Adventure of the Week: Jungle Adventure Part II - King Solomon's Mines (1982)

This week, we're tackling a game informally listed as "Solomon Adventure" in the online archives, published in January of 1982 by the cassette-based CLOAD magazine for the TRS-80 home computers.  It's actually billed as Jungle Adventure, Part II -- King Solomon's Mines, but I haven't yet been able to track down Jungle Adventure, Part I, so we will just have to start in the middle of the saga.  This BASIC-language adventure was written by John R. Olsen Jr., of Newberg, Oregon, author of quite a few adventure games, mostly in the early 1980s with several published as late as 1992; this is the first of his works I've covered here.

This is a fairly difficult adventure -- there are time pressures of various kinds to deal with, and once a puzzle is figured out it's often necessary to restore, go back and re-execute as efficiently as possible.  The game does have a functional SAVE feature, but it allows only one slot and using it seems to count as a move, so some care is required even there.  My walkthrough below attempts to optimize the game's solution, but one wrong move can spell failure.

I always encourage interested readers to play these games a bit before reading my comments here; I'm going to be documenting the game's storyline and my experiences while playing it, and for history's sake, there will doubtless be...

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

The game begins outside a trading post near a watering trough, and we are told that (presumably in the first game) Yesterday you brought back IVORY from the Elephant's Graveyard.  You are now ready to start out alone on your next quest.

We are carrying a letter, which tells us to bring the treasures from King Solomon's Mines to the trading post and say SCORE, so we can surmise that this will be a traditional treasure hunt adventure.  TRS-80 users with lowercase kits beware -- the parser is case-sensitive, so read letter doesn't mean anything but READ LETTER does.  We can GO POST to find a plastic bag, a revolver, and some ivory, all of which will potentially be useful.  (Though the intro implies that by using the ivory for another purpose, we'll be negating everything we worked so hard to accomplish in the prequel Jungle Adventure.)

We get a feel for how this game's going to go when we discover that we have also started out very thirsty -- we get a You will die of thirst in 5 moves message shortly after starting.  Even moves that the parser doesn't understand get counted against this expiration timer, which can be a bit frustrating while we're figuring things out.

We can observe a rock slide to the east, where after one turn the room description suddenly includes a RHINO charging you, with no additional comment from the engine.  Once he charges, we're pretty much dead, although if we have the revolver we can shoot him twice to casually turn him into a dead RHINO in the Great White Hunter tradition.

There's foul water in the grassland to the west -- DRINK WATER yields the perspective-challenging It's poison!  We're dead!  So finding potable water really has to be our highest priority.  The watering trough in our starting location will do, so this really isn't much of a puzzle, though the textual sound effects are entertaining: Slurp! Ahhh!  But the respite doesn't last long -- unlike many games where drinking takes care of the issue for the rest of the game, thirst will be a constant challenge here.  It seems we need to drink water every 9 moves to stay alive, which will put a serious cramp in our adventuring style.

There's a pygmy village at the end of a winding jungle trail littered with skulls.  South of the village is a rock canyon with stones littering the ground (they turn out to be flint if we LOOK STONE, so we ought to be able to use these to make a fire.)  A jungle clearing features a dead tree, from which we can observe our surroundings but not really obtain any new information. 

We can't map very far away from the trading post's trough without dying of thirst, so we need to solve that problem.  We can't seem to carry water in the skull or the bag, and there are no canteens at the trading post.  We can't GET TROUGH either, not that I really expected to be able to.  I was on the right track, so I don't feel guilty about peeking at the game's programming code to figure this one out.  As it turns out, we can't FILL BAG, or GET WATER / WITH BAG or GET WATER / IN BAG, but we can PUT BAG -- In two words, tell me where? -- IN TROUGH to get some potable, portable water.  LOOK BAG now tells us that It contains 24 turns of water.  Oddly, we never have to actually drink water from the bag -- having it handy just allows us to move for 24 turns without running out of water and starting to die of thirst.

Now we can make it to the edge of a lost city, where we see a temple and poisonous SNAKES slithering towards you.  We can't move after we see them, because immediately The SNAKES bite you! You have been killed!  We can't shoot them with the revolver either, at least not effectively -- one gets killed but the rest keep coming. 

We pause to note here that the revolver has limited bullets -- we start with 6, which should be plenty.  Our inventory is limited to 5 slots, which is more of a challenge.  GET checks the inventory limit before resolving the object -- GET [anything] yields You're carrying too much! even if we've asked for something nonexistent or un-gettable.


We will need to deal with the snakes somehow, it seems.  We can GET GRASS in the grassland to come away with a handfull [sic] of GRASS, though this isn't immediately useful either.  We can STRIKE FLINT and observe that, as expected, The FLINT makes a small spark.  If we do this in the grassland, though, we observe FLAMES!! It's a grass fire!! and we are dead again.  Making sparks doesn't seem to help with the snakes, and it doesn't seem we can light a handful of grass on fire either.

Aha!  There's some trading possible with the locals.  If we DROP IVORY in the Pygmy village, then leave the "room" and come back, we find a carved wooden MAP in its place.  This opens up a hidden trail out of the village; we can FOLLOW MAP to find a small ravine with a cave, a bubbling SPRING, a knife and an old stick of dynamite.  Now we're getting somewhere.

The cave to the south is extremely dark; it seems to be black hole of sorts, as if we don't have a light source we can't even walk back out the way we came without falling and getting ourselves killed.

The dynamite seems like it might be useful for clearing the rockslide, but if we just LIGHT DYNAMITE it immediately explodes.  LOOK DYNAMITE (following a restore) indicates that There's no fuse.  With a handful of grass we can MAKE FUSE to produce a FUSE made from woven grass.  But we're still on the wrong track -- we can't just DROP DYNAMITE, light the fuse and run; it explodes but makes no visible impact on the rockslide.  We can't seem to use it against the snakes either; we are fatally bitten before we have time to drop the dynamite or light the fuse, even if we light it before entering the temple area.

Can we find anything of value in the cave?  Well, if we go into the dark cave with the flint and the dynamite, we can LIGHT FLINT, which ignites the fuse... but doesn't illuminate our surroundings at all.  Nor does a brief spark from the flint without the dynamite nearby show us anything about the area -- it really is dark in here. We can try to map the cave in the darkness with repeated SAVEs and LOADs... if we try to move in an invalid direction, we get the potentially revealing You can't!  But if we are successful at finding a valid direction, then we fall and die of a broken neck.  So this approach is not going to be very productive.


LOOK TREE in the clearing reveals that The BARK has been eaten away.  But we can't seem to CUT BARK or GET BARK or CUT WOOD from the dead tree.  It's impervious to dynamite also. 

We can CUT HORN to obtain the dead rhino's horn, and then trade this to the pygmies to get a wood FLUTE.  (I pause here to note sadly that, in the real world, rhinos are being driven to extinction by the superstition-driven demand for their horns.  I plead self-defense here.)  The flute is carved to resemble a snake, and PLAY FLUTE scares the snakes away.  (We are not given any information about what tune it is we have played, but clearly it's no charmer or we are really bad at playing it.)

Now we can access the ancient temple -- and its sealed stone door.  OPEN DOOR yields only I don't understand you, so it's pleasantly satisfying when we figure out that this is where the dynamite finally comes into play.

The temple contains goggles, a stone idol, and an elaborate wall mural depicting men cutting tree bark and chewing it.  Okay.  If we wear the goggles, everything looks dark, so we may want to try these in the cave... nope, they're not night-vision goggles.  Maybe the mural indicates that we need to chew some bark too.  We can't CUT BARK at the base of the tree, as previously established, but by climbing the tree we can get some.

Chewing the bark makes everything too bright outdoors in normal light -- the goggles cut the light down, so we can take them off in the cave to see normally now.  There's a path going down to a rock ledge, and another ledge across the way.  JUMP LEDGE yields You weigh to [sic] much right now.  We have to drop everything to make it across to the other ledge.

At last we have found King Solomon's treasure room!  There are sapphires, rubies and diamonds here on a stone table.  But we can't JUMP CHASM with any of these treasures in hand -- they're too heavy.  And eventually we are told that Your eyes itch, which can't be a good thing; they eventually return to normal and we can't see in the dark any more.  So we need to get the treasures out of here, and quickly.

We can try to THROW RUBIES to the other ledge, but They scatter and fall into the chasm.  Maybe we can put them in the bag, if we empty the water first?  Yes, that works, and THROW BAG causes it to land on the other ledge.  But the bag can only hold one type of gem at a time -- it fills up quickly with our questionable gains, so we have to make several trips to rip all of these invaluable archaeological finds out of their in situ location so we can cash in.  And of course, we are likely to run out of night vision partway through the process, and have to go get some more bark.  Ack.  It is possible to get all the treasures bagged, tossed and retrieved before the timer runs out -- but just barely.

On our return from the treasure cave, we find that our path is blocked in the pygmy village by a large group of PYGMIES, previously unseen.  We need one of the skulls (which we selected at random but turns out to be the Sacred Skull) to drop, so we can scare them off without giving them a treasure.  Of course, we can't get to the skull pile with our path blocked, so if we didn't think to bring a skull along before we went into the cave, and our save post-dates that point, it's time to start over.

With the pygmies dispersed, we can either empty the bag and fill it with water from the spring, or just drink water at every opportunity to get safely back to the trading post and deliver the treasures.  Despite our blatant disregard for animal life, native religions and archaeological integrity -- victory is ours!

This was a pretty challenging game, but it's a fair design that doesn't cheat too much beyond the usual die-to-learn-how-not-to adventure situations.  I'm pleased to see that Mr. Olsen created quite a few games, and I look forward to playing more of his work.  My walkthrough should be available at the CASA Solution Archive soon, and is posted here below the fold.


**** WALKTHROUGH ****



READ LETTER
DROP LETTER
DRINK WATER
GO POST
GET REVOLVER
GET BAG
GET IVORY
S
PUT BAG (In two words, tell me where?)
IN TROUGH (bag is filled with water)
DRINK WATER
E
LOOK ROCKSLIDE
SHOOT RHINO
SHOOT RHINO
DROP REVOLVER
W
PUT BAG, IN TROUGH
W
GET GRASS
MAKE FUSE
S, W, S
DROP IVORY
S, N (ivory has been replaced by a map)
GET MAP
FOLLOW MAP (to a small ravine)
GET KNIFE
E, N, E, N, E, E
CUT HORN
W
PUT BAG, IN TROUGH
W, S, W, S
DROP HORN
FOLLOW MAP
GET DYNAMITE
PUT FUSE, IN DYNAMITE
PUT BAG, IN SPRING
E
GET FLUTE
S
DROP MAP
GET STONE
S
PLAY FLUTE (snakes slither away)
DROP FLUTE
E
DROP DYNAMITE
LIGHT FUSE
W (an explosion in the distance)
DROP STONE
E
GO DOORWAY
LOOK MURAL
GET GOGGLES
W, W, N
GET MAP
N
FOLLOW MAP
PUT BAG, IN SPRING
E, E
CLIMB TREE
CUT BARK
DROP KNIFE
D, N, W
GET SKULL
S
FOLLOW MAP
DROP MAP
DROP GOGGLES
DROP SKULL
POUR WATER (bag is now empty)
DRINK WATER
S

(NOTE: There is little room for error here -- if your eyes start to itch, you may need to come back out of the cave early and get more bark, then go back for the remaining treasures.)

CHEW BARK (everything becomes bright)
D
THROW BAG (it lands on the other ledge)
JUMP CHASM
GET BAG
S
GET RUBIES
PUT RUBIES, IN BAG
N
THROW BAG
JUMP CHASM
GET BAG
GET RUBIES
DROP RUBIES
THROW BAG
JUMP CHASM
GET BAG
S
GET DIAMONDS
PUT DIAMONDS, IN BAG
N
THROW BAG
JUMP CHASM
GET BAG
GET DIAMONDS
DROP DIAMONDS
THROW BAG
JUMP CHASM
GET BAG
S (eyes start to itch, vision running out)
GET SAPPHIRES
PUT SAPPHIRES, IN BAG
N
THROW BAG
JUMP CHASM
GET RUBIES
GET DIAMONDS
GET BAG
U, N (in the nick of time as eyesight returns to normal)
GET SKULL
DRINK WATER
E (a large group of pygmies)
DROP SKULL (pygmies scatter)
N, E, N, E
DRINK WATER
GO POST
DROP RUBIES
DROP DIAMONDS
GET SAPPHIRES
DROP SAPPHIRES
SCORE