Renga in Blue   Interactive fiction and the All the Adventures project

I’ve finished the game. This continues from my previous post.

Another picture from the September 1982 cover of Softside.

After getting by the snake (which was a matter of realizing I could take an item from a room even though it doesn’t get described that way) the game was mostly straightforward; the pattern is that you have access to a whole, er, menagerie of animals, and they get used in various ways to solve puzzles. In a narrative sense, the animals are rallying together to assist in your breakout (except for the snake, and another critter you’ll see later).

To recap: I had a deadly snake blocking an intersection, and the only ways I could go were one way blocked by a metal wall, and another with the mirror (shown above) hiding a light rod farther back.

I’m generally used to the Kirsch games being explicit about items in rooms, but the mirror room is an exception. You can TAKE MIRROR, then apply it to the snake.

The “It’s getting darker” is because I didn’t have the pole-on-fire get blown out by the wind in this run. I’m still holding the light rod as shown so it counts as a bug.

I’m glad I had already made my verb list (SHOW might have otherwise still taken a little time to get to). With the snake out of the way (although we have to keep doing SHOW MIRROR passing through the center) we now have free travel of most of the ship. To the west is the bridge, which is only interesting in a narrative sense.

This helps explain why we don’t face much opposition in the events there are to come.

Headed upstairs first…

…the symmetrical arrangement has an empty cage in the middle (I suspect meant for our protagonist), a storage room with some rubber gloves, a meeting room with some keys and the notation north = Mars, south = Earth, a “control room” that clearly needs a battery…

…and a Robot Room with one of the more interesting moments in the game.

The robot is painting EARTHLING and you can come back later to see more letters painted.

This makes for a slightly unnerving timer to the events (if they finish, they catch you) but in gameplay terms the amount of time you have is fairly generous.

Heading downstairs is where all the animals are kept. And my apologies, but I misspoke last time: the animals are NEARLY all from planets other than Earth.

The rooms are pretty description-free (“YOU’RE IN A STALL”) so let’s focus on listing the menagerie. None of these animals talk:

• VENUSIAN METAL EATERUS
• MERCURIAN LAZY CLAM
• NEPTUNIAN TERMITE
• PLUTONIAN DIAMOND-HEAD WOLF
• SATURNIAN PEACOCK
• ELECTRIC EEL (in a water tank)

(If you were paying attention before, you might immediate spot two of them help solve puzzles, but let’s finish listing the menagerie first.)

There’s one completely empty room that will get filled later, and one which had a resident that has now left.

On top of the non-talking critters there’s GALAXIAN WISE OWL that dispenses some hints.

The other hints (picked at random) are “diamonds cut glass” and “ask the cat”. Speaking of the cat, the cat asks for a pearl.

We’ll come back to the pearl in a few; let’s get out the way the electric eel first. With the rubber gloves on you can pick it up and put it directly on the control panel (!!) and the lever will work.

This brings down a force field later. However, you don’t find out about the force field at all if you do this first, and I only learned about the force field by looking up a walkthrough after beating the game.

The METALEATER, as you might also have predicted, goes back to the mysterious wall made of metal. (Past this point, any animal you cart around has to have the chain unlocked first with the keys from the meeting room.)

Right after this wall is a wall made out of wood (bring forth the NEPTUNIAN TERMITE) and then one made out of glass (meaning we now want the PLUTONIAN DIAMOND-HEAD WOLF). The wolf doesn’t cut the glass automatically; we need to type CUT GLASS, suggesting we somehow pick up the wolf and use it as a can opener of sorts.

All this leads to a branching hallway where one way goes to a dead end with a stone wall, and I did not seem to have any creatures that could handle stone. The other way is a navigation chamber.

YOU’RE IN A NAVIGATION CHAMBER.
There’s a large compass standing on a green plush carpet. An arrow on a gauge points “N”. A dial is missing fron the navigation control.

With that route all a dead end, let’s return to the demand of the cat. It wants a pearl.

The CLAM immediately came to mind but the game didn’t understand TICKLE when I tried it (as hinted at by the owl). The game specifically says

Sorry, you can’t do that

which it normally does for actions it understands but won’t ever do, but in this case, I was simply missing the right item in inventory. I needed to go to the SATURNIAN PEACOCK and TAKE FEATHER first and then the clam would give up a pearl.

Once you deliver the pearl the cat has another demand.

This is when a Janusian mouse starts showing up at random. It runs away, but you can drop the half-eaten cheese and wait and eventually it will show up.

But wait! A twist!

You can, of course, ignore the mouse and cart it over to the cat (the mouse keeps repeating “please don’t feed me to the cat”) and eventually get laughed at.

When the cat mentions the landing on Mars, a counter starts ticking to actually arrive; a MARSIAN BULL gets scooped up at that stop and added to one of the stalls. The bull can’t talk but will help you with the stone wall.

Remember, there was a red flag attached to the flag pole at the start.

Behind the wall is a room with the missing navigation dial, so you can bring it back and fix the device.

Using the “north = mars, south = earth” guide…

…it’s almost time to go home. However, a robot is unhappy with your shenanigans (now they pay attention).

Alas, the bull doesn’t help you bust through.

I ended up needing to check Dale Dobson’s walkthrough who himself needed to check the source code. Back at the navigation room there’s a richly-described carpet (and nothing is richly-described in this game); it hides a secret exit, but you can’t just GET CARPET, you need to MOVE COMPASS first (!!).

This lets you bypass the guard robot and sneak your way out as soon as the vessel lands on Earth.

This would be the second game in a row where Kirsch gives a slightly unhappy ending. I guess it’s a good thing we didn’t swipe any artifacts, because the IRS would be after us for undeclared income.

This was simpler than the last few Kirsch games, but with him still cranking out content monthly (and not having any others jump in) it is understandable he tossed a more straightforward game in the queue. It does have his moments of plot beats (the Mars landing doesn’t happen until the cat talks about it), but the theming around animals = solutions means that most puzzles are simple to solve, even if somewhat elaborate in plot terms (I especially liked picking up a BULL and toting it around).

You’re on a pasture. Straight ahead you see a strange vehicle which appears to be a spacecraft of some sort. You are being drawn closer and closer, as if by sone magnetic force…

Through the doors you can see an eerie red light, illuminating an otherwise dark, foreboding passage. You can hear strange cries from within.

Suddenly you are rushed through the door, almost as if pushed from some outside force.

The September 1982 issue of Softside Magazine was devoted to computer graphics.

Art from the cover, scan via Atarimania.

Meanwhile, the Softside Adventure of the Month series marched on as an all-text jam (previously: The Mouse that Ate Chicago), with Peter Kirsch once again the author, as credited in the TRS-80 source code (dated June 1982). Once again, there are also Apple II and Atari versions. This time I went with Atari. I’ve already done a thorough job on what we know about Kirsch (including his first game, Magical Journey) so this was an ideal pick to go with while the Internet Archive is still down wobbly.

We’ve been scooped up by an alien spacecraft and the action immediately continues from there.

We’re immediately next to a dark room, and has matches. They’re the kind of matches they light up a room temporarily without any possible action in-between.

This appears on the screen temporarily before the game goes back to the dark description.

You can still pick up the pole while in the dark, the flag just rolls away. You can then light the pole (requiring another match) and treat it as a torch.

(It’s fascinating how there are specific rules being followed here and how different they are from other games. Here, you can walk in the dark safely but can be killed by something specific that is dangerous; you can pick up items while in the dark. There are plenty of games where dark = no manipulation of items in a room other than possibly dropping something. There’s also been plenty of games with matches, and while they usually don’t work as long as lamps or torches, only in a few games have had the mechanics like this, with the room made visible but 0 turns allowed. The ability to pick up items in darkness compensates.)

The snake here is a little farther, and I haven’t gotten past it yet. You might think the pole/torch would be good for prodding it, and that might even be the right action, but I haven’t found the right verb to express this if so.

TICKLE is the main one I wouldn’t normally think of, and it’s useful to know now there’s an emphasis on conversation and SHOWing things.

Fortunately, the snake only blocks some of the exits. Specifically the east-facing exits are all accessible. To the northeast there is a passage to a room of mirrors; you can break one of the mirrors in order to get into a windy passage which blows out your torch. At the end (in a room you can briefly light up with the matches) is a room with a “light rod”, and typing ON ROD (and no other syntax, as far as I can tell) will turn it on.

Directly to the east of the snake is a single room with a suggestive metal wall, but again, if there’s simply a parser action to do, I haven’t found it yet.

While it is not unusual for me to be stuck on a Kirsch game, usually the verbs have been reasonable to find, but given how little I have so far to work with (pole, matches, light rod, and the red flag from the pole which you find after you get some light) that seems like the only possibility. My suspicion is one of the two puzzles (snake or metal wall) will fall and then I’ll have a whole chain of events next time.