The Cottage: Victory

As of my last post, I had obtained seven of the treasures required to complete the game: the diamond, the cucumber, the coins, the shoe, the trilogy, the laurel wreath and the contract.  That left me with six to obtain: the silver ingot  (not "silver stick" as Google had translated for me), the halberd, the skull, the alarm clock, the painting, and the pearl necklace.  Some of those I obtained fairly, and others not so much, as you'll see below.

The Silver Ingot: You may recall from earlier posts that there's a safe I haven't been able to open.  The only clue I had was a sign in a nearby room: "CORKSCREW HELPS WITH THE SA..."  I had figured that the last word there referred to the safe, and I was right.  So I kept playing, looking out for a corkscrew, but I never found one.  It's not an item, though, it's a password.  You just need to type CORKSCREW in front of the safe and opens, revealing a silver ingot.

The Jewelled Halberd:  I already knew that the halberd was in the possession of a guard, but nothing I did was enough to get him to relinquish it.  The solution to this was fairly circuitous.  First, I needed to cut open a glass window using a diamond, and take the crowbar hidden behind it.  Then, I needed to use the crowbar to open the chest in Tharvald's Room.  (I'm not sure why this took me so long to figure out, it's pretty obvious.)  Inside the chest was a bike pump, which I used to inflate the ball I had found in the Entrance Hall.  There's another window elsewhere, too high to reach, but I was able to break it by kicking the ball.  Behind that window I found some vodka, and with the vodka I was able to get the guard drunk and take his halberd.

Pretty involved for just one item, isn't it?  The only part of this I didn't figure out by myself was kicking the ball into the high window.  I had to use the game's HELP command, which sometimes gives you a clue at the cost of some points from your score.  Using it in the room with the window gave me the solution outright.  I don't quite consider this one cheating, because the HELP clues were programmed into the original game.  (By the way, whatever you do, don't use the KICK command unless you're kicking the ball.  You'll injure your ankle, and suffer a delay of a few second between every move.  It's infuriating, and I'm not sure it goes away.)

Claiming the halberd.

The Alarm Clock: Not far from the guard is an ornate gate that is locked.  I had found the keys earlier, but apparently only the guard is strong enough to turn them in the lock.  Giving him the keys wasn't a problem, as he accepts anything you try to give him with a wry smile.  The problem is that he's in the room adjacent to the gate, so he can't interact with it.  I had to figure out how to get him to move.

The first thing you need to do is get him drunk, which I'd already done.  I tried MOVE GUARD, PUSH GUARD and DRAG GUARD, and all sorts of other things.  The solution ended up being TAKE GUARD, which took me so damned long to figure out.  I should have remembered this after the bear in Colossal Cave Adventure.  So you give the keys to the guard, TAKE him, walk to the gate, and unlock it.  Job done.  Just remember that you need the guard in your possession, and he needs the keys in his possession.  If you drop him before you try to unlock the gate it won't work.

The room beyond the gate is an interesting one, and the closest that the game gets to actually providing a story.  When you enter, the as-yet-unmentioned Cottage Council are having a meeting, where the chairman Thorvald wants to discuss the deterioration in quality of recent "cottage researchers".  Another member, Kimmo, sees you enter and proposes that they finish the meeting in the Treasury, and the lot of them leave.  It's not much to go on, but at least it provides some foreshadowing for the end of the game, such as it is.

Oh yeah, the alarm clock.  It's in this room.  Another treasure down!

Lads, the quality of the Cottage Council ain't so hot either.

The Skull: This is where I seriously needed help.  First of all, there's no indication that you would even need a skull.  I only knew because I'd looked it up in the source code.  I'm all for obscure puzzles, but give me something to go on.  Anyway, there's one obvious skull in the game, and that's the one belonging to the guard.  You can't kill him, even when he's drunk: the only weapon in the game is the halberd, and when you throw it at him he will catch it.  You need to put him to sleep, which involves giving him a second drink before he sobers up.  He's already drained the vodka bottle dry, though.  You can find more in a room with a chess motif, which I had previously been unable to enter due to a faun stepping on my toes.  If you go there with the empty vodka bottle, Fozzie Bear shows up and gives you a refill.  I'm not sure that Fozzie is the Muppet I'd choose to be handing out alcohol, but whatever.  (Rowlf, maybe?  He looks like he enjoys a good drink.)  Right after opening the gate, you need to grab the guard and take him all the way to get the refill, then get him drunk again.  After that he falls asleep, and you can murder the poor bloke.  That's not the end of it, though, because you then need to bury him in the cemetery.  Then you need to wait for about 50 moves while his body decomposes, and then you can take his skull.

So yeah, this one I needed help with all the way through.  I couldn't use the HELP clues though, because none of them mentioned anything about the skull.  And as I said in my last post, I couldn't find a walkthrough for this game on the internet.  What I should have found is the HINT file included with the game, because it's mentioned at the very beginning.  It's not a part of the original game; I think it was added in 2007 when the game was first ported.  It provides hints on various objects, characters and areas in the game, in a sort of tiered system that starts with vague clues and gets more specific as you go deeper.  If you've ever used the Ultimate Hint System it's similar to that.  I used those hints to get me through this whole process, which is so obtuse that I never would have solved it otherwise.

The Pearl Necklace: This was easily the most frustrating puzzle in the game.  Even with the solution in front of me, it took forever to get right.  The old man is found in a dark room, and he's clutching a bottle of water and a pearl necklace that he refuses to let go of.  You can give him the laurel wreath, and he'll give you the bottle.  But then he disappears, muttering about being disturbed, and you have to find the bastard.  He could be anywhere in the game, so good luck.  Then, when you find him, he wanders off again.  And so on, until you get the puzzle exactly right.  I made liberal use of saved games here, let me tell you, and I was also pretty free with the HINT file.  This is another one where the solution would have been beyond me.

The bottle he gives you is empty, but it's marked as a water bottle, so I went and filled it up at the waterfall.  When you find the old man again, you need to give him some water.  Then, while he's drinking, you need to blind him with the lamp, causing him to drop the necklace.  Say what?  First of all, there's zero indication that you need to blind this guy, unless you count the fact that he begins in a dark room.  He doesn't show an aversion to light otherwise.  And you can't blind him while he has the bottle, because he'll use it to deflect the light.  Secondly, you need to use the command GIVE WATER.  If you use GIVE BOTTLE, he just takes the bottle away from you, and you're back to square one.  All of this while he's wandering off to a new random location every time you try something.  It was annoying to me playing on a modern laptop, and it must have been far worse for anyone trying to do this on a mainframe terminal.

Oh yeah, you need to get the laurel wreath back from him as well, but that's easy.  It was found in a room with a sign saying ALEA JACTA EST, and typing that phrase returns the wreath to its starting location.

Getting the pearl necklace.

The Shoe and the Painting: The faun shoe and the painting are both listed as items you get points for from the Automated Machine, but they're both red herrings.  You need the shoe to get the coins, which are worth more points.  You can't take the painting at all.

With all of the treasures in hand, I was able to take them to the Automated Machine and insert them one by one in exchange for points.  When I was done I had 330 points.  I was expecting a victory message at that point, but I got nothing.  It turns out that there are other things that grant points aside from the treasures: entering the cottage, debating the Muppets, kicking the ball through the window, getting into the animal room past the curtain, getting a phone directory, cutting the window with a diamond, finding where the pirate hides his treasure, opening the ornate gate, and burying the guard in the cemetery.  I'd done all of these except finding the phone directory, which I'd already done in a previous game.  So I went and grabbed it again and got the following victory message.

Even the cucumber is a better prize than this.

Accepted into the cottage council.  Yippee.  Would it not have been better to just bugger off with the treasure?

There are only a few things in the game that remain a mystery now that I've finished it.  I never found a use for the phone, despite how complicated it is to set up.  It must have used a lot of code for not much of a result.  I never reached the hole under the jetty, and I'm not sure it's anything more than a bit of description.  The "animal room" is simply a place you go to get points.  I never figured out the half-rotten tomato, or the kitchen.  I suspect they're all irrelevant, and I'm not about to translate some Swedish source code just to find out.

So that's The Cottage, and good riddance to it.  It's not the worst adventure game I've played, but it is one of the most frustrating.  I suspect that foreign language games will continue to baffle me in many areas, and I need to keep it in mind that I'm playing a translation.  It's possible that some of the transitions and events that I found confusing made perfect sense in the original game.  That said, I can only rate the game in front of me, but I'll try to be as fair as possible.

FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: There's potential to be had in a game set in a mysterious cottage in a Swedish province, but The Cottage doesn't provide much of interest on that front.  It has some interesting areas, but no cohesion at all.  Pirates?  Fauns?  The Muppets?!  As for the story, it's yet another treasure hunt, with some stuff about a Cottage Council tacked on.  There's nothing there.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters: A bunch of character show up throughout the game: Thorvald, Osvald, Kimmo, the telephone repairman, the lift repairman, the fauns, the guard, the old man.  Hardly any of them do anything though, and only a couple of them can be interacted with.  They're obstacles and events rather than characters.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics: A primitive text adventure is always going to score low in this category, and it's not helped by a fairly ugly translation.  The writing was apparently quite informal to begin with, and I wonder if any jokes got lost in the move to English?  Regardless, it's all quite terse and occasionally confusing, with little in the way of atmosphere.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: It's a simple, unsophisticated parser that does a decent enough job.  I'm going to dock it a point for using compass direction outside, and FORWARD, BACK, LEFT and RIGHT inside.  It wasn't as confusing as I thought it would be, but it still annoyed me.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge: I would rate this game as slightly too hard to be enjoyable.  Getting the skull and the pearl necklace were particularly frustrating, and chasing around after the old man was a nightmare.  I used save games to help with that, but I'm not even sure they would have been available to those playing it on a mainframe.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: At face value, it's yet another treasure hunt in a whimsical fantasy setting.  It's only 1978 and I'm already sick of those.  It does at least try something new with the two different sets of movement commands, though, and I'm tempted to give it points just for not featuring a lightsource-based time limit, or a large labyrinth.  I should also consider that it's the first ever Swedish adventure game, and quite influential in that country.  Rating: 5 out of 7.

Fun: I didn't outright hate the game, but I didn't find much to enjoy either.  The Muppet sequence was probably the most enjoyable, functioning almost like a mini-game where you make a series of multiple choices to get to the end.  It had some memorably absurd situations, but that one sequence isn't enough to drag up the score.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

I'll never be playing this game again, so there's no bonus point.  The above scores total 16, which doubled equals a Final Rating of 32.  That puts it 14th on the main list, and 8th on the adventure game list.  It's sitting just above Voyage to Atlantis and Colossal Cave Adventure II, and just below Pirate Adventure. 

ADDENDUM:

Somewhat later in this blog I made the decision to overhaul my Final Rating system, so I'm going back through and fixing all of the games I've already played as of March 2020.  I've ditched the Innovation and Influence category, and replaced it for adventure games with a category for Puzzles.  I've also changed the purpose of the bonus points, saving them for games that are important, innovative, influential, or have features that are otherwise not covered by my other categories.

Also, the Final Rating is a boring name.  The CRPG Addict has his GIMLET.  The Adventure Gamers have their PISSED rating.  Data Driven Gamer has his harpoons.  So I'm ditching the generic name and calling my new system the RADNESS Index: the Righteous Admirability Designation, Numerically Estimating Seven Scores. It's a pretentious mouthful, but I'm going with it.

Puzzles: I found a lot of the puzzles in this game to be irritating and not at all well signposted, but enough of them were clever that I can't give it the minimum rating. Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus: 1. The Cottage is the earliest known adventure game written in a language other than English, so it gets a bonus point.

The Cottage gets a RADNESS Index of 27 out of 100. That places it 16th overall, and 10th out of thirteen adventure games.  It has a lot of really good ideas, but so much of it is jarring or actively irritating.

NEXT: With The Cottage over and done with, I'm moving on to Library, the third and final adventure for the Wander system.  Let's see if those games can go three for three in requiring me to fix the code so that I can win.

The Cottage: Laying It Out

My progress in The Cottage has been slow and painstaking.  A part of that is because it's not exactly setting my world on fire.  There are many, many things I could be doing that I'd enjoy more than playing this game.  Mostly, though, it's that the puzzles are somewhat obtuse, and there are a number of things going on in the game that I can't quite explain.

After a lengthy session last night where I didn't feel like I was making much progress, I pulled up the source code and had a bit of a look.  Unfortunately for me, the code I found was in Swedish, so I wasn't able to glean a great deal from it.  I found what I was looking for, though: a list of the treasures I need to complete the game.  It's somewhat of a cheat, but I wanted to know roughly how far I had progressed, and what items are important.  There are thirteen treasures in all: a diamond, a silver stick, a smelly cucumber, a jewelled halberd, a skull, an alarm clock, some gold coins, a "trilogy", a contract, a pearl necklace, a laurel wreath, and a faun shoe.  I know where ten of these are already, which is quite heartening.  I'll detail their whereabouts below.

• The diamond is out in the open in Thorvald's Room, which is not that hard to get to.  Carrying it around presents a problem, though: certain doors and exits from the house become barred when you are carrying it around.  It's still possible to get back outside with the diamond, via some more circuitous routes, or by getting lucky in those rooms that send you to random locations.
• The smelly cucumber is also in Thorvald's Room, in a hatch in the roof.  You need a ladder to reach it, but that can be found in a cupboard in Osvald's Room, right next door.
• The jewelled halberd is in the possession of a guard, who is situated in an area beyond the lift's engine room.  I'm yet to find any meaningful way to interact with the guard.
• The gold coins can be won from a gambling machine that's found in a cave in the wilderness.
• The shoe is found in a cave south of the gambling machine, where it falls from the foot of a faun who runs by.  The shoe is needed as a stake to operate the gambling machine.  If you lose at the gambling machine, it's easy enough to come back and get another shoe.  But once you win the coins, the shoes stop spawning.  I need to see if I can get the points for the shoe, then get another shoe for the machine.
• The "trilogy" is actually a copy of Lord of the Rings, and it's found in a maze of twisty passages.

Speaking of things I'd enjoy more than this game...

• The pearl necklace is in the possession of an old man, who won't surrender it for anything.  He did show some interest in the laurel wreath when I had it in my possession, but giving it to him didn't help.
• The laurel wreath is found in the Studio, sitting out in the open under a sign that reads "Alea Jacta Est" ("The die is cast").
• The picture is found in the same maze of passages where I found the trilogy, but it doesn't seem to have an actual location.  Rather, it appears as I move from one location to another.  I'm really not sure how to interact with it at all, because it never appears as an object in a room where I'm standing.
• The contract is a strange one to get a hold of.  Remember when I mentioned that there's a lengthy, surreal section where you have to participate in a performance of The Muppet Show?  No, it wasn't a fever dream.  You have to navigate your way through the choices, Choose Your Own Adventure style, and if you make the right ones Kermit the Frog will reward you with a contract.  It's frankly bizarre, but also quite a bit of fun.  It might be my favourite thing in the game.  I understand that it was left out of the commercial release for legal reasons, which is a shame.

Maybe the weirdest thing I've encountered in the blog so far.

So as it stands, I can easily get the diamond, the cucumber, the coins, the shoe, the trilogy, the laurel wreath, and the contract.  I need to work out how to get the halberd away from the guard, how to get the necklace away from the old man, how to interact with the picture, and how to get the coins without losing the shoe.  That's a refreshingly short to-do list, and it's somewhat refreshed my enthusiasm for the game.

That said, those are far from the only puzzles I need to solve on my way to winning.  The game has presented me with loads of other mysteries, some of which I've solved and some that remain elusive.  You may have noticed that I love running things down in point form when I'm writing about text adventures, and I'm going to do that again here.  It helps me to get my thoughts together, and figure out exactly what I need to do.

• In my last post, I noted that there was an area in the forest where it appeared that someone had been recently digging.  Using a spade that I found in the cemetery I dug a hole, only to find that it was empty.  A little later I tried again, and found that it contained some treasures that had been stolen from me by a robber (this game's equivalent of the thief from Zork, or the pirate from Colossal Cave Adventure).  Everything that the robber steals will end up here, which could actually end up helpful in getting things to the surface, as this area's not hard at all to get to.
• There's a rowing-boat near the beginning area of the game, which can be used to row to every shore of the lake.  Weirdly, at the centre of the lake there's a telephone socket.  When I tried to plug a phone into it, a telephone repairman came along, uninstalled the socket, and gave me a phone directory containing some useful numbers.
• I'm not sure what the deal is with the phone sockets, though.  Sometimes when I try to use one, the repairman comes along and takes the socket away.  At other times I've been able to plug it in and call some numbers successfully, but none of them have accomplished anything.  You can call a phone repairman and a glazier (both of whom are out), the guard (who just tells you stop distracting him from his guard duty), and a few other rooms that had already been disconnected before I found a socket I could use.  I've also found an extension cable, which will no doubt play into the ultimate solution for this puzzle.
• There are a number of paths that lead to an area under the jetty where the game begins.  There's a hole down there, but if you remain in that area you'll drown.  I think the solution lies with a deflated ball that I found, but I need a pump of some sort so that I can use it to float.
• I'd mentioned in my last post that I had found a crowbar behind a window, but breaking the window caught the attention of Osvald, who came along and took the crowbar himself.  The solution to this one was to use the diamond to cut the window.  I haven't found a use for the crowbar yet.
• In a pitch-dark room, there's a hidden lamp.  The game gives you no indication that it's there, but if you type GET you'll pick it up.  The game then informs you that you can only keep the lamp if you stay put.  Sure enough, if you type STAY PUT you'll eventually - after 30 seconds of actual waiting - be transported to another location.  It doesn't make much logical sense.

Also shown here is me being booted from the room with the animals.

• There are three rooms that I can't get into: a kitchen where an angry faun tries to kill me, a chess-themed room where a faun steps on my toes, and a room full of animals that is UNDER CONSTRUCTION.  The last one seems like it might be a red herring, but then again it's past a puzzle that involves cutting through a curtain with some scissors.  I'd think a puzzle like that would lead to a useful area, but you never know with a game designed by pre-teens.
• I still don't know what's with all of the areas where you're just randomly holding a rotten tomato.  It's baffling.
• There are some ornate gates just past the guard with the halberd, but the keys I found don't open them.
• There's a safe that I can't open.  Elsewhere there's a sign that says "CORKSCREW HELPS WITH THE SA..", which may or may not be relevant here.
• The lift is a useful way to get around, but sometimes it crashes and kills me when I try to use it.  I'm not sure what sets this off.  I'm thinking it might be something to do with the number of items in my inventory, or perhaps that the presence of the diamond causes it in the same way that it blocks off the house's exits.  More investigation is required.
• The Automatic Machine where you deposit treasure can be accessed from outside as well as inside the cottage.  This is good to know, because I got blown up the second time I tried to go there from inside.  The outside access lets you come and go as often as you like.

So that's a pretty comprehensive rundown of where I am in The Cottage.  I said that laying it out like this helps me figure out what I need to do, and I'm really going to need that help here.  The source code I found is in Swedish, and I can't find any walkthroughs.  I'm on my own.  The game itself provides a HELP feature, though, and I've used it a few times.  It helped me with cutting the glass window, and finding the lamp in the dark.  Normally this would feel like cheating to me, but I'm fine with it when it's a function that's built into the game.  And it doesn't give hints for every puzzle, so for most of the game I'll be on my own.

The Cottage: Nine Floors, Zero Clues

After mostly exploring the wilderness in my last post, I've moved onto the interior of the titular cottage.  This gave me a taste of this game's idiosyncratic method of navigation: it uses compass directions when you're outside, and the commands LEFT, RIGHT, FORWARD and BACK to move around inside.

To be honest, this wasn't as irritating as I had thought it would be.  The big sticking point I had was whether the directions would be fixed or relative to your own position.  What I mean is, if I enter an area will FORWARD and BACK always take me to the same place, or will it change depending on which entrance I came through?  Thankfully, the directions are fixed.  It doesn't make much sense, and it doesn't really justify not using compass directions, but it does make mapping easier than it would have been otherwise.  Relative directions could work in a game where the geography is well-defined, but The Cottage is definitely not that game.

I had a moment of panic early on when I stumbled into a lift, and saw that the cottage has 9 levels.  This gave me some horrible flashbacks to the sprawling size of Acheton, but I don't think that this game is all that big.  The geography twists and turns a lot, though, and it's almost impossible to know what floor you're supposed to be on.  There are loads of paths between levels aside from the lift, and a combination of terse language and general weirdness can make it rather difficult to navigate.  I feel like I've mapped most of the cottage interior (about 50 areas), although there is definite room for expansion.  I've found the lift entrances for levels 1, 2, 4, 8 and 9, so there are obviously floors I haven't been to yet.

Some places and points of interest within the cottage are as follows:

• One room had a curtain, which I was "too weak to move".  Setting aside all discussions of my actual strength, I was able to get through by solving a few puzzles.  In one room I found some keys, which I used to open a case in another room, which gave me a sledgehammer which I used to break a glass box in yet another room to get some scissors.  With those scissors I cut through the curtain, and behind it I found a room full of animals.
• I wasn't able to enjoy that Animal Room for long though, because I was transported to a random location.  There's a lot of that in this game.  One minute you're happily exploring, the next you're just somewhere else, and it can get very annoying.  This is part of the "general weirdness" I was talking about above, and it's not always apparent why it's happening.
• When you die, the game gives you the option of being resurrected.  If you choose YES, you find yourself at the bottom of a grave with a priest looking down at you, all depicted in ASCII art.

• In one room I found a phone that was ringing.  Upon answering it, I was asked for my name, and then congratulated for finding a phone.  There are phone sockets throughout the house, so I'll have to try plugging it in at various points.

• There's an old man in a dark room, who refuses to let go of his pearl necklace and water bottle.  I tried to kill him, but he noticed the vicious gleam in my eye and ran away.  Elsewhere I found a smelly cucumber, and I'm going to try giving it him, because I'm pretty sure that's the sort of thing an old man would want.
• The lift has an engine room.  At first it was empty, but later on I followed a lift repairman inside and saw an open hatch in the ground.  This led to a "vestibule", where a guard with a bejewelled halberd was stationed.  I subsequently got lost and couldn't find my way back here, so I'm not sure what the guard does, if anything.
• In one room is a dark window, which I broke to find a crowbar inside.  Unfortunately, the noise attracted a fellow named Thorvald, who took the crowbar as payment for the window.  I've met Thorvald in a number of places, and it seems that he might be a sort of antagonist for the whole game.  I've been in his bedroom, as well as that of a fellow named Osvald, who I met in the kitchen.
• One room has an "automatic machine", which asks you to deposit items in exchange for points.  I suspect that this is where you place the game's various treasures.  It asks specifically for a "picture", so it might be that I need to deposit the treasures in a specific order.  The second time I went there I was killed by a bomb, so it seems you only get one crack at it.
• There's Staff Kitchen, in which I encountered Osvald as well as a very angry faun who tried to kill me with a knife.  Afterwards the floor collapsed, dumping me elsewhere.  It's another one of those "transported to a random location" bits I mentioned above.

And no,  have no idea what "quarking a praktyl" means.

• Speaking of fauns, there's a room I can't enter because one of them keeps stepping on my feet.  Maybe I need better shoes?
• I found a room that was labelled Big Turning Labyrinth, and promptly got the heck out of there.  I hate old-school adventure game labyrinths, so I'm leaving this until last.
• In a similar vein, there's a bit where a boiler explodes and opens a hole into a large cavern.  It had the makings of another maze/labyrinth, so I've ignored that as well.  I hate mazes, you guys.
• This may have been a fever dream, but at some point I stumbled into a lengthy performance of the Muppet Show.  I can't remember where it was, and I didn't get a screen-cap.  It was very late at night, so I can't be sure that it actually happened.  It was very weird.

So far I'm not really feeling this game.  It has a lot of stuff going on, but none of it really seems to fit together, and the wacky geography is frustrating.  I'll keep up with mapping, and hopefully will have explored the whole game before my next post, but let's just say that it's not doing a great job at pulling me away from Breath of the Wild.

Game 22: Stuga (aka The Cottage) (1978)

A while ago, it was Ultima VII that kept me from blogging.  More recently, it's been The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is an incredible game, and probably the best in the series since at least 1998.  It's very hard to dig into text adventures from the 1970s when I have the vastness of Hyrule to explore (and boy, is it vast), but here I am with my first non-English game: Stuga, otherwise known as The Cottage.

The cover of the 1986 commercial release version

The Cottage (as I'll refer to it from now on) was created in Sweden by two brothers (Viggo and Kimmo Eriksson) and their friend (Olle Johansson).  They were, respectively, 10, 12 and 14 years old, which puts them in a similar category to Greg Hassett, whose games have been haunting this blog for a while now.  All of their parents were on staff at the Stockholm Computer Central for Research and Higher Education, which gave them access to the Oden mainframe, and also exposed them to the Woods/Crowther version of Colossal Cave Adventure.  In summer of 1977 they started crafting The Cottage, and the first playable version of it was released in 1978.  It was made commercially available - retitled as Stugan - in 1986, but I gather that that version had some changes from the original.  Much later, around 2009, the game was translated to English, and that's the version I'll be playing (using Winfrotz).

No hints yet on who or what VIOL might be.

The Cottage begins with the hero standing on a jetty, with people water-skiing in the lake behind and a house in the distance ahead.  The goal seems to be to get a high score by collecting valuables (i.e. the same goal as pretty much every other adventure game of 1975-1978).  Your score starts at 50, and can be increased to a maximum of 307.  I haven't done much experimentation with the parser yet, but it all seems to be pretty basic stuff.  The main thing it does that I haven't seen elsewhere is change up the way you move depending on whether you're inside the mansion or in the wilderness.  When you're outside, the game uses the standard compass directions (N, S, NE, SW, etc.), but when you're inside it switches to directional commands (Forward, Left, Right, Back).  I haven't done much exploration inside yet, so I can't say exactly how irritating this is, but I'm going to hazard a guess and say "very".

Given the potential irritation of this change, I've stuck to the wilderness and pretty much explored that completely.  Most of it is forest areas surrounding a lake, with a fence around the perimeter to create a boundary.  So far the rooms and there exits all line up and make sense really well, and the game has been quite simple to map.  I fully expect that this will be right out the window once I get inside the cottage.

The game has already presented some basic obstacles and mysteries.  There's a rowing boat that I haven't tried yet, and a locked gate for which I've yet to find the key.  In one place there's a hole in the perimeter fence you can crawl through, which leads to an area where someone has been digging.  I haven't probed any of these mysteries too hard yet, as I'm in exploration mode.  I like to map as much as possible before I start getting stuck into solving things.

I've solved one puzzle so far, though it barely qualifies as such.  In a cave with numerous entrances (including one behind a waterfall) there's a gambling machine, with a sign reading "PULL THE LEVER IF YOU HAVE A FAUN SHOE TO STAKE".  In a room directly to the south a faun runs through, leaving its shoe behind.  Sure enough, if you pull the machine's lever with the shoe in your possession, you're rewarded with some gold coins.  It's hardly Acheton-level stuff, but it's a start.

Fear my genius.

There are a number of ways to get inside the titular cottage.  I've gone in through the front door, climbed down a well, and crawled through holes in the side of the house.  There's a bathing hut in which the floor collapses when you enter, leaving you in "Thorvald's Room".  I do like a game that rewards exploration, but I have to say that the transition from wilderness to interior can sometimes be a little jarring.  I'm chalking it up to language/culture differences for the moment, and I'll try not to let it bother me too much.

There's one other thing in the game that makes little sense to me, but may possibly be better understood by Swedish players.  In a couple of areas, instead of a room description I've gotten a message saying "You have a half-rotten tomato in your hand but it vanishes".  Following that, I've found myself somewhere inside the cottage, usually in a boiler room.  It's weird and nonsensical, but in a way that jars me out of the game.  If there's anyone who knows what this might be a reference to, I'd love to hear it.

As you may have guessed, Googling "rotten tomato" is of no help.

So far, The Cottage seems to be another in a long line of whimsical fantasy adventure games (it seems to be the thing to do in 1978).  It's very sparse in its descriptions, which is a double-edged sword.  It makes the game less immersive, but it also makes it easier to figure out what's important in each room.  By the time I get to my next post I'll have explored inside the cottage, and I'm hoping that the inconsistent movement inputs don't ruin the experience for me.  Regardless, I expect there'll be enough oddities in the game to keep me amused.  You know, provided I don't just play another 100 hours of Breath of the Wild instead...

King Tut's Tomb: Complete Victory!

OCD strikes again!

As you can see from the image above, I managed to get the full score of 207 points in King Tut's Tomb.  I owe it all to Adamant, who has been doing a wonderful job of dissecting the code of this game in the comments section of my previous post.

As I had surmised, you lose points if you take too many moves.  I had also suspected that the number of matches you finish with influences the score, but it's more insidious than that.  To get all of the points, you need to complete the game using just a single match.  Given that the torch goes out roughly every 32 moves it seems that this is impossible, but there are some quirks in the code that can be exploited.  Simply put, the torch only goes out on move 32 if you have just entered a room (or used the LOOK command).  If you do anything else on move 32 (or any multiple of 32), the torch stays lit.  By counting my moves carefully, I was able to achieve the screen you see above and satisfy my inner completist.

Obviously this is the sort of thing that can only be done with careful dissection of the code, or an extreme amount of luck.  You'd need even more luck than it seems, though, because get this: whenever you light the torch it uses a random number of matches between 1 and 4.  I spent more time lighting the torch at the start of the game, checking how many matches had been used, and reloading than I did actually playing.  There's also the mummy, who you can't defeat by burning if you want the full score; you just have to rest your hopes on the 50/50 chance that he'll slip on a banana peel rather than kill you.  So yeah, the chances of getting this score without knowledge of the code are practically zero, but with Adamant's help I was able to do it.  Thanks!

Game 21: King Tut's Tomb (1978)

Apologies for the lengthy delay, but Ultima VII is real good, you guys.  So good that when I finished it I launched immediately into Ultima Underworld II, and Serpent Isle following that.  What can I say, I got that Ultima bug, and it caused me to neglect whichever of the virtues covers "diligent blogging".  Sacrifice maybe?  Honor?  Whichever it is, I hath verily lost an eighth, and I'm back to make amends.  (And if you don't know what I'm talking about, well, stick with the blog, and all will be revealed in the years to come.  Or better yet, just go play Ultima IV right now.)

This title screen depicts a brilliantly accurate scene of our hero 
exploring the tomb without his torch.

Today's game is the next effort from boy genius Greg Hassett, King Tut's Tomb.  Having created a game based on Jules Verne, and another tackling the haunted house genre, Hassett's next effort draws from stories based on Egyptology and the legend of the mummy's curse.  All of these genres are perhaps overdone by today's standards, but all three are firsts in the text adventure field in 1978, which has to count for something.

This game was developed for the TRS-80, and that's the platform I'm emulating it on, but there's a caveat to that which I ought to mention.  Every copy of this game that I could find for the TRS-80 has problems with the code: in particular, there's a certain point that, once you've progressed past it, doesn't allow you to return to the entrance of the tomb. At first I had thought this to be a clever puzzle, but it seems not. Every walkthrough and all the ports of the game that I tried - not to mention the source code that's available in this book - suggest that returning to the entrance should be no trouble at all.  I'm not sure where the problem originated.  Was it in the game's initial release?  Did someone writing the code to put up on the internet type it in wrong?  I have no idea, but I feel safe in declaring that it was definitely an error.  With that in mind, I fixed the code to match the published version, which changes some of the map connections.  I also took it upon myself to fix a minor bug when encountering the mummy, and to fix some spelling errors, because I'm like that.  So I'm playing a slightly tweaked version of the game than what's available on the web, but one that can actually be beaten. As usual, if anyone wants this code they should shoot me an e-mail.

The opening area of the game.

As with Hassett's other games, this is a simple text adventure. It has a two word VERB NOUN parser, which only recognises the first three letters of each word.  I have mixed feelings about this level of simplicity.  It can be limiting, but it's also nice to know that I won't have to deal with any particularly complex puzzles. Your character has an inventory limit of eight items.  Much to my surprise it recognises the command DROP EVERYTHING (more commonly seen in games as DROP ALL), allowing you to dump all of your inventory at once. It's a nice aid for inventory management (and move conservation) that I would never have expected to see in such a simple, early game.  It doesn't recognise GET EVERYTHING, however.

Speaking of simple and early, this game is another treasure hunt. You play as an unnamed explorer/adventurer/who-knows-what, raiding a pyramid to find various treasures, I guess for their monetary value. There's no explanation, and I really don't require any.  Collecting shiny things is just what text adventure protagonists do, and what they use them for once the game is done is best left to the realm of imagination.

There are thirteen treasures to collect, and finding them isn't difficult in any way. It's simply a matter of exploring every room in the pyramid and carting them back to the entrance.  There are a couple of small mazes to navigate (like, three or four areas each), and a gate to unlock, none of which is challenging.  The main puzzles/logistical problems to overcome, what few there are, are detailed below. 

Light: A late 70s adventure game where you need to carry a light source? How unusual!  I kid, of course.  Every adventure game I've played, except for the two developed for Wander, has had a light source of some kind.  In King Tut's Tomb you carry a torch and some matches.  The torch will go out periodically, and if you move around in the dark you'll eventually fall and break your neck.  You need to relight the torch with a match.  I never ran out of matches in the game, but a look at the source code tells me that there's a limit of 25.  They're also used to get around another obstacle, as detailed below, and the number you have left at the end influences your overall score.

The Mummy: Occasionally a mummy shows up to menace you as you explore, because it's an Egyptian-themed game and a mummy is obligatory.  He'll try to kill you, and there's a 50/50 chance that he succeeds.  On the times that he fails, there's a message about him slipping on a conveniently placed banana peel that is equal parts amusing and baffling.  (It can happen anywhere, so does that mean every location has a banana peel?  Who left them all there anyway?  Or does it spontaneously generate when the mummy appears?)  The mummy is easy to defeat, though, as the most obvious means of killing him is given to you at the beginning of the game.  All you need to do is BURN MUMMY while carrying the matches.  (The original code didn't display the message saying that the mummy was destroyed, although the mummy still vanished.  I tweaked this so that it works.)

Maybe the goobers eat bananas?  Or maybe I'm giving this 
game far too much thought?

The Goober: There's another monster that randomly shows up to try to kill you: a "goober".  These things are immortal and indestructible, and will follow you around and throw knives at you until they eventually hit and kill you.  One way to get rid of them is to head back to the pyramid's entrance: for whatever reason, they won't follow you outside, and when you re-enter they will be gone.  The other way to scare them away is to show them a snake.

There's a snake in a pit quite deep into the pyramid.  At first the snake won't let you get near it, but if you feed it (with food that you find right at the start of the game) the snake calms down and you can carry it in your inventory.  The problem with that is that it eventually gets annoyed again, and will bite you.  The poison kills you eventually, but there's some wine you can drink that acts as an antidote.  As soon as you drink it, though, the snake slithers away and is gone.

The goobers will flee at the sight of the snake, but to be honest the rigmarole involved with carrying the snake around is more annoying than the goobers themselves.  Eventually I stopped bothering to carry the snake, because it was barely worth it.  Instead I just retraced my steps back to the entrance, or lured the goober to the snake pit if I was too deep within the pyramid.  They flee from the snake regardless of whether it's in your possession.

The goobers are really the only deterrent to finishing the game, and their random appearance can make or break any attempt.  They keep appearing even after you scare one away with the snake, so there's no way to get rid of them permanently.  In some games I would encounter three or four, and in others I wouldn't see any at all.  It's luck of the draw, and generally I just hoped to get a game where none would appear rather than bothering with the snake.  Starting over is probably less hassle than going through the process of carrying the snake for thirty or forty moves.

I got Goobered.

As you can see in the image above, the game offers reincarnation in much the same manner as Adventure and Zork.  If you take the offer, you'll find yourself back at the entrance with your torch and matches, and the rest of your inventory scattered throughout the pyramid.  It doesn't give you any benefits above just restarting that I can see.

It's not clear who it is that reincarnates you, other than "the game", but it does tie into the one clever thing that King Tut does.  When you're reincarnated, said mysterious benefactor does so with  the aid of some orange smoke that's stored inside a sarcophagus.  One of the treasure in the game is a sarcophagus, and if you open it, you get a face-full of orange smoke and a forcible reincarnation, complete with transportation to the entrance and the scattering of your inventory.  It's annoying, but I'm already on record as saying that I have an appreciation for a good adventure game trolling.  So to this I say, well-played Mr. Hassett.  Ya got me.

There are some other items in the game besides the treasures.  Some are red herrings, like a worthless glass medallion, or the Steve Martin poster that references his novelty hit King Tut.  (As a side note, I'm certain that I remember a time when Steve Martin was funny, but it sure wasn't that song.)  There's the cup of wine for curing snakebite, as mentioned above.  The only other useful non-treasure item is the Book of the Dead, which contains instructions for defeating the mummy and the goober.

Once you've retrieved all of the treasures and brought them back to the entrance, your score will be 175 out of 175.  The game gives you a possible 32 bonus points, though, for a grand total of 207.  I'm not certain what factors influence these bonus points exactly, but the highest score I could manage was 203.  Looking at the source code, I can see that you lose points if you take more than 310 turns.  The number of matches you have left is also a factor.  Other than that I can't figure it out, but I'm happy enough to leave it with a score of 203, which is still enough to gain the top rank of Grand Master.

Goddamn those 4 points!!!

Now, on to the FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: There's no story to speak of, and although the pyramid setting is novel for the time, the descriptions are (necessitated by hardware limitations) too bare to evoke much of anything.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters:  There are the goobers, the mummy, and a snake.  Two of those are obstacles, and one is an inventory item.  It would be tempting to give this a score of 0, but I'm trying to avoid having to do that.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Aesthetics:  It's a text adventure in grey and black, with the most minimal descriptions possible.  This is as bare-bones as games get, and it can't escape a minimum score.  Rating: 1 out of 7.

Mechanics: The parser is adequate, but very simplistic.  I was tempted to bump it up due to the recognition of DROP EVERYTHING, but in the end I decided it wasn't enough.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Challenge:  What challenge?  The game barely has any puzzles at all.  The mummy is a trivial nuisance.  The goobers are irritating, but eventually you'll get a game where they don't appear.  Other than that there's a locked gate.  That's it.  Sometimes an easy game is welcome, but there ought to be some challenge, and King Tut's Tomb doesn't present one at all.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: It's yet another treasure hunt, with only the Egyptian theme to differentiate it from what has gone before.  I'm not sure it merits an extra point, but I'm going to give it one just because it's such an early game in the genre.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Fun: King Tut's Tomb is such a slight experience that I struggle to see what enjoyment anyone could get out of it, outside of someone in 1978 playing an adventure game for the very first time.  I won't give it the minimum score, because I'm reserving that for games that elicit genuine hatred from me.  This game didn't elicit anything except a resigned shrug of the shoulders.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Bonus Point: No bonus point.  I won't play this game again.  What would be the point?

The scores above total 12, which doubled gives a Final Rating of 24.  This makes it the lowest rated game of the blog so far, although it's only 2 points below Hassett's other games, House of Seven Gables and Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  Gables is probably the best of his games that I've played so far, and given that I'm not 100% sure of the chronology I probably played it out of order.  It's a more complete game than King Tut, that's for certain.

ADDENDUM:

Somewhat later in this blog I made the decision to overhaul my Final Rating system, so I'm going back through and fixing all of the games I've already played as of March 2020.  I've ditched the Innovation and Influence category, and replaced it for adventure games with a category for Puzzles.  I've also changed the purpose of the bonus points, saving them for games that are important, innovative, influential, or have features that are otherwise not covered by my other categories.

Also, the Final Rating is a boring name.  The CRPG Addict has his GIMLET.  The Adventure Gamers have their PISSED rating.  Data Driven Gamer has his harpoons.  So I'm ditching the generic name and calling my new system the RADNESS Index: the Righteous Admirability Designation, Numerically Estimating Seven Scores. It's a pretentious mouthful, but I'm going with it.

Puzzles: This game barely has any puzzles at all, and the ones that are there are incredibly simple. Rating: 1 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

King Tut's Tomb's RADNESS Index is 22.  That puts it equal last along with one of Hassett's other efforts, Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  Should I feel bad for picking on a little boy?

NEXT: It's back to the Wander system, for the evocatively named Library.  It's all the excitement of my day job, in game form!

Acheton: Victory!

When last I left you, I had found 49 treasures and was preparing to gather them and see how close I might be to wrapping Acheton up.  I had some minor fears about how difficult it might be to get all of the treasures before my lamp ran out, but I didn't think it would be that hard.  Boy, was I wrong about that.

The timer in Acheton is tight, and there is absolutely zero time for messing around.  Yes, there's a way to recharge the lamp, but as far as I can tell you can only use it once - to get there you need to pass by a "toll hole" that requires you to drop a treasure inside.  You can get by once safely without sacrificing a treasure, but on the second try you'll be crushed to death.  So while the Timeless Cavern might be able to recharge the lamp multiple times, I don't know for sure because I could never get back there.

There's also the problem of juggling your inventory.  You can carry a maximum of eight items, and there are sections that provide you with far more treasures than you can carry at one time.  So there are places that need to be visited more than once, and that adds to the difficulty.

So I charted a rough outline of what order to do things, but try as I might I just couldn't collect all of the treasures before my lamp expired.  Even turning my lamp off at every opportunity (in rooms with another light source) didn't help.  Besides, one of the areas with too many treasures to carry was the one beyond the "toll hole".  Either there was some way to pass it multiple times that I was missing, or some other way to get my items back to the main area.

It turned out to be the latter, and the answer was something that I had needed to look up in a walkthrough earlier in the game.  There are stars painted on various walls throughout the caves, and if you turn off the lamp and say the magic word ZOOGE, anything that's on the floor will be transported to the room just outside the treasure vault.  There are (I think) four of these in the game: one past the toll hole, one in the wizard's house, one in the desert canyon, and one near the central slab room.  Once I figured this out, I was eventually able to gather all 49 treasures and head for the vault.

Before I get into that, though, there were a couple of other things I discovered about the game.  The first is that the treasures in the mine maze aren't always in the same location.  There are seven in all, and every time I played they were scattered around the maze in different places.  It's a small thing, but I don't think there's been this kind of randomisation in an earlier text adventure.

The second thing I discovered is that I'd mixed things up a bit when writing about the pirates on the island in a previous post.  I had said that you need to hide at the top of a palm tree, wait for the pirates to land and visit a cave before they leave the island, then dig in the cave to find some doubloons.  Somehow I got that wrong.  You actually need to dig before the pirates arrive, which is kind of an ass-backwards puzzle to my mind.  I'm not completely opposed to puzzles that require you to fail before you can figure out the solution, but they aren't the best way to do things.

Okay, so back to the vault.  It's somewhat irritating that the treasures are transported to the room outside the vault, and not into the vault directly.  When you're trying to beat a timer, having to go back and forth carrying things from one room to the next is really not welcome.  Even aside from that, it's just an annoyance.  I eventually made it with my lamp still functional, and got the following exciting count-down.  (I guess it's actually a count-up.)

That bit about the safe being cluttered up is what happens when you leave a 
non-treasure in the vault.

It was success, of a sort.  I hadn't found all of the treasures, but what I had found was enough to grant me access to the endgame.  Of course, the first time I tried this I didn't have the item that I needed to re-open the vault door.  With the way back blocked by a stone slab, there was nothing to do but restore and try to figure out what I was missing.  I didn't take too long to hit on the solution: the magic rod was one of the only items in the game that I hadn't yet found a use for.

So, a wave of the wand re-opened the vault, and I was able to proceed to the final stages.  Before doing that, though, I wanted to find all of the treasures.  And with no other clues to go on, I cracked open the old walk-through and looked up the locations for all of them.  There's a total of 55 treasures in the game, so I had only missed six.  I'll list them and how to find them below.

The Silk: Remember the ultra-deadly snake maze I mentioned in my last post?  The one that took me hundreds of attempts to safely navigate?  I was afraid of this, but there was a treasure in one of the more inaccessible parts of the maze that had previously been covered by a huge boa constrictor.  The way to get it was simply to explore the maze without being killed by snakes, but that's a lot harder than it sounds.  With a walk-through, not hard at all, but it would have taken me hours  of painstaking trial-and-error without it.

The Diamond: There's a room not far from the Timeless Cavern that has some writing on the wall.  For whatever reason, I don't think I ever read that writing, but it says OFF MOAN WAIT EXAKCIP.  Saying these words causes an uncut diamond to appear in the abandoned mine aaaaall the way back on surface near the beginning of the game.  I guess you might figure out where to look from EXAKCIP (pickaxe backwards), but it seems unlikely, and there are no other clues pointing towards it, or even an acknowledgment that saying the words has any effect.

  An uncut diamond isn't quite good enough to get you the full points, though.  To turn it into a beautiful cut diamond, you need to CUT DIAMOND using a pair of scissors.

The Rhodium Sculpture: You might think that cutting the diamond would be enough, but nope.  If you CUT DIAMOND a second time, the scissors get hot and melt.  When they have cooled, the scissors are transformed into a rhodium sculpture.  It's another obscure puzzle with no hints towards its solution, but I probably would have figured it out just based on the principle of "what would happen if I tried this again".

Perhaps a mention that the scissors are made of rhodium 
might have been a good clue.

The Silver Sovereigns: Also near the game's beginning, there was a locked grate that was something of a callback to Colossal Cave Adventure.  If you try to enter, you slip and die in freezing water.  I had written this off as a joke, but there's actually a treasure here.  First you need to wave the magic rod, which causes the water to boil away.  Then you can safely go down and claim some silver sovereigns before emerging back in the forest through a different tunnel (which of course can't be found from the outside).

The Agate Ring: In the frozen tunnels there's a dead end with a floor of thick ice that I had noted earlier and then completely forgotten about.  You can melt the ice with some salt (which is apparently real science?) and in the room beneath there's an agate ring.

The Ankh: This one is apropos to my current gaming circumstances, because I'm trying to complete Ultima VII: The Black Gate (and enjoying the heck out of it).  But that's not really relevant to this post.  Remember the "toll hole"?  There's a chunk of quartz that I had thought was a treasure, but I hadn't noticed that it didn't have the telltale exclamation point that would mark it as such.  If you drop the quartz into the hole, an ankh flies back out at you.

 

You can't get past safely after this, so the Timeless Cavern is still inaccessible.

So I now had all of the treasures, and I was feeling less negative about how difficult some of them were to obtain.  You don't need all of the treasures to progress to the endgame: a minimum of 45 is enough.  It's a tough game to beat, but at least it's a little bit lenient when it comes to this final hurdle.

And now, the end-game.  After placing the treasures in the vault, and re-opening it with the magic rod, you'll find that it now leads to a different place: a corridor that steadily becomes steeper.  There's a sign that warns you to drop all of your items, and if you don't you'll be incinerated.  Obviously none of the items are required for the end-game - not even the lamp, as the whole place is lit - so it's perfectly fine to drop everything and continue down the slope.

This leads to a series of three rooms.  One room contains a small obsidian disc, another contains a medium-sized flint disc, and the last contains two discs of larger size stacked on top of each other.  Yes, it's a "Tower of Hanoi" puzzle, where the goal is to shuffle the stones around in such a way that you pile them up with the largest at the bottom progressing to the smallest at the top.  You can't put a larger disc on top of a smaller disc without blowing the whole place up.  It's very easy, and I had a mixture of relief and disappointment upon encountering it.  Disappointment, because I expected the ending of this terribly difficult game to be a bit more challenging, and relief, because I just wanted the thing to be over with.  Anyway, moving the largest stone reveals a hole underneath, and dropping through it takes you to the very final area of the game.

A gladiatorial pit, surrounded by a cheering crowd!  Now this I really enjoyed.  You're presented with eleven weapons: a mace, an axe, a canister of gas, a spear, a broadsword, a silver cane, a dagger, a stake, a mace, a barrel of gunpowder, and a crucifix.  One by one you have to defeat ten different enemies: a minotaur, an orc, a scorpion, a vampire, a wolf, a knight on horseback, a cyclops, a serpent, a spectre, and a dragon.  There's no scope for trying anything clever here, you just have to pick whichever weapon you think will work best, and you only get one shot with each weapon.  The order that these enemies appear is random, with the only constant being that the dragon always appears last.

I love that the crowd is composed of former adventurers.

The goal is obviously to find the best weapon for each foe and progress through them until you defeat the dragon, but there are some enemies that can be killed by multiple weapons, and some that are only vulnerable to a single weapon.  For example, if you're thinking mythologically you might use the stake to kill the cyclops.  If the vampire appears after that, you'll then be forced to kill him with the crucifix.  This will leave you helpless against the spectre, however, who is only vulnerable to that weapon.  The first time I got to the dragon I had already used the gunpowder to kill the minotaur, so I lost at the final hurdle.  It's a process of trial and error, but you're pretty much guaranteed to win eventually, which I did after maybe twenty tries.

After long hours of gruelling puzzle-solving, the gladiator arena does seem to come out of nowhere, and present a challenge that feels a little disconnected from the rest of the game.  Personally, I found it to be a refreshing change, and the various combat results were written amusingly enough that I spent an hour with a checklist trying to get them all.

Once the dragon is defeated you're cheered out of the arena, given a laurel wreath, named as a Supreme Grandmaster of Acheton and elected to the Ruling Council.  It's all a little perfunctory, but abrupt endings are pretty much all you're going to get until maybe the mid-1980s.

I think the relevant authorities would not look kindly on my use of a walk-through.

But wait, what's this?  I only finished with a score of 1499?  At this point I had a minor panic, thinking that I might have missed something right near the beginning of the game.  But luck was with me: that Last, Lousy Point (in the tradition of Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork) was to be found in the arena.  You can defeat the knight with the axe, the mace or the gunpowder, but using any of these won't get you the full points (and besides that you need the mace for the minotaur and the gunpowder for the dragon).  The trick is, when presented with a choice of weapons, to type NONE.  Which is funny, and a little bit clever, but also quite cheap and unfair.  It's hard to get worked up over it though when it's just a little something to get the maximum score.

With that, I'm very nearly done with Acheton.  On the whole I found it rather enjoyable, with the caveat that I was able to look up the answers whenever I got stuck.  Without that luxury, I'd still be stymied by it, and may never have completed it before giving up.  Even so, it's undoubtedly one of the best adventure games around for the time.  It's not up to the lofty standards set by Zork, and probably a bit too lengthy for its own good, but it's a worthwhile experience, and I feel as though I'm a far better adventure gamer than I was before I started it.

Before I sign off, here is the updated List of Shame, being all the things I needed to consult a walkthrough for over the course of the game:

1. Climbing the Ningy before tipping it over.
2. Drinking the gin to fall safely down the cliff.
3. Using the mushroom password at the Gate of Isis.
4. Turning the thread into a rope to get down from the canyon.
5. Finding the invisible clock.
6. Using the clock in the maze of mirrors.
7. Using the amulet to make items visible or invisible.
8. Using ZOOGE to transport items in rooms with stars.
9. Painting a star to transport the portrait out of the gallery.
10. Navigating my way out of the wizard's dungeon.
11. Finding the silk in the snake maze.
12. Finding the diamond in the abandoned mine.
13. Cutting the diamond.
14. Cutting the diamond again to create the rhodium sculpture.
15. Using the wand to safely access the area beyond the grate and find the sovereigns.
16. Using the salt to melt the ice floor and find the agate ring.
17. Dropping the crystals in the "toll hole" to get the ankh.
18. Beating the knight with my bare hands.

It's not pretty, but this game is hard y'all.  I feel no shame.

And now, for the Final Rating.

FINAL RATING:

Story & Setting: Yet again it's a treasure hunt, featuring a character with no discernible goal beyond the player's desire to win the game.  On that score, it's about on par with Colossal Cave Adventure.  The caves of Acheton occasionally gesture towards some of the humourous elements of Zork, but while there are some interesting areas none of them quite reach the iconic status of things like the Flood Control Dam.  It also lacks the cohesiveness of Zork, with very few of the game's areas feeling connected in any way.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Characters & Monsters:  There aren't really any characters, but there are monsters galore: snakes, a mummy, an idol that comes to life when you pluck out its eye, and the various creatures inside the arena.  None of them are all that interesting, being more obstacles than anything else, but I'm going to mark this category up for the many amusing results to be had in the arena.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Aesthetics: It's a well-written adventure game with a fair amount of wit, but in the end it's still a text adventure, and not exceptional enough for a high score in this category.  Rating: 2 out of 7.

Mechanics: The parser is a basic two-word affair, with which I had minimal difficulty.  I think the only place that I found myself getting stuck for the right verb was when trying to light a fire on the island.  Otherwise, it did the job adequately.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Challenge: This is where I need to point out that this category isn't really about how hard a game is: on that scale, Acheton would rate very high.  What this category really rates is how well-balanced a game is, and a high rating would be for something that maintains a high level of challenge without ever becoming frustrating.  A game that is too hard, or too easy, would rank low.  I was prepared to rank Acheton fairly low here, but I'm reconsidering.  Most of the puzzles play fair, and there's also the fact that you can beat it without finding all of the treasures.  That said, I played it with a walkthrough at hand, so I didn't get the full experience of just how ball-tearingly difficult it could be.  Mostly, I think I'm marking it down for just being too big.  There's probably four really good adventures crammed into this thing, but as it is it's too unwieldy.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Innovation & Influence: It's one of the very first adventure games to be written outside of America, and still one of the earliest ever made, so both of those have to count for something.  There are some other smaller things as well, like the randomly generated mazes.  I might even consider the sheer vindictiveness of some of the puzzles to be an innovation of a sort.  But overall, it's very beholden to Zork, and never really steps out of its shadow.  Rating: 4 out of 7.

Fun: Acheton was equal parts amusing novelty and mind-numbing frustration.  There's so much to like in it, and so many clever puzzles and fun situations.  But there are also moments where it just feels too hard, and provides little guidance as to what to do next.  And again, there's the size of it.  Had it been half as big, it would get a more impressive score here.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Perhaps against my better judgment, I'm awarding Acheton the coveted bonus point, as I could definitely see myself coming back to it some day.  Actually, the commercial version is a little different in that the arena weapons are scattered throughout the caves, so I'll probably challenge myself with that on the blog should the time ever come.  The above scores total 21, for a Final Rating of 42.  That's fairly impressive at this stage: as far as adventure games go, that puts it level with Adventureland, with only Colossal Cave Adventure and Zork above it.

ADDENDUM:

Somewhat later in this blog I made the decision to overhaul my Final Rating system, so I'm going back through and fixing all of the games I've already played as of March 2020.  I've ditched the Innovation and Influence category, and replaced it for adventure games with a category for Puzzles.  I've also changed the purpose of the bonus points, saving them for games that are important, innovative, influential, or have features that are otherwise not covered by my other categories.

Also, the Final Rating is a boring name.  The CRPG Addict has his GIMLET.  The Adventure Gamers have their PISSED rating.  Data Driven Gamer has his harpoons.  So I'm ditching the generic name and calling my new system the RADNESS Index: the Righteous Admirability Designation, Numerically Estimating Seven Scores. It's a pretentious mouthful, but I'm going with it.

Puzzles: Acheton has so damn many puzzles that it's tempting to rate it high just for that alone.  Some of them are incredibly devious and clever, but there are a lot that are difficult or just outright nasty. I was definitely too dumb to figure most of this game out on my own.  Again, using Colossal Cave Adventure as a benchmark, I'm going to rate it the same.  For every obtuse puzzle, there's another one that's brilliant.  Rating: 3 out of 7.

Bonus Points: 0.

Acheton's RADNESS Index is 38. That puts it equal 5th, along with Colossal Cave Adventure. For expert adventure game players Acheton might be superior, but for we mere mortals Colossal Cave is a bit more accessible.  It's placed equal 2nd out of eleven adventure games.

NEXT: It's King Tut's Tomb Adventure, by my boy Greg Hassett!  Whatever his adventures may lack in quality, they make up for it in brevity, and that's really what I need right now.