As seen in Pearson's other Other Ventures, the main screen display features a graphic at the right edge, with text, commands, and output refreshing on each turn within specific areas on the left side. The graphics don't change, aside from brief "white noise" breaks or blackouts when major events occur.
This is the first Jyym Pearson game I've seriously played, and while I found it frustrating on more than one occasion, his approach to interactive storytelling did grow on me over time. Pearson's games depend much more on observation than most adventures -- initial descriptions are extremely stingy with details, requiring us to LOOK at the room, at specific items and sometimes at specific details mentioned in the text to learn useful information. The late Mr. Pearson was also fond of non-interactive sequences, forced event triggers and physical obstacles requiring lengthy detours -- all are occasionally irritating, but I must admit that they do something for pacing and character identification.
As always, interested readers are encouraged to play The Farvar Legacy before continuing below. I will be documenting the game's world, its puzzles and the complete gothic tale in the following discussion. As I did not find any published walkthroughs, and some of the commands are very difficult to guess properly, I will also be providing my solution below the fold at the bottom; it's also available at the CASA solution archive. So be aware that there are complete and thorough...
***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****
The story starts, as so many classic horror tales do, in a small compartment aboard a European passenger train. Nothing seems to be happening until we LOOK to discover a door leading out, which we cannot immediately use, and a letter on our lap; we can't make use of the door until we READ LETTER several times.
It takes several rounds to get through the content of the letter, and after we're done, the train conveniently stops and the door automatically opens. The letter is fairly standard genre stuff -- our family is unpopular with the unfriendly villagers, we are the last surviving Farvar, and one J. Jacob, Attorney is due to join us in a week's time to discuss sale of the estate.
I should note that this opening sequence is in what I take to be Pearson's typical style -- key events do not happen, and important objects and information do not become available, until we've experienced the parts of the story intended to precede those discoveries. In this opening, for example, we have to read the letter now, and can do nothing else until we have done so. This is not to say that we can't get ourselves stuck in a dead-end situation by doing the wrong thing at the wrong time -- fortunately, there's a SAVE GAME command that saves to tape, and I had no problem saving and restoring (LOAD GAME) using the TRS32 emulator.
Pearson's parser is also quirky, with a limited vocabulary and inconsistent use of adjectives. To get out of the train once it has stopped, we can't GET OUT or EXIT or DISEMBARK or LEAVE TRAIN as simply as we might like. We are required to be observant -- LOOK tells us STEPS LEAD DOWN -- and experimental -- having learned this, it turns out we still can't simply go D, but must CLIMB STEPS to leave the train.
Once we're off the train, we're still locked into the author's narrative for a bit. There's a locked tin shed on the train platform, which we will revisit later. An old man stops us as we try CLIMB STEPS a second time to leave the platform and head south into the village; typically, again, we are told the steps lead S, but we can't simply go S. We have to pause and TALK MAN, which over the course of several non-interactive turns yields a dire warning about HUGO and THE CURSE; he also tells us we will KILL AT NIGHT until we FIND THE AMULET, and mentions that the MASTER'S BED WILL PROVIDE A TOOL AND HELP HEAL YOU. The bed's healing properties will become apparent eventually, but I never did figure out what the TOOL reference meant; EXAMINE BED yields OK.., as if something meaningful has happened, but I never saw any evidence. The game is also a bit coy about exactly what the CURSE entails, but as we can't ever FLY, I concluded we become a werewolf who stalks by night; finding THE AMULET sounds like the ultimate goal of the game at this point in the story, but that's not actually true.
Once the old man has finished his canned spiel, we have a little more freedom to explore. We can meet the Mayor, and I thought he was misspelling our family name as FARVER due to bureaucratic incompetence, but the game itself uses both FARVAR and FARVER. The mayor tells us to leave his office, as he "CAN'T BE SEEN WITH YOU," and throws us out of the courthouse if we persist. The old lady in the library doesn't like us either, and neither do the denizens of the local Tavern. I made several attempts to enter, yielding A LARGE DRUNKEN MAN THREW YOU OUT! several times in a row until, presumably, he got bored or passed out. The warehouse across the street is secured with a brass lock, and the key will not turn up for a while yet.
I found myself stuck at this point until I visited the Tavern again, took a quick LOOK TABLE and spotted an OLD KEY there. For some reason, it turns out to be the key to the huge iron gate blocking the path to FARVAR FORTRESS, which we learn if we LOOK GATE and READ the SIGN posted there.
The parser has several odd habits -- EXAMINE never works, nor does TAKE, though the parser doesn't explicitly tell us that it doesn't recognize these common words. The engine yields I DON'T UNDERSTAND in a wide variety of situations, some of which it actually does comprehend if circumstances are different. And verb application is quirky -- CLIMB climbs whatever seems handy, with most rooms structured to have, for example, one CLIMBable exit and one OPENable exit. If there are multiple climbable objects, we have to be more specific about our target; but if there are multiple objects that seem climbable but aren't, the parser jumps to unexpected conclusions and ignores the player's specified target. On the train platform, for example, the nearby mountain is just for set dressing; we can't CLIMB MOUNTAIN, so when we try, the parser assumes that we want to CLIMB STEPS. Similar things happen with OPEN - we can try to OPEN FLASK, and the game will OPEN DOOR instead.
With all the structure the story insists upon, I was surprised to find out that we can short-circuit the whole gate puzzle by simply asking to QUIT. The game never actually lets us do so -- instead, it treats it as a death, and the player learns instantly that YOU'VE BEEN RESURECTED [sic] in the MASTER BEDROOM inside the fortress, allowing us to skip the work of actually getting inside the normal way. This shortcut always works, with no apparent penalty, and can be used to accelerate navigation; my solution below does not take advantage of this bug, but it's there for the exploitation.
The fortress has a number of interesting rooms, some of which present genuine puzzles, most of which do not, beyond examining the environment carefully to inventory everything that's actually there. Our character is remarkably unobservant by default -- in the south end of the ornate hall, we must LOOK to discover the marble table, and then LOOK TABLE to spot the flask sitting there. It's a remarkably strong ceramic flask -- LOOK FLASK tells us SOMETHING IS DOWN INSIDE IT. But we can't SHAKE or EMPTY or TIP the flask. TASTE FLASK yields YECCH! DRINK FLASK chides us YOU DRINK TOO MUCH but imbibes nothing. How do we obtain the flask's content? By leaving it in the ballroom and dropping the chandelier on it by pulling the chain in a nearby storeroom. This yields the AMULET -- again, if we LOOK at the aftermath; it is not capable of warding off Hugo Farver's initial appearance to curse us, and we still wake up bloody the following morning, but it does keep us from killing at night after that point.
Once we are cursed, an angry crowd assembles outside to seek revenge. We can avoid confrontation to some degree by staying in the castle; we can't lure them inside to drop the chandelier on them, as they run pretty fast and kill us before we can climb the steps to go back inside. But it's worth going through one encounter -- we have to RUN repeatedly, CRAWL into some bushes when we see a shadowy figure doing the same, and then watch the figure disappear, leaving a SCREWDRIVER in his wake. I never figured out who our mysterious benefactor was, but the screwdriver comes in handy toward the end of the game. Of course, after we emerge from the bushes, we are caught and killed by the slavering crowd -- but the curse confers some degree of immortality, and we wake up safe and sound in the master bedroom with our inventory intact. We can discover the hidden crawlway through the bushes on our own, with LOOK BUSHES or LISTEN in that location, and we will need to revisit the stream hidden there later on. But we can only obtain the screwdriver by sacrificing ourselves to the crowd at least once.
There's a red herring in the main hall - a painting of AN ANCESTOR, HUGO FARVER I, hangs over a heavy oak door that's nailed shut. But we can't move the painting, or cut through it, or pull out the nails -- an alternate path must be found.
Another heavy oak door north of the ballroom singes our hair when we try to open it, yielding A TREMENDOUS FORCE THREW YOU BACK. We need a certain pendant to get past this supernatural barrier, and the only way to get it is by killing the Mayor, who wears it around his neck.
I was temporarily stymied by the parser when dealing with the single open window in the ballroom. Whenever I tried to CLIMB generically, I was only told YOU'LL FALL, which is the standard response when there's nothing available to climb. But in this case, CLIMB WINDOW works. From here, we can open a small door, and crawl through a seemingly interminable passage to find a small cave overlooking the interior of the tin shed visible from the railway platform. We need the long rope and the metal snips to create an alternate route here, which will let us avoid the angry mob outside the castle.
In some rooms we have to probe the standard compass directions, as available navigation options are not always spelled out. For instance, there's a narrow segment of railroad track north of the train platform, which we can only learn about by trying to go there; we need to visit it twice as the game progresses, as critical items that are not present at the game's start show up in this location later.
When we can't UNLOCK something because we don't have the key, the game prompts us WITH WHAT? but all WITH responses yield I DON'T UNDERSTAND, because it's not actually asking for a response. When we have the key, we can just UNLOCK the target with no additional prompting. Lock behavior can be annoying, as locks and doors tend to automatically relock after we've passed through them; for instance, we have to UNLOCK the main GATE of Farvar Fortress, then OPEN GATE, from each side, each time; we can't just leave it open (and still it does nothing to hold back the bloodthirsty crowd.)
The path through the woods to reach the castle past the gate is a minor maze, roughly running east to west, when walking, but RUN moves the player right along.
The curse sequence is evocatively written -- the evil spirit of Hugo Farver I is described as A GHOSTLY FIGURE RESEMBLING YOU, and we can't interrupt the cursing process, because YOU CAN'T MOVE..HIS EYES BURN YOU! Jyym Pearson likes these kinds of marginally-interactive set pieces -- they do make for good storytelling, and I think it's his screen layout approach that requires the multiple short bursts of text, rather than any sadism on the designer's part.
THROW never has any practical application in The Farvar Legacy, but I did laugh when the game yielded IT BOUNCES BACK AND HITS YOUR %#$& !
The tiny stream in the woods, where we duck out to avoid the rampaging crowd, is filled with an odd bubbling liquid. DRINK LIQUID yields THERE WENT ABOUT 20 FT. OF YOUR INTESTINES, though that doesn't prove fatal. TASTE LIQUID tells us IT MAKES YOU DIZZY. It develops that the liquid has useful chemical properties, but we can't use the FLASK to take the liquid -- we will need a kettle found later on in the Tavern.
LOOKing remains important. A critical WOOD KEY is on the staircase in the front hall; we can't GET WOOD or GET KEY but have to GET WOOD KEY. Carving on the key reads "H.F.II".
The most important thing to know about finishing The Farvar Legacy is that the outside world changes from day to day. We can SLEEP in the master bedroom, once we have the amulet in hand, and we need to do this, as we have to go through several night/day cycles to obtain all the important items. At night, we are free to explore the town; the Tavern becomes dark and deserted, and a long rope and kettle turn up there as time goes on. We also need to READ BOOK in the library to learn something important about the Mayor's pendant, and visit the railroad tracks at night to find the KNIFE needed to liberate it.
The environment inside Farvar Fortress is more predictable, but it's important to see the GHOSTLY FIGURES DANCE in the ballroom at night. And to note in particular the TILED FLOOR, and explicitly LOOK TILED to find the BRASS KEY needed to unlock the Warehouse in town. Somehow, plain old LOOK FLOOR completely fails to notice this detail.
In the Warehouse, we find a pair of METAL SNIPS lying in plain sight. We also have to MOVE CABINETS to find a CAN OF GREASE. Trying to move the cabinets again after this is done indicates, strangely, that YOU CAN'T MOVE IT.
The player can only carry six items, and many objects only become available later in the story, which makes for a lot of long trips through the crawlway. Once we have the metal snips, we can CUT TIN (from either inside or outside the tin shed) to make a passable hole. There's nothing of value in the shed, but with the secret passageway, the long rope, and the hole thus created, we can visit town in the daytime without being killed by the villagers. We need to do this in order to KILL MAYOR to get his pendant, which has a gold triangle on it, and according to the library should allow us to get past the mysterious barrier guarding the oak door.
It does, in fact -- we can now access a HUGE DESERTED HALL where a dozen of our ancestors' ghosts have gathered. They are not particularly supportive at first, intoning, "YOU WILL JOIN US SOON FARVER. THE CURSE WILL KILL YOU JUST AS IT KILLED US. YOU ARE A DEAD MAN!!" But then, just as they are about to tell us how to kill the evil Hugo Farver, we are pushed out of the room by a supernatural force, and return to find they've all been turned into glass statues.
To explore the stairway above the ancestors' hall, we need a light source. It's important to note that the stairway heads E, because it's too dark up there to see that we can only come back down by going W. Once we have done this, but not before, we can hear a faint voice coming from the ancestors' statues; LISTEN VOICE, cryptically, yields, IT SAYS "SEARCH FOR THE VASHA!"
This turns out to be the VASHA PLANT, which we can (only) now find growing along the railroad tracks. The lighting model isn't sophisticated -- having the plant in our possession doesn't directly make the dark room's contents visible. Instead, we have to LOOK to see that THE PLANT ILLUMINATES THE ROOM, revealing a rope strung over a pulley, attached to a heavy door. And if an item is dropped here, it's displayed among the VISIBLE ITEMS even though the room still tells us YOU ARE IN DARKNESS.
At this point, we are on the verge of completing the story, but we need to prepare for the endgame with six specific objects in inventory. First, we need the grease to lubricate the pulley so we can briefly open the heavy door; the rope breaks after this single use, so while we can return here it takes some doing and it's a lot smoother if we just have everything we need.
Behind the door is a brick cubicle, with a plaque on the floor that is too tarnished to read. POUR FULL KETTLE (if we have found it in the Tavern during the daytime, and filled it at the strange stream) cleans it off so we can read the legend: "HUGO FARVER II : 1642,1662 - KILLED BY HIS FATHERS HAND IN A TRAGIC ACCIDENT." This tells us something important about the story, and the first date is well worth noting.
The cubicle is a dead-end -- the only way to escape it is to CLIMB HOLE, where we find ourselves sliding down a steep tunnel for a few turns at a high rate of speed, finally crashing through a wall into the old deserted warehouse. We can CLIMB back up from here, all the way to the cubicle. I was stuck here for a while, having seemingly run out of puzzles, until I discovered that if we LOOK, partway up the tunnel we find AN ANCIENT DOOR.
This door leads us to an EERIE CHAMBER with a CANDLE and a STEEL DOOR sealed with a combination lock. We can BLOW CANDLE, to no apparent effect, and cannot take it with us. But we can unlock the door -- the combination is the younger Hugo Farver's birthdate, 1642.
Now we can reach Hugo Farver II's bedroom. An oak chest bears his initials - we can use the wood key to unlock it, yielding his OLD GREEN SUIT OF CLOTHES. GET GREEN SUIT causes it to be worn automatically. And we must LOOK BED to find bloodstains on the floor, LOOK BLOOD to discover that A BIBLE LIES IN THE BLOOD, then GET BIBLE. We have to LOOK BIBLE (the game tells us, misleadingly, that IT'S IMPOSSIBLE to READ BIBLE) to see the gold embossed text, which reads "HUGO FARVER II - SELF-SACRIFICE BRINGS GLORY."
Before we assay the tower staircase, we should stop to notice that the screws holding the staircase are untightened. So we need to TIGHTEN SCREWS with the screwdriver before we CLIMB UP several times to reach the HIGHEST TOWER OF FARVAR FORTRESS.
Here, we again encounter the ghostly figure of Hugo Farver I. But his eyesight has apparently faded after all these years of being dead, because as long as we're wearing the green suit and carrying the Bible (I thought we had to READ BIBLE, but the game will accept and ignore any input we care to provide at this moment), we are informed that HUGO STARES WITH SHOCK.. THEN CRIES "MY SON, MY SON !" He claims to be seeking forgiveness from the gods, but then YOU CAN FEEL HIS SPIRIT ENTERING YOURS..., so clearly he is up to his old descendant-killing tricks.
This is where the text on the cover of the Bible proves prophetic. If we take no action, it develops that HUGO DESTROYED YOUR SOUL, and we are once again resurrected in the bedroom, which seems a bit of an anticlimax. So we are wisest to take the only other available course of action... and JUMP.
YOU ARE FALLING OFF THE TOWER TOWARDS THE GROUND.
Another turn, and HUGO'S SPIRIT IS SCREAMING WITH RAGE!
And then... we have won, although it's a bleak and Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one. The screen whites out, and then gives us the good news:
Wow. Now that's what I call a Gothic tale!
But I found Pearson's storytelling surprisingly compelling -- this was a difficult adventure, and as I had no walkthrough to speed the process, I really had to buckle down and fight the good fight. I was annoyed and frustrated many times, but I was still drawn back into the story. And, to save others the more aggravating aspects of playing The Farvar Legacy, I am happy to provide a complete walkthrough, below the fold.
***** WALKTHROUGH *****
READ LETTER; READ LETTER; READ LETTER; READ LETTER;
CLIMB STEPS;
CLIMB STEPS; TALK MAN; hit ENTER three times
CLIMB STEPS
S, E, E
N; LOOK TABLE (repeat 3X until large drunken man quits bothering you)
GET OLD KEY, S, E, UNLOCK GATE, OPEN GATE;
E, N, E, E, OPEN DOOR, CLIMB STEPS;
CLIMB STAIRS; LOOK; LOOK TABLE; GET FLASK;
N, N, DROP FLASK, N, CLIMB STEPS, PULL CHAIN, W, S, LOOK, GET AMULET;
S, E; LOOK; hit ENTER four times; (wake up bloody)
LOOK; W, S, E, S, OPEN DOOR;
RUN, RUN, RUN, CRAWL, LOOK, GET SCREWDRIVER;
E, LOOK; (villagers kill you, wake up resurrected in bed)
LOOK, SLEEP; (it's night)
LOOK, W, N, LOOK, LOOK TILED FLOOR, GET BRASS KEY;
DROP SCREWDRIVER;
S, S, E, S, OPEN DOOR, W, W, S, W, UNLOCK GATE, OPEN GATE;
W, N, LOOK TABLE, GET LONG ROPE;
S, UNLOCK WAREHOUSE, OPEN DOOR, LOOK CABINET, GET METAL SNIPS;
MOVE CABINET, GET GREASE;
N, DROP BRASS KEY;
W, W, N, N, N; LOOK; GET KNIFE;
W, CUT TIN, DROP METAL SNIPS, CLIMB STEPS, S, E;
CLIMB STEPS, READ BOOK, N;
E, GET BRASS KEY, E;
UNLOCK GATE, OPEN GATE;
E, N, E, E, OPEN DOOR;
CLIMB STEPS, CLIMB STAIRS, N, N;
DROP GREASE;
S, E, SLEEP; (it's morning)
LOOK, W, N, CLIMB WINDOW;
OPEN DOOR, CRAWL X 7, OPEN DOOR;
LOOK, TIE LONG ROPE, CLIMB ROPE;
CLIMB HOLE, CLIMB STEPS, S, E, OPEN DOOR, KILL MAYOR, GET PENDANT;
DROP KNIFE, S, W, N, N, CLIMB HOLE, CLIMB ROPE;
OPEN DOOR, CRAWL, CRAWL, CRAWL, CRAWL, CRAWL, CRAWL, CRAWL, OPEN DOOR;
CLIMB WINDOW, N, OPEN DOOR:
LOOK, TALK FIGURES, hit ENTER three times; (swept out of room);
S, S, E, SLEEP (nighttime);
LOOK, W, N, OPEN DOOR, CLIMB STAIRS, LOOK, W;
LISTEN, LISTEN VOICE;
S, S, CLIMB WINDOW;
OPEN DOOR, CRAWL X 7, OPEN DOOR;
CLIMB ROPE, CLIMB HOLE, N;
LOOK, GET VASHA PLANT, W, CLIMB HOLE, CLIMB ROPE;
OPEN DOOR, CRAWL X 7, OPEN DOOR;
CLIMB WINDOW, S, E, SLEEP (it's morning);
LOOK, W, N, DROP OLD KEY; CLIMB WINDOW;
OPEN DOOR, CRAWL X 7, OPEN DOOR;
CLIMB ROPE, CLIMB HOLE, CLIMB STEPS;
S, E, E, N, LOOK BAR; GET KETTLE;
S, W, W, N, N;
CLIMB HOLE, CLIMB ROPE;
OPEN DOOR, CRAWL X 7, OPEN DOOR;
CLIMB WINDOW, S, E, SLEEP (night);
LOOK, W, S, E, S, OPEN DOOR, W, W, CRAWL;
FILL KETTLE; GET FULL KETTLE;
E, E, E, OPEN DOOR, CLIMB STEPS;
LOOK STAIRS, GET WOOD KEY, CLIMB STAIRS, N, N; (here we go!)
DROP BRASS KEY, DROP AMULET;
GET GREASE, GET SCREWDRIVER;
N, OPEN DOOR, CLIMB STAIR, LOOK;
GREASE PULLEY, DROP GREASE, PULL ROPE;
POUR FULL KETTLE, DROP FULL KETTLE, READ PLAQUE;
CLIMB HOLE; hit ENTER three times;
CLIMB HOLE, CLIMB UP, CLIMB UP;
OPEN DOOR, E, UNLOCK DOOR, 1642;
OPEN DOOR, N, OPEN DOOR, LOOK BED, LOOK BLOOD, GET BIBLE, LOOK BIBLE;
UNLOCK CHEST, OPEN CHEST, GET GREEN SUIT;
E, LOOK STAIRCASE, TIGHTEN SCREWS;
CLIMB STAIR, CLIMB UP (X 5);
LOOK, READ BIBLE (or just hit ENTER), hit ENTER three times;
JUMP; hit ENTER two times; (Congratulations!)
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