Archive for the ‘the-paradise-threat’ Tag
I’ve finished the game, and my prior posts are needed for this one to make sense.
It’s pretty clear, reaching the end of the game, that Jyym Pearson was just goofing around. All of the remaining puzzles were absurd in some way. I almost feel like he was trying to channel William Denman (of Med Systems who published this, and made the Asylum games) but Asylum did it better somehow. Also, Denman makes a actual cameo.
Continuing directly from last time, I had killed a demon who had left behind a hand.
If this was a “closed room” puzzle it wouldn’t be too terrible; the problem is I wasn’t sure if I was missing an item from previous rooms (I was, but it doesn’t affect this puzzle). With a hand and the objects being held the only one that goes together with it is the gold ring. PUT GOLD RING ON HAND:
Arbitrary un-clued magic for the win! Buckle in everyone, it’s only going to get weirder from here.
This screenshot shows all my items shuffled over.
I didn’t have much to work with other than a door with a plate. Nothing seemed to help from my item stock, so I went on another trip trying to look / listen / smell all the rooms to see if something new came up. I don’t think this was a new thing; rather I missed it because the placement is so utterly absurd:
This is just a random hallway room right before the Nazi hall with the timber. This captures the spirit of bombing every single direction in every single room in Zelda 1 just in case you missed something.
I get what’s going on, here: the author is trying to squeeze nearly every single room into having something of interest, and out of the “opening area” this is the only one that was “just a hall”. This still is, in a narrative sense, absolutely silly — we’re supposed to be getting help to save Heaven, yet this particular help can only be received by listening in a very particular room. This is decidedly crossword winning over narrative (except the crossword isn’t really a crossword but rather a puzzle requiring random-search).
PUT MAGNET ON PLATE:
A few more steps leads to a crevice where you can use the board again, and a steel door the requires the tiny key that previously worked on the desk. (Again, any manner of narrative is just being pitched, since the tiny key previously worked on the door Eichmann was sitting at.)
Inside the development room are a bunch of programmers chained to computers and William Denman, who leads you back out.
The steel door then can no longer be opened, and this is the end of the line.
I was quite stumped but I went for the structural solving juke: there had to be a reason for this section. Doing yet another pass through all the previous rooms yielded no new things, so there was still a secret to be found. Back at the crevice, which I hadn’t bothered doing a LOOK at (given it is a repeat) there’s the message that SOMETHING’S HERE. You need to CLIMB CREVICE (not the board).
Doing this action kills you on the other crevices. This is a “repeated element” fakeout puzzle where an author looks like they repeat an element but there is a subtle difference.
This puzzle wasn’t terrible, even in the confines of the parser, but it gets followed by something absolutely as off-the-wall as humanly possible.
ABE’S VOICE CRIES,Did you listen
to Marx, he knows the clue.
I spent some time hanging out a the opening (where Groucho Marx is one of the crowd of people in the conference room) thinking I had missed some interaction or clue. No, the game railroads you into typing LISTEN to get any effect.
What the statue looks like, from Lucifer’s Realm.
I guess the mindset to be here is like original Adventure (where I genuinely liked the PLOVER puzzle); in that game, though it set you up with magic words to begin with making it possible to have a lateral connection. Here, this is the only magic word in the game. Just type on its own, without applying the verb SAY to it: GROUCHO.
Yes, that’s genuinely the ending. You then get sent back to the bearded man at the podium.
Things gets rather meta.
“God” continues:
Nothing that has happened to you since your death has been real… It’s been a test !
There are no heavens or hells here
Every man makes his own,in his own mind….
You’ve passed your own test…
Congratulations…
HE TAKES YOUR ARM, LEADS YOU TO A DOOR AND SAYS,
I’ve many marvelous things to show you,come.
Congrats! Now buy our other games!
Now, I admit The Prisoner had a similar ending and I wasn’t grouchy about that one, but this is a game with a universe that started with a promising and unique atmosphere (Lucifer’s Realm) and even Paradise Threat had some promising moments going in, but it started to get more and more arbitrary before falling in a pile of bits and bytes. Asylum had a consistent tone going for it where “you’ve escaped the game” or “you just met the programmer in the Asylum” both seemed to fit; The Institute had a similar angle going but again themed everything appropriately. So I don’t think a meta commentary on “you’re just playing a game, ha ha” is inherently a bad thing it came off here more as an anticlimax than anything real.
Pearson has one more game to go (The Farvar Legacy) where we battle the undead. Maybe this time he’ll stick the landing.
NEXT: A short game supposedly set in a real location, followed by Sirius Software.
(You can read all my posts about The Paradise Threat starting here.)
I had left off being baffled by a board (obtained from a pile of lumber) and some quicksand. My issue was half with the parser and half with visualization.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
To be specific, from the room marked YOU ARE AT THE EAST END OF THE VALLEY typing LOOK gets the message that
TO THE E A PILLAR SITS
IN A MUDDY FIELD,THE VALLEY BENDS S.
My assumption was that I go east to the quicksand, use the board to stabilize the way, then proceed further east on to the pillar. That assumption was wrong.
You need to DROP BOARD to the west; if you then LOOK the game says
THE BOARD FORMS A BRIDGE
TO THE PILLAR.
For this to make any sense to me physically — remember, we’ve been toting this bridge around — I suddenly visualized the “pillar” much different than I originally did; something fairly low. Let me invoke the power of Microsoft Paint to show what I mean:
This jives enough with the text descriptions to work for me, but I still couldn’t get across the board. A “normal” game would just land you on the pillar if you try to go east, but nope, you just go in the quicksand.
Fortunately, I had the power within me to “test every verb I have encountered in the game”, so I was able to stumble upon … CLIMB BOARD? Really?
I guess my visualization should have been such that the pillar would be much taller, so the board is more at an angle, but how would that make any sense anymore given this would indicate a board taller than a person? Incidentally, CLIMB BOARD is also the way to get back; there really is no consistency in this game in how to travel (CLIMB STEPS but just going WEST to go back, in another instance).
I had the suspicious powder and only one real obstacle, getting the key from Eichmann.
What he looked like in Lucifer’s Realm.
I took it back to the room with the secretary and the secretary was gone, but there was still a tray full of food there. Time for some poisoning!
Some more wandering — and finding the Nazi guard I had knocked out by scent had been replaced —
— and I rather delightfully found an unconscious Eichmann. I rummaged through his desk (applying the TINY KEY given to us by Jyym Pearson on the phone) and found a SKELETON KEY; we’d already been warned ahead of time by Abe Lincoln this would go back at the door in the haze.
Taking the key back leads to a trap, but the kind of trap that is easy to avoid as long as you haven’t been discarding your starting inventory items.
I was then in darkness in what appeared to be a maze and dutifully started dropping items and mapping out exits. However, I soon realized the items I dropped were simply disappearing, so this had to be a gimmick rather a maze. Applying all my senses, I tried LISTEN.
This had to be referring either to the gold ring or helmet. With the helmet off, typing LOOK gave the description of a breeze from above, so I tried UP to no avail, and also CLIMB UP (“YOU’LL FALL”), FOLLOW BREEZE (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND”), CLIMB (with no target: “YOU’LL FALL” again), GO TO BREEZE (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND”), JUMP (“IT’S TOO DANGEROUS”), ENTER PASSAGE (“I DON’T UNDERSTAND”), CLIMB PASSAGE (“IT’S TOO DANGEROUS”), JUMP PASSAGE (“IT’S TOO DANGEROUS”) and then UP again for good measure.
After a reset just in case I made a typo on something, I finally found you’ll move farther if you:
LISTEN
DROP HELMET
LOOK
LOOK UP (not just look!)
JUMP (only immediately after doing LOOK UP)
As far as I can tell, if you miss your opportunity to jump, even though you still feel the breeze, you’ve softlocked the game. It’s great to have all this combined with a tricky parser, right? I knew LOOK UP was used previously by Pearson but it still isn’t an absolute standard of mine to test (maybe has only gotten used in 5 games so far from 1972 to 1982)?
The dark figure will run south to a brick wall with a window; there’s guards there that will kill you if you don’t still have on the UNIFORM. (I should incidentally point out I’m maxed out on inventory at this point; you have to take another loop to get here, so I brought the BOARD, PACKET of seeds, and TINY KEY over on an extra trip after intentionally dying in order to teleport to the start. So dying isn’t technically a completely negative thing in this game.)
From here there’s a crevice to the east, and you can use the board to get over (I suspect many players left it behind at the pillar so would need to return for it).
Then comes an ancient door (neither skeleton key nor tiny key work)…
…so you can veer south to find a dragon. The dragon is sleeping and no threat as long as you don’t try to hurt it or CLIMB it. (Why would you try to climb it? You’ll see in a second.) Heading south from the dragon mysterious leads to a “DARK MOIST PLACE” which I believe is just supposed to be literally inside the dragon. I tried dropping the sleeping powder there to make the dragon extra-sleepy but no dice.
Trying to drop the powder here into the mouth doesn’t work either.
Testing out various actions, I noticed DIG mysteriously told me “O.K” rather than denied my action. The last place this happened was somewhere soft enough to plant seeds, so I tried it again (“THE PLANT GROWS UP AND OUT OF SIGHT”) and then typed CLIMB. Oops.
The command defaults to the dragon. I was genuinely confused here for a bit because I thought the dragon was eating me because I made noise climbing up the plant. I finally found the eating to happen again when I tried CLIMB DRAGON and connected the dots.
The plant needs you not have much in the way of inventory, so you have to do the “drop everything, grab one item” shuffle, but it fortunately doesn’t take too long.
Along the passage I found a dead Nazi that did not react to any of my commands other than UNDRESS NAZI (I was told there was a quota of only one naked Nazi in this game). I highly suspect something useful is there but my verb-fu is failing yet again. Just a bit south is a Nazi demon, who is easily dispatched by your sword:
The demon may be ambidextrous, but one more slice kills the demon outright, leaving behind a severed hand. Unfortunately I am unable to pick up with the hand or interact with it in any way, and I’m stuck to the left by another locked door (again non-responsive to my current keystack).
I think the next step here is likely to comb over all the rooms again in case a new latrine has popped up or Jesus has made another call somewhere.
My biggest issue is I’m worried I might have a solution (like the powder does go with the dragon) but I’m fighting with the parser enough that I pass by thinking I’m wrong and waste time. Not my favorite scenario to be in but I’ll plug through. I’ve incidentally finally caught up to Will Moczarski, who (other than the demon) managed to get to this place in a single post.
(Previous posts on The Paradise Threat here.)
This is, without question, one of the worst parsers I have dealt with in a long time, and that includes all the other Pearson games. I had numerous points where I knew what I wanted but couldn’t communicate, or where I wasn’t sure if I was doing the right thing.
First off, a little theory. I’m going to explain how the “rulebook sequence” in the parser for Inform 7 works (which is as modern as it gets) just to give a sense about the problem of message priority. From the Inform 7 handbook:
First it makes sure it knows what the input words are, and that the command makes grammatical sense … If there’s a typo in the input — or even if the parser knows all of the individual words but doesn’t understand how they’re strung together — the parser will reject the input before anything happens. Assuming the parser can figure out what the words are, and that they’re in a grammatical form that the parser knows, Inform starts processing the action.
The game then checks Scope to see if your item being referred to can be seen (or if it is a case where it makes sense to refer to something even if you can’
>open gate
You can’t see any such thing.
(You also get the same message if you try a noun that isn’t in the vocabulary — the game is trying to prevent “noun hacking” here to find objects that you haven’t seen yet.)
Once past that phase, things get more complicated:
There’s a Before section, which is checked before anything else. This triggers before any checking of the world environment, so this is for responses that override even checking if an action is plausible; it just checks if a verb is trying to be used. Suppose the player tries EAT CHEESE. A player controlling an alien with no mouth might just immediately be told they have improper anatomy; even if the cheese is in a locked container, it is much more logical to just say the action will never work.
The game then passes through an Accessibility check; even if the target of an action is “in the room” with the player it might be impossible to reach. So here is when EAT CHEESE might inform the player that the cheese is locked away and you don’t have any way of getting at it.
This is followed by an Implicit action check. This accounts for circumstances where the player expects item-juggling to be handled automatically, like unlocking a door with a key that is held in one’s pocket; the game can automatically take the key out of the pocket rather than force the extra steps, and will be explicit about this happening with a message like “(first taking the key out of your pocket)”. In the cheese-eating instance, if the cheese is close enough to reach, the game might have the player first pick it up before eating it.
Then comes the rulebooks Instead, Check, and Carry out. This is the “central” part of the parser and includes more specific checks like the cheese you’re eating is really a rock (which you find out by trying to eat it). Finally there’s an After section (there might be a chain reaction of other things after successfully eating the cheese, for instance).
This structure has been designed after a lot of experience with parsers having strange messages because of priority issues. Not every condition has been obvious. If you try to EAT PRIME MINISTER and there isn’t a single government official in sight (perhaps the Prime Minister walked to a different room and the player didn’t notice), the best response is to say you don’t see the Prime Minister, not “don’t be a cannibal”. The cannibal message feels appropriate but implies the Prime Minister is visible; the player then may try to GIVE LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER and be confused.
The Paradise Threat has (in addition to other parser sins I’ll get into) some priority issues. Suppose, having seen some timber described you try to GET TIMBER and you’re holding six items. The game will go
ONLY SIX ITEMS PLEASE.
This implies “you’d be fine getting it, but only if you reduce your inventory”. So you do some item juggling and try to get the timber now, getting
IT’S NOT A VISIBLE ITEM.
Clearly, the fact that the timber is not considered “visible” is the more salient fact than the player’s inventory capacity. The game is essentially checking conditions in the wrong order.
I’ll hit other issues in context, let’s get back to the action–
Last time I had dropped off a wood box to get consumed by termites but couldn’t get at the result. I waited around a very long time and nothing happened. I had neglected one of the other Pearson tendencies: to have time pass based on entering certain locations. That is, in most games, if you have a timed event, you might think to type WAIT sufficient times and the game will move on; in the case of The Paradise Threat, sometimes you can hang out for many turns and find nothing will ever happen. The game is waiting for you to move to some other specific part of the map, and passing throw room X will cause the time-passing condition to happen in the earlier room Y.
I went over to the arrow-killing room, stepped back out (as long as you immediately go west you don’t die) and then found the termites were finally done with their snack.
The packet had seeds, so I took them to the soft area I was able to dig. After PLANT SEEDS I had to walk around a bit more; the “arrow-killing time pass” seemed to do the trick again.
There’s a cliff described as also being at 30 feet, so you have to wait around for the plant to get that high.
Before showing the result, I should mention I elided something important on the parser: PLANT SEEDS. PLANT is not understood as a standard verb elsewhere. Hence it turns out that this is a game with a “standard dictionary” of verbs and response to when they don’t work, but also a bespoke set of verbs-with-nouns that will work only in the particular cases they are intended. In that parser diagram, you have to imagine a brand-new list of phrases which all get interpreted on their own outside of the main structure.
PULL, which I originally thought didn’t work, works specifically here: you can PULL ROPE to get the crossbow to launch early.
TWAANNG…..THUMP !
This disarms the trap that had been stumping me. Looping back around to the trap and the next room:
If you just drop the scepter it disappears. The logical step to me seemed to be to attach the ivy to the scepter, but I went through
TIE IVY VINE
ATTACH IVY VINE
WRAP IVY VINE
ATTACH SCEPTER
PUT IVY VINE
and many other permutations before arriving at the exact phrase TIE IVY VINE TO SCEPTER. This is the only way to do the operation. TIE IVY VINE along just gets “I DON’T UNDERSTAND”; trying to TIE IVY VINE TO SCEPTER while anywhere other than this specific room also gets “I DON’T UNDERSTAND.” This is about as mind-bogglingly misleading as a parser message can be, especially because it isn’t playing guess-the-verb, it’s playing guess the phrase.
Essentially, the “bespoke phrase” part of the parser skips any of the kinds of checks a good parser might have and only looks for: are you in the right room with the items, and have you typed the exact phrasing? If so, go on, otherwise, go to the generic non-understanding message.
You have to incidentally JUMP to get back (both JUMP VINE and JUMP IVY VINE work; the game inconsistently will sometimes need the two-word version of the noun and sometimes not). This reflects one of the other issues with the game, that map traversal requires very specific phrasing and reversing directions isn’t consistent. Normally, when outside a cave with steps, even our lower-tier parser games would accept at least a subset of GO CAVE, U, E, ENTER CAVE, GO STEPS; you have to CLIMB STEPS exactly. Trying to CLIMB STEPS to go back has the game say
YOU’LL FALL.
being of course the exact same steps we just climbed up. No, you have to go WEST to go backwards. I have to essentially glance at my map every time I pass back and forth to make sure I’m typing in the right word. Door to the east? OPEN DOOR, not EAST. Going back, OPEN DOOR fails — “you can’t” — and you go WEST instead.
Once in the hall, the game takes a moment to go meta.
ANSWER PHONE:
However, trying to make the conversation go further I was stumped; LISTEN gave me I HEAR NOTHING COMPREHENSIBLE; trying to ANSWER the phone again did as well. I assumed I was in another part of the game which required exact phrasing, so I ran through about 30 phrases before looking at the phone, which (after what looks like a cut-off conversation) has a tiny key.
Moving along…
From Lucifer’s Realm.
…I came across a Nazi guard at a door. Trying to KILL GUARD (we have a sword, after all) gets
YOU’RE TOO KIND.
which is the default “kill but not understood” response. If you TALK GUARD…
…only then do you have the opportunity to KILL GUARD and finally be understood. However, the guard just blasts you with his gun.
Being stuck I let the death happen, since that just warps you to the start, and explored around a little, keeping in mind Pearson was going full steam now on the “timed events” that were really dependent on you reaching some farther location.
As typical, it took an infuriatingly long time to figure out how to get into the hole (CLIMB HOLE) and then you just find out it is a latrine. The smell is enough to kill the guard if you go for a round 2.
We’re about to see a bunch of Nazis and none of them have this reaction.
Heading past, you get into a “huge hall” and a “reception room”. Taking the reception room first, we are encouraged to come back later, which sounds like another “timed” event to me.
There’s food on a tray we can access, so I assume he hasn’t actually started lunch yet.
Back in the huge hall, I did a LOOK HALL and found some lumber. LOOK LUMBER reveals a board.
Yet again I had enormous parser struggles, finally landing on PULL.
The board seems like it’d help with the quicksand, but no dice. I tried about 30 different parser commands, gave up, and went to check if Will had already gotten that far in his first writeup.
That’s not the case but moving on I find that I can indeed drop the board and thus access the quicksand room without sinking. I can thus reach the pillar and pick up some powder.
DROP BOARD, then go EAST? Nope. Drop board before arriving in the quicksand room, then going east? Nope. Not
CROSS BOARD
STAND ON BOARD
STEP ON BOARD
WALK ACROSS BOARD
USE BOARD
GO TO PILLAR
etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. Still no idea what to type even though I’m following Will’s exact directions.
We’re mostly past this nonsense in 1982; the only parser from that year of comparable badness I remember is Grandell Island. What’s so baffling here is I certainly don’t remember this much trouble from the prior Pearson games. I think the author is trying hard to make a “compact” game where every step is interesting but the end result is that every step I can only manage on the fourth or fifth parser attempt.
(Continued from my previous post.)
From Launchbox.
In a stark reminder of how different two experiences of an adventure game can be, Will Moczarski reports he finished this game in a handful of hours. I have put significant effort in with no real progress. This may be a matter of the Atari version of the game being more obscure, or me missing one single verb or object in the right place causing a cascade, or just bad luck.
I have found things in the rooms I’ve already mentioned but none of them have allowed me to pass my two main obstacles, the quicksand…
…and the arrow.
To be absolutely thorough, I made sure to LOOK in every room using every plausible noun as well as LISTEN and SMELL. The first useful LOOK was in the very first room of the dying land, where I did LOOK PLANT on the supposed plant-life and found an IVY VINE I could take.
Although the game is finicky and requires you type IVY VINE in full, not IVY or VINE, otherwise you get the weird sensation of typing TAKE VINE and having the game tell you it isn’t visible despite it being listed as visible.
The vine is described as “long and slender” and I assume will be a rope at some point. The next room over I found — again in the plant-life — a fallen-over tree with termites. However, I could not get anything else to happen with either TREE or TERMITES, and that’s after forming my standard verb-list and testing everything.
A quick aside on the testing-list: while it certainly is useful to instantly have at hand the game lets you TURN, PUSH, and MOVE things, forming this kind of list also helps get a sense of what the parser responses will be like beforehand, which can prevent chasing phantoms. For example, just typing PUSH by itself gives
OK..OOMPH..SO WHAT?
which is detailed enough it might be a cue in some games that the action is right, just you need some assistance, like the truss in Pythonesque. Since this is clearly a generic not-even-type-an-object message, its appearance should not be marked as remarkable at all. Similarly, THROW with no verb says
IT BOUNCES BACK AND OUCH!
which means you aren’t supposed to be improving your aim: you’re just barking up the wrong tree.
Returning to the game, the tree gave me no joy, and moving on to the very next room yielded a pillar.
I think from the description the pillar is supposed to be adjacent to the entrance to the quicksand to the east, or at the quicksand itself somewhere? Either way I cannot refer to it (again I ran down my verb list).
In the quicksand itself you get one extra message about how “you’re either shrinking or sinking” before you die. This indicates there should be an opportunity for extrication, but the way the parser works is odd: it intercepts basically everything I’ve tried to type except for dropping items. This includes some logical self-rescue attempts like THROW IVY VINE.
Moving south, to a misty haze, I technically found two things. One, by using LISTEN, was the voice of Abe Lincoln.
The other, just by typing LOOK, was finding an ancient door in the ground. The door is unfortunately locked.
To the east is a truly odd location: a field of soft earth where DIG (which normally fails to work) will “succeed” but with no result in the room as a consequence.
I tried DIG ten times just in case it was one of those cumulative dig puzzles (although so far games have gone that route have had an item you can find on turn 1, but a second item you can find on turn 2). My guess is I will be told in the future somehow I should dig here and that’s when digging will become useful.
Climbing up to where Demon Trivia was, I found nothing useful, so I started trying at the arrow room some more. Again, the weird “dropping takes no time” element of the parser game up…
…but otherwise, any other parser action at all resulted in death. (Including making a typo and putting in DRP HELMET trying to get the screenshot above.)
I feel like I’m missing something simple and fundamental like an exit. The diagonal directions do work but none of them have revealed a “new” direction, they’ve just duplicated the cardinal directions, so I have declined to map them.
Please no hints for now, unless you don’t know the answer and just want to speculate. I’ve seen this game described as “outtakes from Lucifer’s Realm” so it genuinely might be short, but that’s only true if you’re making forward progress!
BONUS ADDENDUM: While reviewing this post for typos, I thought to drop the wood box with no seams at the tree with the termites. The termites swarmed the wood box, but then I was unable to open or take it; LOOK WOOD BOX gets YOU CAN’T SEE IT WELL. So I’m doing something right here but I need to tweak my implementation somewhat.
THE CONTINUING STORY
You died, and you weren’t a good person.
However, someone else was being a worse person: Hitler.
Hitler wanted to raise an army against Satan, so Satan gave notice that stopping Hitler would be worthy of a a ticket up to the pearly gates.
While you needed to give over a powerful “Deecula” statue in the process (see gloating above), you managed to stop Hitler and gain the favor of both Jesus and Satan.
The end result is that Hitler’s army gets kicked out of Hell, so he decides to turn his fury towards Heaven instead. To save Heaven you have to a final showdown with the Führer of Evil himself.
From the Museum of Computer Adventure Games.
The Paradise Threat by Jyym Pearson picks up directly where the game Lucifer’s Realm leaves off, and marks the next step in Will Moczarski’s marathon of Med System games over at The Adventure Gamer. Just like with Lucifer’s Realm we are going to both be blogging it at the same time (his first post is here). He will be playing the TRS-80 version and I will be playing the … Apple Atari version.
Sorry, Apple II superfans: this one didn’t get illustrated like the last game. Text-only, making graphics with the power of your imagination!
Before really getting rolling, let’s briefly review the prior Jyym Pearson works, and most particularly the quirks and tendencies that need to be kept in mind while playing one of his games.
Escape from Traam
Curse of Crowley Manor
Earthquake San Francisco 1906
Saigon: The Final Days
The Institute
Lucifer’s Realm
Authors can of course add things to their style, remove things, and do one-off experiments, but they do tend to have certain “signatures” that are visible if you consider an oeuvre in aggregate. In Pearson’s case (with his sometimes collaborator, Robyn) he always has very intense use of the LOOK command. Getting through sections will often involve intensely applying LOOK to each and every noun mentioned, and then to nouns mentioned by using LOOK. Earthquake San Francisco went into shaggy-dog-joke territory, having a CREVICE with a QUARTZ with an INDENTATION with a FLAT SPOT with an OBJECT with a DIAMOND, requiring you to apply LOOK at every step in the chain.
LOOK UNDER is rare but did show up in The Institute.
Pearson also appeals to more than just visual senses; LISTEN was required to localize a child in Earthquake, LISTEN was used to find a dripping sound in The Institute. Lucifer’s Realm had multiple uses of SMELL.
While Escape from Traam was essentially linear, Pearson gradually started to add non-linearity by requiring re-visits to old locations; for example, Lucifer’s Realm had an early encounter with Beelzebub giving general quest information. Late in the game, upon encountering Jesus, he says you should speak to the “evil one” again, requiring a re-visit all the way back to Beelzebub.
With all this preparation I’m still probably going to get crushed somewhere, but that’s how adventure games go. Noteworthy is that this is the first time I’m playing the non-graphical version; I could tell from comparing the TRS-80 and Apple II versions of Lucifer’s Realm that puzzles sometimes went under revision. Here we’ll just have to deal with version 1.
The game starts almost like it ought to be the epilogue to the prior game where you get your long-deserved rest; you rise up to a tunnel and get led by Winston Churchill into heaven who ominously says “only you can help us”.
Abraham Lincoln shows up shortly after to explain that Hitler’s army still has the power of the Deecula statue and is now veering towards heaven. Because we were the one that restored the statue in the first place we are (by some mystical rules) the only ones who are able to destroy it.
The game thus rather generously starts you with a GOLD RING, HELMET, SCEPTER, and SWORD, essentially the Armor of God. At the very first room where you can really start acting (the peaceful meadow) if you LOOK you’ll see something floating in the river, and you can find a wood box that way.
Proceeding further leads to dead lands.
I don’t have much of a map done yet.
Early on you can land in trouble in some quicksand; I haven’t been able to get out and I suspect I might need an item I don’t have yet. Veering away from the quicksand to the south leads to a demon who asks you trivia.
Yes, really, trivia.
He says,Welcome to the new quiz show LET’S MAKE HIM SQUEAL.
Thus you need to know (or be willing to look up) what the capital of Ecuador is and how many yards are in a mile. This is not a moment Pearson has had before but it makes me wonder if the pattern will be demons trying to trick us and play games rather than having to do that much in the way of physical combat.
Past the demon is an ancient stone door.
I was unable to get through, so I stopped to LOOK (as is the Pearson Way) and immediately died.
We are apparently immortal and I could see this getting exploited in a puzzle somewhere. This seems like a good place to leave off for now. I need to do my verb-testing run and of course LOOK and re-LOOK in every location for clues.
Renga in Blue 