I’ve finished the game; this is continued from my last post.
Via the Centre of Computing History. ftb on Discord pointed me to one of these mega-shareware discs having a copy of Raspion, but compiled for DOS.
First off, RavenWorks cleared something up for me: that SLIT message was referring to the acronym that goes with the “say Lymbar in tomb” in the book; I hadn’t been paying attention to the acronyms and I additionally had already mentally “used up” the book so had thought SLIT was referring to some other thing. Figuring out to use that phrase is honestly easier than the GIVE REGARDS puzzle so I would expect most people playing to hit the two moments out of order.
The desert was the real obstacle. I was frustrated trying to figure out something clever so I went into “brute force mode”, doing things like dropping an item and testing one exit before dying, then repeating. I thought I was honestly “spinning my wheels” a bit, like when I solved for a dark maze in Savage Island 1 too early via brute force. It turns out the game really does intend brute force:
Now, at first visual glance — and probably to the author’s eyes — this doesn’t look too bad. It’s just a grid where you’re supposed to find the right location. However, in context, with the loops there, this comes across as a maze, and I had to treat it as such. I only realized the author intended a grid (with us starting at the southwest corner) at the very end of the process. Once you look at a finalized map with a loop it can seem straightforward but from my experience it can double the mapping time.
Another case shows up right after falling into the underground river:
Heading north from the river drops the player not only in an endless loop but a softlock. I wasn’t expecting a double-loop there so it took me a while to realize what was going on. The right way to go is south to a shore.
Going west leads to a dead end, but the spade — which I had been testing absolutely everywhere — finally pays off.
The exit you dig leads back to the park near the house, so I had no new treasures to speak of, meaning I had missed something (rather, two somethings). The first is a “platinum nugget” that just washes up on the shore when you visit it the second time (I guess saying things wash up is a hint to be checking back, but a player with a different sequence of events might get very frustrated because it doesn’t feel like solving a puzzle). The second is found by going back to the water and using DIVE, which I knew to do because it was on my verb list.
The chest is described as “locked” but the keys don’t work.
The “sign” is the subway sign I had been carrying around in order to do mapping. It was genuinely useful to bump up my item count in the Caverns of Syl.
It immediately occurred to me the hammer was now useful, but I couldn’t SMASH CHEST either, and it took me some fiddling to realize the chest’s description mentions a lock, so you’re supposed to SMASH LOCK.
And that’s everything! The coins and nugget get dragged back to the start, the end, horray.
Rob in the comments compared the setting to 70s sci-fi shows like Ark II and Morpheus Kitami mentioned the concept being like a Lovecraft story.
From the third episode of the only season of Ark II. Yes, the chimpanzee is a crew member.
I personally was hoping for something like the Twilight Zone episode Time Enough at Last where there’d be a twist ending.
From Vivarium (2019), an A24 movie about a couple trapped in a mysterious labyrinth of houses. It hit most theaters right before the pandemic lockdown.
Look, this was a TRS-80 game in 10,500 bytes, I knew there wouldn’t be much, but a two-sentence twist ending which reflects on the state of the player would have been possible. Nothing about being trapped in the city is explained, nor what happens after. In a way this is like Strange Adventure which lands you trapped on a tiny island with your treasures; the “winning” is almost abstracted from the practicality of the narrative. The sarcastic narrative voice of Strange Adventure made it clear the author had awareness of the bizarre ending point, but here I’m not sure if the author intended anything more with Raspion than a straight treasure hunt.
(Here’s a related question: when the player shoots the nosy neighbor in It Takes a Thief, does the author realizes this shifts the narrative tone entirely, or is it just another puzzle?)
BONUS:
A bit of history deleted from my last post but the picture is too good not to include.
When the General Electric OARAC computer started working, they invited 6 humans in a computation contest, trying to find the square of 8,645,392,175 by hand vs. the computer. The computer time was 0.004 seconds, the average human time was 8 minutes. All six humans failed to get the correct answer. Connie Hodgson of Syracuse, New York, is shown here pointing at where she forgot to carry the one.
While General Electric (the company originating with Edison in 1878) is not much remembered for computers now, they were involved quite early. They started a relationship with the Air Force in 1948 manufacturing jet engines (only a year after that branch of the military was founded); this relationship let to the OARAC (Office of Air Research Automatic Computer) being built by GE and installed in 1953.
The military computer’s success led some in GE to push for going into computers more generally, but it didn’t happen until 1955. Bank of America did a call for bids to develop an electronic accounting method; while GE put in a bid, they fully expected to lose to IBM, but instead came out with the win at $32 million (in 1955 dollars). This led to the development of the Magnetic Ink Character Recognition system, and at the same time, GE established a computer department in Phoenix, focused on business mainframes.
Through the 1950s and 1960s they producing a long line of machines: the GE-100, 225, 312/412, 635, and 645. Mainframe manufactures, with IBM being the “old man” of the industry, were dubbed Snow White (IBM) and the Seven Dwarves (Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, General Electric and RCA). I’m going to guess GE was Grumpy. RCA was a spinoff from GE in 30s, so they were competing against their own spinoff.
GE was heavily involved in operating system development (notably the GECOS for their GE-600) and time sharing (allowing many people to use alternating cycles of mainframes). The ground zero of timesharing, Dartmouth, used GE hardware and was a joint project between the college and the company; this was the same system where Dartmouth developed the first version of BASIC.
GE eventually started losing ground to competitors and sold their computer assets to Honeywell; however, they still kept their time-sharing services, and after a number of changes, they were dubbed the General Electric Information Services (GEIS).
This remained a business-only service, but the number of unused computer cycles led GE to make a commercial spin-off in 1985 that would serve as a competitor to the dial-in services of the time, CompuServe and The Source. GE’s long-standing time-sharing infrastructure — dating back to the very invention of the concept — enabled them to charge less than their competitors.
While CompuServe had Forums, where people of common interests would gather, GEnie had RoundTables. For our story today, the important RoundTable is the Tandy RoundTable; the TRS-80 community there became the big hub for online enthusiasts. One of the sysops, Tim Sewell, uploaded his public domain and shareware library of software (keep in mind “public domain” was a vague notion in the 80s); as a second outlet he created a disk distribution group known as the File Cabinet, so that people who weren’t on GEnie could get the same access. In a survey from 1989 he found only 10 percent of the people who answered even had a modem and only a small fraction of that group even used one. (To be fair, even with GEnie’s lower prices being online via dial-in was quite expensive at the time. Note the launch article touting $35 an hour primetime — essentially, day hours. Even by the 90s when things were slightly cheaper primetime use went for $18 an hour. That’s about $41 an hour in 2024 money.)
This all leads to my recent thread about lost adventure games from 1982 and before. The proprietor of El Explorador de RPG had mentioned in a comment that the entirety of the File Cabinet was online. A catalog of the files as of 1991 is up here.
Whilst browsing, Raspion Adventure caught my eye as something I had never seen before and was not in any of my references. That File Cabinet link seems to be the only reason the game survives today. The BASIC source was entirely devoid of an author name or year, but the distinctive name led me to find an ad in 80 Microcomputing (May 1981).
This is the only reference to RanDob (P.O. Box 1662 out of Boca Raton, Florida) I’ve been able to pull up. It lists a second adventure game (It Takes a Thief) and it is one I’ve played before! Not only that, that game gives an author name: Randy Dobkin. Previously, it was a game I only knew about via mysterious index card, and I had thought it might just have been someone’s unpublished side project, but apparently the author tried to sell it at least a little.
While it is not guaranteed Raspion has the same author as Thief, by source code similarity I’m marking it as essentially certain. It Takes a Thief placed you as a criminal robbing a home, with no preface: you just start in your getaway vehicle and get to work. It didn’t really need any explanation. Raspion, on the other hand, is cryptic even after it starts progressing:
We’re supposed to “visit the deserted city and find Syl and its treasures”. This is a treasure hunt with asterisks around the names of treasures; so far, normal. The game even has a “your house” opening (the only useful item is a spade) and there’s a storage room where the treasures go.
Going out to the door, however, leads straight to the aforementioned city.
Is this …. a horror premise? Has our house been mystically tossed into a future city? The adventure-collection aspect suggests not, but the “no escape” is striking. I haven’t finished yet so I don’t know if there’s some plot turn.
Here’s a meta-map of what I have so far:
The city part has a park where you can find a keys and a book hidden in bushes. The book requires unlocking with the keys. The book gives various “key phrases” if you TURN PAGE but only one of them is useful.
Say Lymbar in tomb is the useful one. The “stop reading books” warning is literal and if you TURN PAGE again you will die.
Also near the park is a moving walkway (WAIT will cause the player to change rooms) and there’s a computer off the side; I’ll get back to that later. Let’s check out the Tower of Lorgon next.
The tower starts with a ground floor that has spinning mirrors, and if you are in the room for more than two turns, you get dizzy and die. This means you can safely pass through and safely pass back but can’t linger (otherwise you’ll die on the way back).
The tower leads up to a roof with a vent, which you can climb to find a stair described as “mile-long”. Again I get cryptic vibes, although the path down only lets you go a hundred yards before getting stopped.
The “impassable” stone has an inscription
There is a better way. Give my regards to the keeper of the records. — Ranon of Lymbar
which will come up later. I have yet to find a use for the hammer (even though SMASH is a verb).
Moving back to the park, on the far east side is the Tomb, which is where the clue from the book gets used.
This opens a route down to a subway that has a “Yttrium capsule” you can ride.
At the end of the line there are two branches. One leads to a desert where, so far, all I’ve managed to do is get thirsty and die.
The second branch goes to the “Caverns of Syl” which is a maze, at the end of which is a *synthetic ruby*.
This is the absolutely standard “drop items to map” maze, no gimmicks.
That’s the end of the line for my exploring, except I said I’d come back to the computer. This is if you ride the walkway at the park, where there is a side room described as a “computer archive” with a “computer keyboard/screen”. I tried very hard to locate a verb that would work for interaction.
This included using LOAD which tried to load a saved game I hadn’t made, causing everything to crash. Oops.
This is meant more as a riddle: there is no “normal” verb here. I did my standard verb search and found
DIG, READ, OPEN, WAIT, UNLOCK, SMASH, TURN, SAY, CLOSE, EXAMINE, GIVE, ENTER, DIVE
and the right command is off one of those. Specifically, the message back at the tower told us to give our regards to the keeper of records. This indicate we should type GIVE REGARDS, and I have no idea what that would look like physically (“press F to pay respects”?) but it works, and I’ll provide the full animation:
“SLIT”, blinking. Is that supposed to be a reference to the double-slit experiment from quantum physics? It is not possible to repeat the action.
To summarize, I have a a hammer (not yet used), spade (not yet used, I’ve tested everywhere), the book and keys, and a synthetic ruby which counts as a treasure. My only obvious obstacle is a desert where I die of thirst and the only unused clue is a mysterious flashing SLIT message; I have not tried SAY SLIT everywhere but that’s the only thing I can think of. My point score is 100 out of 450, but the entirety of those 100 points comes from dropping the ruby at the storage room.
Regarding if this is “horror” or “science fantasy” or something else, I get the vibe this aligns with the 90s Myst-clone games like Obsidian filled with bizarre future devices (and no people because that would be too hard to handle technically). The ultra-minimalist style gives it a unique flavor and the game will just throw a “control room” out with no description and you’re just supposed to imagine.
This could be a scene out of L-Zone or Rhem. If this was a real 90s game that message from Ranon of Lymbar would have been rendered as a blurry QuickTime video.
Renga in Blue 