This is yet another escape-the-spaceship adventure, with one twist -- it's not necessarily an alien spaceship, and our objective is not only to get off the ship, but find safe passage away from the asteroid where we've crash-landed, before another asteroid crashes into it at noon. As BASIC adventures go, Advent X-5 has a large and complex map, but it's a really playable design by the standards of the era -- we can often see our next objective from a distance, and the player is not often at a loss as to what to do next.
As always, I urge interested readers to set this blog post aside and sample the game independently before proceeding here. In the interest of placing this adventure in historical context and examining its approach to the genre in detail, I will provide a full walkthrough (also available at the CASA Solution Archive), and there are plentiful...
**** SPOILERS AHEAD!!! ****
The story opens on the ships [sic] bridge; we have a wrist watch (which keeps time at the rate of 1 minute per move), and can see the surface of Klybex-7. There's also an elevator, which we will spend quite a bit of time using to navigate around the ship. If we leave the bridge by heading downward, we find that it's too dark to see down there. But we can successfully GO OUT from the dark room to discover a shuttle, an unfriendly alien, and instant death, as we suffocate on the asteroid's surface because You can't breath!!! [sic]. We can GET SUIT (no need to WEAR it) in the dark room as well, which allows us to breathe just long enough for the alien (described initially as opening it's [sic] mouth) to devour us whole. So we'd better use the well-lit elevator for a while before venturing outside.
In time-honored pulp sci-fi radition, the voice-activated elevator allows us to move Uplez, Norec, Eafop, Dowes, Sourk and Wesox, which coincidentally resemble English nomenclature for the standard adventure game navigational directions. Except these terms are actually deck names, just to make things confusing. Here also, visiting DOWES finds the area too dark for visibility at the beginning of the game.
The crew barracks are behind a red door. There's an observation deck which contains an item representing the universe, but we're obviously not allowed to GET that. We can see the ship's recreational facilities from up here, but if we try to GO REC ROOM from 20 feet above, we are tersely informed that You missed the swimming pool / Broken neck!!! / You're dead. So there will be no showboating, hotdogging or cannonballing permitted in the pool area.
The medical lab has a vent and a cabinet containing some interesting items, but it seems that we can't TAKE anything in the cabinet, which is annoying, because usually adventurers like to READ BOOK whenever we find one. But I went back to read the original Antic magazine article, and was surprised to learn that we have to explicitly TAKE BOOK FROM CABINET to get hold of it. Advent X-5 uses a two-word parser for most purposes, but FROM comes into play when dealing with containers.
READ BOOK (now that we have taken it) indicates that its title is HOW TO KILL AN ALIEN, and suggests that we will need a battery-powered laser pistol for the job. The book also contains a red card, labeled DOOR, presumably useful as some sort of key. As it turns out, we don't have to do anything special with the card -- if we possess it, the ship's red doors open automatically, though some of the passages are one-way.
The air duct contains a knife (no good against the hungry alien) and leads to a couple of additional dark areas, so it seems we will need to turn on the lights before we get too much farther. It also leads to the computer room, where the screen reads "asteroid collision-12:00 / shuttle code lost in pool / shark is sick to stomach," providing some rather unsubtle clues about the game's objective and puzzles.
The ship's Cafeteria (to the SOURK) has another red door. Further exploration of the darkness beyond establishes that it's actually safe to maneuver with the lights off in this game -- there are no lurking grues or other beasties, or neck-breaking obstacles invisible in the light, to cut our journey short. But we can't really see what we're doing either -- I ran into a robot saying, "Improper identification / Passage denied," and decided I wasn't going to get anywhere this way and I had better refocus on getting the lights running.
With the doorcard, we can also access our own Captain's Quarters and get a key (labeled P.B.K.) and an ID plate. The game has a tight inventory limit of 5 items, so we will need to do a little juggling along the way.
We can also access the Rec Room via the cafeteria using the door card. There's a barbell nearby that can be used to pull us deeper into the pool if we want to go for a swim, but we drown if we do so without collecting the proper equipment.
In the Power Control Room, there's a power box, described as metal, bolted to the floor, and locked. It can be opened with the key from the Captain's Quarters -- P.B.K. apparently stands for Power Box Key -- and then we can simply TURN DIAL to restore the ship's power.
Now that the lights are on, we can find a number of other useful items. A fuel storage area accessible from the air vent system contains something called puddy fuel. And a nearby loading dock has a snorkelizer. The east cargo hold provides an asbestocine bag. And there's a battery in the engine room.
There's also a Giant Terrarium deck with a spear gun, a tree, a fern, and an aquarium containing a shark that can't be entered from this location. Nearby is the Primate Room, containing a cage, a monkey with a shaved head (I never did figure out what that was all about -- I assume he was the unfortunate subject of some sort of experiment, or perhaps a Hairy Krishna -- sorry), and a swim mask. Given the equipment at hand, it appears that we need to assemble a shark kit before we go diving.
With the mask and snorkelizer, we can go to the bottom of the pool and find our way into the aquarium. The shark bites us as soon as we encounter him, and while it's not immediately fatal, the game informs us that You're bleeding! and shortly we do in fact bleed to death. There's no way to prevent the shark's attack; we can only survive if we thought to examine the container from the medical lab, which contains a bandage. Now we can USE GUN to kill shark after it attacks, and then USE BANDAGE to stop our own bleeding. We also need the knife to CUT SHARK and USE KNIFE, so that a piece of paper plops out. Somehow the shark has swallowed the all-important shuttle code, fortunately written in shark-digestive-acid-proof ink; the code is randomized for each game and should therefore be noted before discarding the paper to free up the inventory slot.
Now we should be able to activate the shuttle, but we need to dispose of the hungry alien first. There's a laser pistol in the bowels of the ship, but we can't seem to INSERT BATTERY to power it up. Actually, we just have to carry the battery and the pistol at the same time, then we can USE PISTOL to shoot the alien.
The shuttle code allows us to enter the handy escape shuttle parked very near our crash-landing site, where we discover that it needs fuel, and learn that the puddy fuel is VERY hot. This implies that we can use the asbestocine bag somehow -- and yes, we can deviate from the two-word parser structure again to PUT FUEL IN BAG. We bring the fuel to the shuttle, put the fuel into the tank, and push the button to blast off, arriving victoriously at a local star base to hearty but repetitive kudos:
Advent X-5 is not a difficult game once we've mapped out the spaceship, but it's entertaining and atmospheric without taking itself too seriously. And while there's a lot to do, the design is very fair -- I didn't need to dig into the code to solve its puzzles, and I needed to dawdle and waste a lot of moves to confirm that if we don't escape by 12:00, an asteroid hits Klybex-7 and ends the game unhappily. It can be solved in less than half the available move limit; my walkthrough is below the fold.
*** WALKTHROUGH ***
GO ELEVATOR
SAY EAFOP
GO OUT
TAKE BOOK FROM CABINET
READ BOOK
TAKE CARD FROM BOOK
DROP BOOK
TAKE CONTAINER FROM CABINET
LOOK CONTAINER
TAKE BANDAGE FROM CONTAINER
DROP CONTAINER
GO VENT
W
GET KNIFE
W
GO OUT
LOOK SCREEN (some clues about what lies ahead)
GO ELEVATOR
SAY UPLEZ
GO OUT
GO DOOR
GET KEY
GET PLATE
GO DOOR
GO ELEVATOR
SAY SOURK
GO OUT
GO DOOR
S
OPEN BOX
TURN DIAL (power is back on)
DROP KEY
N
DROP KNIFE
DROP BANDAGE
GO DOOR
GO ELEVATOR
SAY DOWES
GO OUT
GET GUN
W, S
GET MASK
N, E
GO ELEVATOR
SAY WESOX
GO OUT
GO VENT
S
GO OUT
D, E
GET SNORKELIZER
W, U
GO VENT
N
GO OUT
GO ELEVATOR
SAY SOURK
GO OUT
GO DOOR
DROP CARD
DROP PLATE
GET BARBELL
GET BANDAGE
GO POOL (barbell pulls you down to the bottom)
N, N (shark bites you)
USE GUN
USE BANDAGE
S, S, U
GO OUT
DROP GUN
GET KNIFE
GO POOL
N, N
USE KNIFE
GET PAPER
S, S, U
GO OUT
READ PAPER (make note of the code, it's randomized each game)
DROP PAPER
DROP KNIFE
GET CARD
GET PLATE
GO POOL
S, S
GO OUT
GO DOOR
DROP BARBELL
DROP MASK
DROP SNORKEL
S, E, U
GET BATTERY
D
GET BAG
W, W, U
GET FUEL (it's very hot!)
PUT FUEL IN BAG
GO VENT
N, E, E, D
GO OUT
GET PISTOL
GO DOOR
W
GO ELEVATOR
SAY NOREC
GO OUT
DROP PLATE
DROP CARD
D
GET SUIT
GO OUT
USE PISTOL (to shoot alien)
W
GO SHUTTLE
(enter shuttle code noted earlier)
GET FUEL FROM BAG
PUT FUEL IN TANK
PUSH BUTTON (and blast off to victory!)
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