Castle is perhaps the most colorful of the adventures, but not as mystical somehow as Enchanted Cave. De and I didn’t make any more games after this one.
This is not the last of the Explore system games — there’s one more based on a raunchy 80s comedy movie — but we’ll get to that game a different time.
Continuing the pattern of “teenaged prodigies who wrote adventures and went on to fame”, this is Joe Peterson from a group shot at the Southwest Research Institute, where he was manager of mission operations, and was in charge of the New Horizons spacecraft that went to Pluto.
Rather than screenshots I’m going to do text clips, but just a reminder what the system looks like, first:
I’m still paranoid the web page this comes from will disappear some day, although there is technically an Android port so the game is preserved. We have the source code of the Explore system proper but not the script for any of the actual games.
Just like the other two games, there’s no given plot. Here you encounter an Enchanted Castle, and are supposed to pass through all the way until you get to the finish. There’s no particular reason we’d go into the castle in the first place, so the plot is just “have an adventure”.
You are standing at the edge of a cliff. Far off in the distance you see a large castle surrounded by a moat and engulfed in an ominous fog. About a mile below you is a winding river. There is a dirt path to the north.
:n
You are at the base of a tree. There seems to be something caught in the top. A dirt path goes south.
:u
You are standing on a branch near the top of the tree.
There is a hang glider here.
Unlike the other two games this was not a one-shot deal. I am in fact stuck early in a way that is uncomfortably reminiscent of the game I just played, The Sands of Egypt. I am concerned becoming “sophisticated” is code for “tried to do some complex puzzles in a parser that doesn’t support it.”
At least the start is simple enough. You can grab the glider mentioned and take it back to the edge of the cliff, and JUMP, landing at a grassy knoll.
You are on a grassy knoll south of a huge castle. Between you and the castle is a moat full of crocodiles. There is a tree at the edge of the moat. A path goes east.
The east a short way leads to a woodcutter’s cabin, which has an axe, and you can take it back to the knoll and CHOP TREE in order to form a path across the crocodile moat.
:chop tree
The tree falls and forms a bridge across the moat.
:n
You are directly outside the castle. There is a large archway to the north, which serves as the main entrance. To the south is the bridge and the moat.
There is a scroll here.
The scroll is the first cryptic part of the game.
:read scroll
It says,
“PHLURF” is the key to this adventure.
:say phlurf
Oops! Your magic is not too accurate.
You will have to find the key for yourself!
Does that mean I’m “pronouncing the word” wrong? Does it only make sense in the right place? Is the thing written on the scroll really a cryptogram that changes to something else? (At the very least, I tried rot1, rot2, rot3, etc. up to rot25 with no joy.) Using it anywhere else after the first time just gets the message that nothing happens.
This opens the map a bit more, but I’m not finding much luck anywhere I prod.
You are in the main hall of the castle. You are greeted by a majestic red carpet, which extends through a low archway to the north. Sunlight reflected off the waters of the moat can be seen through a large archway to the south. You can see an immense room to the east. A spiral staircase twists up out of sight.
First off, on a branch to the east is a cathedral, with a platform having an “imbedded gold ring about the size of a crown” and a hole high on the ceiling that will no doubt later be important. To the north of that is an altar with a ruby I can’t get at.
You are in the Priest’s chamber. There are many sacred objects and prayer books here. There is a curtain to the south.
Imbedded in a quartz slab is a sparkling ruby!
:get ruby
I see no way to pick up the ruby.
:chop ruby
I don’t understand.
:chop slab
I don’t understand.
:rub slab
I don’t understand.
:push slab
I don’t understand.
Going back to the castle entrance and heading north instead, you pass by a statue with a missing ruby eye (clear where the ruby is going after you get it, at least) and then a rusty door I have seen borrowed from many games already.
:n
You are in a low north/south hallway between two arches. There is a small statue resting on a pedestal on the right side of the hall. The statue is missing one of its ruby eyes!
:n
This is a magnificent room with a ceiling twenty feet high. At one end sits a beautiful throne made of solid gold. The red carpet ends at the foot of the throne. There is a doorway to the west. To the south is a low archway.
The steel bar door to the west is so rusty it won’t budge.
However, unlike those games, I haven’t been able to beat the rust. Upstairs there is a “wizard’s laboratory” with a “flask” and a “bottle of liquid” but neither is helpful based on any command I’ve tried (OIL DOOR, POUR LIQUID, THROW FLASK, etc.) I know the bottle is toxic because it kills you if you drink it but past that I’m baffled.
Showing off a little bit of upstairs, but there isn’t much to do yet:
You are in the wizard’s quarters. There is a strange looking pointed hat on a night stand beside an unmade bed. There is a curtain to the west, and the room exits to the north.
There is a chest here.
:s
This must be the wizard’s laboratory, for there are many bottles filled with strange colored liquids and powders.
There is a small tunnel to the south and a curtain to the east.
:w
You are in the weapons room. There are all kinds of swords, daggers, shields, and crossbows resting against the walls.
There is a grate in the floor, but the latch is on the other side. A tunnel goes north.
I’d normally think the latch is a puzzle clearly solvable later once we actually reach the other side, but I’m stumped on all other avenues so maybe you’re supposed to reach the latch somehow. If there’s a way to express this in the parser I haven’t figure it out.
I’d say someone is welcome to peek at a walkthrough if I’m not missing an obvious verb, but this has no walkthroughs on the Internet. So anyone who wants to help will need to play this for themselves, which you can do online by using the link here. I’m hoping this is a momentary hiccup and the gameplay will return to normal after (meaning I’ll finish by my next post) but it may be the authors decided they needed to crank up the difficulty for their finale, or at least crank up the level of obscurity of commands required to interact with the game.
ADD: Managed to figure out the issue (in the comments if you don’t want to wait). Crisis averted, however.
Renga in Blue 