Adventure of the Week: Adventure in the 5th Dimension (1983)

This week, we're playing through a historical artifact I stumbled across via the CASA database.  Brian "Professor" Moriarty is well-known to adventure fans as a talented designer whose career spanned generations of interactive fiction technology, including fine work for Infocom (Wishbringer, Beyond Zork) and Lucasarts (Loom).  But Moriarty's very first published adventure (according to Wikipedia) was written (mainly) in Atari BASIC and published by ANALOG Computing back in 1983:  Adventure in the Fifth Dimension!

The game takes some time to initialize, but runs at an acceptable speed once it's underway.  We begin on a street corner, where a handy morning newspaper tersely summarizes our mission -- to retrieve The Declaration (of Independence, it develops) for the local police department, an organization apparently possessed of remarkable patience and/or laziness:

From a historical perspective, it's really interesting to recognize Moriarty's design sensibility (and extra-dimensional tendencies) operating in the limited world of the two-word parser.  Adventure in the 5th Dimension has a degree of imagination, and some interesting puzzles, but it seems intentionally designed as a beginner's adventure so it's not particularly challenging.  I was able to solve it in less time than it took to write this post.

You probably won't need any of the information I reveal below to beat this one on your own, but since I haven't seen a published walkthrough for this title I will provide mine at the bottom.  In the interim, please remember that I'm all about the...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

I'm sure the original packaging and/or manual described our objective in more detail, but we get the basics from the morning paper, as crammed into the available memory:  Declaration Stolen! Police Anxiously Await Recovery!

Mapping is fairly straightforward, with simple N/W/E/S/U/D navigation, and even the rooms that tell us we're Lost in a maze of city streets are laid out cleanly and consistently. There are, however, some weird wraparounds at the edges, so drawing a map is useful.

An alien symbol appears on the police department's bathroom wall, rendered as three carats:  ^^^.  There don't seem to be any related jokes, no alien rabbits or jewelry puns; actually, this game plays everything pretty straight.

There's a minor puzzle involving some batteries -- the store in town offers GREEN BATTERIES ONLY $1.00!, and the parser uses the traditional reference-by-color convention.  We can BUY GREEN, but the green batteries don't work with the alien spheroid.  For that, we need the blue battery stashed in a broken portable radio -- we can see that there's a battery inside it, but can't discern its color, which makes it impossible to GET BATTERY until we OPEN RADIO and it falls out so we can GET BLUE.  We do need to buy the green batteries, though, as they will work with another alien contraption found later.  (Why alien devices work with Earth-standard batteries based solely on color code, I can't say, but the alien machines have a habit of absorbing the entire battery upon attachment.  Perhaps these extraterrestrials have succeeded in addressing the compatibility problems that always seem to plague humanity's technology.)

Oddly, Adventure in the 5th Dimension has no INVENTORY or TAKE INVENTORY command that I could find.  It does display a You have: list in the output window whenever the player's inventory changes, but I couldn't figure out how to see what we are carrying without dropping a known item and picking it up again.  There aren't a lot of items to juggle, as we can only carry four at a time, and most objects only have one use, so this isn't a major headache, but it is an unusual limitation.

It's not clear exactly who our character is, at least in-game.  I don't think we're a law enforcement official -- we seem to have no compunction about using a stone to break into a locked apartment via the window, at any rate.  Nor do we seem to have any special knowledge of advanced physics, it seems, as we're not able to recognize anti-matter when we encounter it.  As is usually the case in these games, we're just a nameless dude with a mission, but it's an interesting contrast to the detailed player characterization in Moriarty's later works.

Once we have attached the blue battery to the alien spheroid, it displays the same three-carat symbol seen in the police station's restroom.  Returning there, we discover that a transdimensional duct has opened, which leads to a white void that serves as a hub for the second section of the game.  We can't initially return from the white void -- in fact, we are permanently stuck in this area if we fail to bring the Teabag and Green batteries with us.

The transdimensional areas have color-coded backgrounds, making interesting use of the Atari 8-bit computer's display capabilities.  But while the white void is white, the deep forest is green, the infinite void is black and the golden void is yellow, the crimson void is... blue.

There are a couple of standard item guardian puzzles afoot -- we send a thirsty British soldier off with the Teabag (there's no need to actually brew any tea), allowing us to take his bayonet, which we can then use to threaten the 5th Dimensional Beast, scaring him off so we can take the alien cube.  Moriarty's text goes beyond the usual [Creature] WON'T LET ME! convention here, with specific variations on the theme for each guardian; the Soldier won't cooperate, while the Beast won't let me.

The infinite void room contains the Declaration we seek, guarded by a force field that presents the game's most difficult puzzle.  We need to retrieve the strange gloves from the crimson void, which are automatically worn when carried and somehow allow us to safely pick up the strange, shimmering anti-matter mass in the golden void.  It took me a while to realize this, because if we DROP GLOVES in the golden void room, they react fatally with the anti-matter just like anything else:

GET MASS has the same result if we are not wearing the strange gloves, as does dropping most other objects in the same room as the anti-matter (the alien devices seem to be an exception.)  We do need to use the anti-matter mass to destroy the force field, but it took a little doing for me to figure this out.  We can't THROW MASS from any location; if we DROP MASS, it sidles up against the side of the force field but has the same fatal result as before if we try to set it off.   I finally realized I needed to go back to my own dimension and retrieve the stone used earlier to break into the apartment (it's certainly a fine way to destroy evidence!)  We can then THROW STONE into the infinite void from the adjacent white void, and the parser breaks with its normal behavior here to solicit additional input.  Answering W or WEST creates an explosion in the infinite void, while we stand safely in the white, allowing us to enter after the anti-smoke clears and GET DECLARATION at last.  READ DECLARATION yields We the People..., confirming that this is indeed that Declaration.

All we have to do now is leave the transdimensional area, walk out of the bathroom to the police sergeant's desk, and deliver the goods.  Victory is ours!

This game is certainly not a fifth-dimensional beast, nor even a minor fourth-dimensional monster -- I was able to solve it in less than 90 minutes.  It's a fun little title, and well-suited to beginners -- everything gets used, the puzzles all make sense in game terms, and it's fairly forgiving, with only a few fatal and dead-end scenarios.  It's not bad at all, but veteran adventurers will find it interesting mostly as an early Brian Moriarty effort.

For history's sake, I'm posting a complete walkthrough below the fold, and have also uploaded it to the CASA database.

***** WALKTHROUGH ***** (below the fold)



GET PAPER
READ PAPER
DROP PAPER
N
E
GET STONE
S
E
S
GET BILL
EXAMINE SYMBOL (no deciphering necessary, just recognize it later)
N
W
N
E
N
N
BUY GREEN
S
W
U
BREAK WINDOW
U
GET SPHEROID
D
W
GET RADIO
OPEN RADIO
DROP RADIO
GET BLUE
ATTACH BLUE
GET STONE
W
GET TEABAG
E
E
D
E
S
W
S
E
S
U (to White Void)
DROP STONE
N
E
GET GLOVES
W
S
U
E
GIVE TEABAG (the thirsty soldier departs)
GET BAYONET
W
D
E
KILL BEAST (or scare him off, actually)
DROP BAYONET
GET CUBE
ATTACH GREEN
W
S
GET MASS
N
W
DROP MASS
E
GET STONE
THROW STONE / W (in answer to prompt)
W
GET DECLARATION
READ DECLARATION (it's THAT Declaration!)
E
D
N
GIVE DECLARATION (take that, coppers!)