Adventure of the Week: The Abyssal Zone (1984)

I've been sorting through the Apple II archives of late, and ran across an adventure game I hadn't heard of in its day -- Jeff Gray's The Abyssal Zone, published by Salty Software in 1984.

 

Penguin's Graphics Magician was becoming a common tool by this time, and supports this game's simple vector-and-fill illustrations.  The design uses a simple two-word parser, but supports arrow-key editing of command inputs, better than the usual backspace-and-try-again behavior.  The game's text is simple and contains a few typos, but the design is fairly substantial for its time -- at least it's not the usual treasure hunt I was expecting at the outset.

I encourage interested readers to visit The Abyssal Zone for themselves before reading about my experience here.  It's not a lengthy or difficult game, but its design is logical and there are a few interesting plot developments along the way.  Beyond this point, as always, there are certain to be...

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

We are asked to sign the Divers [sic] Logbook as the game begins, though it's not clear whether our name will come into play at all.  The initial image is of a beach with a sign, a starfish, and an animated shark fin passing by.  The text description tells us that the ocean lies to the north, but doesn't give us any other detail, so it seems we're going to have to pay attention to the pictures to figure out what objects are available.

READ SIGN yields "BEWARE OF SHARKS!" in case we hadn't noticed the fin.  The sign is immovable, and so is the starfish, and we can't LOOK MOUNTAINS or LOOK SKY.  We can't GO WATER or SWIM, either, but if we travel N as suggested, we find ourselvs snorkeling over a coral reef.  THERE IS A LARGE MAN EATING SHARK HERE, though, so we'll make haste back south.

Our INVENTORY is empty and clumsily presented at the moment -- YOUR GOODIE BAG CONTAINS A: -- so we'll try wandering around.  To the south, we find a vast tropical rainforest, with some apparently erupting volcanoes in the background.  Continuing south, we can enter the forest where a toucan is perched.  LOOK TOUCAN reveals that HE IS PREENING HIS MOLTING FEATHERS, and we're free to GET FEATHER; we'll do so, as these sorts of things tend to come in handy in adventure games.

I'm in initial mapping mode, so I'll continue south into the Middle of the Forest, surrounded by trees covered with vines.  We can CLIMB TREE here -- to encounter a poisonous snake that SINKS IT'S [sic] DEADLY FANGS INTO YOUR SKIN!  And we're dead, of course, so that was a bad idea.

Restoring (the game supports named SAVEs to a separate data disk, though I'm using the AppleWin emulator's save states here) and trying again, I continue to the southernmost part of the forest, where an active volcano is visible to the south.  We can travel south onto the active volcano, but are engulfed with molten lava on the next turn as THE ISLAND'S VOLCANO ERUPTS VIOLENTLY.

Restoring again, I start exploring east and west of the main strip, finding myself immediately LOST IN THE FOREST with a chattering monkey as I head east at the southern edge of the forest.  LOOK MONKEY reveals nothing of interest, but TALK MONKEY yields surprisingly coherent advice from our fellow primate: "IF I WERE YOU, I WOULDN'T MONKEY AROUND ON THIS ISLAND! IF THE SNAKES DON'T GET YOU, THE VOLCANO WILL!"

It becomes apparent we're not really lost in the jungle, as these locations still map consistently.  North of the monkey is an area with trees (snake-infested again) and vegetation.  We can explore east through a very humid part of the forest, but there's not much to do here aside from traveling north back to the beach.

The beach runs east/west along the northern edge of the forest, it appears, and the area immediately east of our starting point indicates that SEA LIFE OFTEN WASHES ASHORE HERE.  It looks like there's another ungettable starfish here, and to my surprise DIG is not a recognized verb.  But EXAMINE BEACH reveals that what I thought was a starfish surrounded by some white sand is in fact a SAND-DOLLAR, which we can GET.

I think I've explored the eastern side of the map now, so we'll check out the western areas.  The western part of the beach contains a bottle of suntan oil.  As I reach the west end of the beach, SUDDENLY, THE ISLAND BEGINS TO TREMOR.  This isn't sounding good; I suspect we'll be dead before I can finish mapping.  But we'll persevere for the moment -- which is only a few more turns, as the volcano erupts and kill us.

Retrying, I finally find a climbable TREE COVERED WITH BEAUTIFUL VINES in the southwest corner of the forest, where we find something obviously useful - a can of Shark Repellent!  Maybe we can travel off the island before the volcano erupts now.

I return to the beach and try to OPEN CAN, which isn't recognized, and USE REPELLENT proves to be less effective than I expected, as the cloud of fluid disperses quickly in the water without getting rid of the shark.  But we're not allowed to use it on the beach.  Hmmmm.  Trying to simply swim N is prevented -- YOUR BRAVERY IS ADMIRABLE BUT WILL SURELY CAUSE YOU DEATH!

I try to find some usage directions on the can, but neither EXAMINE REPELLENT nor READ CAN produce any new information.  We can THROW REPELLENT, but it just perches neatly on the shark's back (this is because it is drawn in its original onscreen location designed for a different background -- illustrated adventures of this vintage don't often manage this well.)  I try to swim north again, past the shark, and this time we're viciously attacked, ending the game after I've ignored the earlier warning.

Can we USE OIL?  Nope, the game reacts vehemently to this suggestion -- ARE YOU CRAZY? THIS SHARK IS 25 FEET LONG. USE FEATHER produces the same reaction, so I guess the repellent is what we should be using.  We can't WEAR REPELLENT, though, so I'm at a loss as to how to make it work better.

I wander around some more, and learn that we can EXAMINE TREE in various locations to see any large poisonous snakes hanging there before we climb up.  This means we have to check out more trees, I think... and yes, the ones with snakes seem to reveal their occupants, while the upper reaches of others are concealed by a thick canopy of foliage.  I discover a spear up the tree next to the one with the shark repellent, though I die again a few times due to the erupting volcano while I'm examining more of the trees.  And I actually get killed by a hidden snake in the forest's southeastern corner, where the thick canopy thwarts the very precaution I'm trying to take!  But I think we've done all the exploring we can here for now.

It does prove more effective to THROW SPEAR at the shark -- we miss, but the creature heads for deeper waters, though we can't retrieve the spear.  The volcano erupts just as we head north (for drama's sake) and we find ourselves at Eli's Reef, one of the more colorful locations in this game:

We can EXAMINE FISH -- it's JUST A SMALL RED HERRING with which we can't do anything -- and travel north to a sandy portion of the reef.  We see a sea-fan here, and a reef shark lurking about.  We can EXAMINE SEA-FAN to look at its base, where we spot a bottle with a note.  We can GET the BOTTLE, but READ NOTE indicates the bottle is unbreakable.  As I return to the reef by traveling south and north again, the reef shark seizes and dismembers me! So I guess I need to USE REPELLENT first -- well, maybe not, on my retry the shark isn't hanging out here, so I'll save it until next we meet.

East of the sea-fan, we see some spiny sea-urchins, and east again brings us to the lair of a large spotted moray eel named Eli.  Trying to enter Eli's cave indicates that only Eli's friends may enter, but TALK ELI isn't an effective way to introduce ourselves.

It seems we just have to keep moving whenever we encounter the reef shark, though if we run into dead ends this doesn't always work, and if he stays on our tail too long he eventually attacks and kills us.  I discover some more underwater sea-life -- coral and sponges, mostly -- and find a diver's flashlight inside a vase sponge.  The northern edge of Eli's Reef is bounded by stinging jellyfish, and I find a giant clam to the northeast.  We can't OPEN CLAM or EXAMINE CLAM to any effect, though.

What can we do with our inventory items?  It doesn't seem that we can LIGHT the flashlight or SWITCH it or TURN it ON.  Can we TICKLE CLAM with the feather?   Yes!  It opens and we find a freshly dead fish inside.  But I'm being harassed by the reef shark -- and discover that we can't USE REPELLENT against it! 

Hmmmm.  Exploring to the west, we find an incongruous object on the reef -- THE INFAMOUS LOCKER OF DAVEY JONES.  THE HINGES ARE COATED WITH RUST, and we can OIL HINGES -- WITH WHAT? -- WITH OIL to allow us to OPEN LOCKER.  It contains an anti-shark mesh suit, and (with a retry to be efficient about it) I manage to GET SUIT and WEAR SUIT, and while the shark still follows us around it doesn't seem to attack as readily.  It will, however eventually, but it gets frustrated by the suit and swims away.

GIVE FISH gains us access to Eli's cave, and we can EXAMINE CAVE to see that the tank visible onscreen is a tank of helium.  We'd better take it with us, as Eli is a demanding host and he won't let us just walk in again after we exit his cave to the south.

What can we do with this tank of helium?  I think we've mapped out most of the area here.  Can we use it to get through the stinging jellyfish somehow?  Ah -- we can't go upward as I was thinking, but we can go down: AS YOU DESCEND INTO THE OCEANS [sic] ABYSS, THE HELIUM MIXTURE FREES YOU FROM THE INTOXICATING EFFECTS OF NITROGEN.  Does that really work?  I think it takes more than just randomly mixing helium with oxygen, and earlier indications are that we're equipped only with snorkeling gear. 

But at any rate, we're headed downward toward the area's outer sloping reef, where we meet a beautiful mermaid who appears to be wearing clown makeup and has a very flexible neck:

TALK MERMAID informs us that this is Melinda, Queen of Atlantis, and she volunteers: "COVERED BY MY HAIR IS A PENDANT WHICH YOU MUST NEVER LOOK AT."  She commends us on our bravery thus far, and allows us to continue descending to the Deep Abyssal Plains, with seamounts visible to the north.

I choose to avoid the obvious path and head east instead, getting LOST IN THE BLACK DEPTHS OF THE OCEAN.  This is a maze of dark rooms occupied by phosphorescent plankton, and eventually I emerge from its western edge to find a surprisingly intact underwater plane wreck site near a rocky ledge.  It's EASTERN AIRLINES FLIGHT 401, A PLANE MISSING SINCE DECEMBER 29, 1972.  But there's no sign of the plane's crew or passengers.  (This sounded slightly familiar, so I looked this one up -- there really was such a flight that crashed in 1972, but there was no mystery about it; it crashed in the Florida Everglades and some of the crew and passengers survived.  Some sensationalist accounts were published that suggested hauntings related to it, so maybe the game's designer misinterpreted some of the attendant "ghost flight" hoopla.)

Traveling N takes us into the plane's cockpit, where EXAMINE COCKPIT reveals the flight recorder.  PLAY RECORDER produces several indistinguishable words before it stops.  Exiting the plane and heading south, I find myself back at the deep abyssal plains, so I think the detour into the plankton was unnecessary.

I explore west of the wreckage, and suddenly A LARGE GROUPER IS ABOUT TO SWALLOW YOU.  I try to flee back east, but the creature swallows us and dives deep into the ocean, before spitting us out into the plankton maze... and confiscating some of our inventory items.  I find my way back out to the wreckage, and thinking that we just don't want that to happen, I restore to our pre-grouper state.

What about the mermaid's pendant?  We're allowed to GET PENDANT -- if we LOOK PENDANT, we see the image of an eye on its surface.  Melinda's warning is genuine -- we do in fact fall into a trance of sorts and drift into the dark plankton depths once again, but it's not fatal.

Can we use the pendant on the grouper?  SHOW PENDANT doesn't work, and we can't flee before we're swallowed.  I confirm that N, W, W seems to be the quickest way out of the plankton maze, and I find that the grouper is no longer interfering with travel west of the wreckage, so I'll continue this time.

We're in a deep east-west trench here, another maze of sorts.  The trench adjoins two northward passages -- at the west end is a small, purportedly DANGEROUS cave.  Fortunately, our belongings that were confiscated by the grouper can be reclaimed here -- but we have to remember what these things are called, and it takes me a while to realize that a small object a few pixels across is the mermaid's pendant.

The other northward passage leads into another trench, where a frog creature with a human torso guards the passage with his weapon as well as his generally unsettling appearance.  He won't let us travel north, but if we WEAR PENDANT he looks at it and falls asleep as we approach.  And now we must turn the disk to side 2!  This is a bigger adventure than I expected.

We continue up the north/south trench, and find a small lobster boat on the ocean floor, though we can't explore or examine it.  An intersection to the north contains more small boats -- this leads us into another maze, until we discover a larger sunken ship to the east.  A FISH DARTS FROM THE CABIN as we enter -- we can also read the Captain's Log-Book here (we have to READ BOOK): "A DOLLAR A DAY KEEPS THE GUARD AWAY."  This entry is signed by Melinda, which seems odd.  I check my inventory and discover that I've neglected to claim the sand-dollar from the beach in my current save!  So I'm going to have to replay quite a bit of the game, but I'll keep going for now until I learn more about this guard.

I explore the trench maze some more, and encounter AN ATLANTEAN GUARD along a northward passage.  So that's what that was all about then.  I ignore him for now, opting to explore the maze to the west where we come upon a house made from a large shell.  Inside is a table with a knife on it -- a diamond-bladed knife, actually.  We'll take that along.  I also see some scary-looking deep sea fish, but it emerges that THEY ONLY LOOK MEAN.

I think I'm going to need that sand-dollar.  I make a half-hearted foray back toward the island in case the volcano hasn't completely destroyed the shoreline, but find my air supply running out on the way and the island is now inaccessible.  Time to restart!

It takes me about ten minutes to replay to this point.  I can't GIVE SAND-DOLLAR to the guard, or PAY GUARD, and BRIBE GUARD returns YOU DON'T HAVE IT.  Drat.  This guard is immune to the pendant, and is refusing us entrance to the "LAND OF THE 'BLUE HOLES'."  Is this bribe meant for the other guard?  Nope, YOU DON'T HAVE IT here either.

I find myself on reserve air supply again as I revisit the shell house -- odd, as I have spent fewer turns this round than before, so the timing must be triggered by something else we've done, maybe flipping the game disk.  Where is the guard referred to in the ship's log?  We can't swim up from the trench maze, but we can do so from the room by the shell house, leading us to another tropical island.

All we find on dry land is a single palm tree -- we can CLIMB TREE and GET COCONUT here. EAT COCONUT is possible, even without the knife, but we can't get another one so I'm not sure if that was a smart thing to do.  East of the island is a small reef flat, where a barracuda with razor sharp teeth resides, adjoining an angelfish's area to the south.  These locations appear to be scenic in nature; they don't cause us any trouble or provide anything new of note.

Oh!  Can we PLAY RECORDER here?  Yes, on the island the words are intelligible -- a female voice says, "SAY HIPPOCAMPUS TO LUCIA, MY LOYAL AND TRUSTY SEAHORSE."  Okay?  When I visit the shell house to get the knife, I also find my helium tank here.  I also notice this time that the second guard is wearing shaded glasses, which is why the pendant isn't effective.  And he is riding a seahorse -- SAY HIPPOCAMPUS doesn't work, but HIPPOCAMPUS alone does, sending his steed into an uncontrollable state that allows us to slip north past the guard to the region of the "BLUE-HOLES."  These are, literally, blue-colored holes in the ground, and not some sort of pejorative describing the local residents.

There's really only one Blue-Hole we can explore -- a large one directly north of the entry to this area.  We can travel down to an ancient limestone cave, leading into yet another maze we have to navigate, and the most complicated one.  There's only one destination we need to reach, though, as we emerge at the "TONGUE-OF-THE-OCEAN" (designer Gray tends to hyphenate object names consisting of multiple words), which is a downward passage leading to the ledge of a deep trench.

Traveling north here takes us to an area with a large crystal enclosed by a transparent dome; the illustration is oddly colorless, suggesting that disk space was tight and the fills could not be defined, or that this illustration simply shipped out unfinished.  There's another shell house to the west, which proves to be the ENTRANCE TO THE ATLANTEAN MONITORING SYSTEM, guarded by another, perhaps BRIBEable GUARD... well, not quite.  BRIBE GUARD still returns YOU DON'T HAVE IT -- a quirk of the parser's priorities, it appears -- but GIVE SAND-DOLLAR works; even though we're told the GUARD EXCEPTS YOUR SMALL BRIBE, he takes no apparent exception to it and even offers us some advice: "WHEN IN THE MONITOR ROOM, PRESS '1 IF BY AIR AND '2' FOR THE ZOO, '3' and '4' WILL BE UP TO YOU."  Then he abandons his post, no doubt off to spend his ill-gotten dollar of corruption.

I'm once again on reserve air supply as we reach this point, so time may be of the essence.  I can't seem to EXAMINE MONITORS, so I just try to PUSH 1, revealing a display of a plane flying over an island.  PUSH 2 reveals humans locked in cages -- must be those vanished flight passengers.  PUSH 3 shows us the domed crystal area we saw just a while ago, with a cable extending from it that we didn't see when we visited earlier.  And PUSH 4 shows us the strange creature from the game's title screen, apparently AN ALIEN.  So this is all some sort of alien/Atlantean plot?

Can we CUT CABLE at the crystal?  Not at first -- we have to EXAMINE CABLE to find it, and then we can CUT CABLE.  It's not clear why we want to do this, really, but somehow, the deep-sea alien installation explodes, we manage to inflate our life vest and rise to the surface without getting the bends, and we very shortly wake up in a hospital, where we are attended by a nurse in an unprofessionally low-cut blouse who looks very much like Melinda the Queen of Atlantis and appears to be wearing the same pendant.  Apparently we've freed our fellow humans from alien captivity, instead of blowing them up along with the facility, but the whole situation raises certain questions about our sanity, methinks.  Ah, well -- victory is ours!

Apparently, The Abyssal Zone was the only adventure game ever published by Jeff Gray and Salty Software, whose products were apparently not nearly as salty as the company name suggests.  It's not a bad effort -- there's quite a bit to do, the map is extensive if a little maze-heavy, and the puzzles aren't too cryptic thanks to some handy clues available through exploration.  It's not a lengthy game by any means once the puzzles are figured out, but getting there is a pleasant experience and it's a decent example of its type.  I'm glad I discovered it -- while I know this blog attracts more readers when I tackle something well-known, I have more fun playing the games that nobody really talks about.

Adventure of the Week: Mummy's Curse (1981)

Recent forays into the Apple II adventure game library, with many early and exclusive titles,
has brought me to this week's subject: Mummy's Curse.  It was released in 1981 by a small publisher variously known as Highland Computer Services and Highlands Computers Inc. -- the company published several Apple II graphic adventures written by Butch Greathouse and/or Garry Rheinhardt in the early 1980s.

The intro explains that the scenes are DONE IN HIGH RESOLUTION GRAPHICS (not yet common in 1981, though the illustrations are fairly simple) and the game uses a two-word parser.  Our goal is TO RECOVER THE SOLID GOLD DEATH MASK OF KING RUTTATUTTUT WHICH IS GUARDED BY THE MUMMY.  We're also informed that we will encounter a number of amulets and must use their individual names for differentiation, and that we must bring the gold mask back to the Oasis to win.  Sounds straightforward enough!

As always, interested readers are encouraged to face the Mummy's Curse firsthand before continuing into my playthrough notes below.  I found the game fairly challenging -- the map is large and maze-infested, and while the puzzles are generally straightforward it's not easy to find everything that's important; I had to avail myself of some clues at the CASA Solution Archive to finish this one on deadline.  Beyond this point, for the sake of documenting these games, I will be detailing my experience from start to finish.  That is, there are sure to be...


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

As the game begins, we find ourselves at a Desert Oasis WHERE ALL TRAILS CROSS.  There appear to be a couple of palm trees near a pool here, but we can't LOOK TREE or LOOK POOL, or CLIMB TREE; we can't DRINK POOL, but we can DRINK WATER -- AHHH THAT WAS GOOD.  I try to DIG, but YOU HAVE NO SHOVEL, suggesting that we're likely to run across one at some point.

Heading north from the Oasis brings us into the Great Sahara Desert, with the sun beating down on the dunes.  Continuing north for the moment, we see some mountains in the distance, and North again brings us to a location with LUSH MOUNTAINS AHEAD and a stick lying on the ground.  We'll follow adventuring best practices and GET STICK in case it comes in handy later.

I'm just plowing forward here, seeing what the map looks like, and heading N once again we find a branch in the path through the mountains.  North again shows us the Nile river off to the west, and one more northward step is as far as we can go for now, as we encounter a Great Wooden Door that is locked.

I'll backtrack south to the Oasis again, and head South to see Shiek Mazurka's Small Palace.  Heading south again here loops back to the desert location just north of the Oasis.  I always like to map the world out before we get into the story, so now I'll head east from the Oasis to discover a Small Village on the edge of the desert.  It looks like the map is a little more constrained than it appeared to be at first -- heading east from the village takes us to Shiek Mazurka's palace again.  But we can go north into the village, where two stucco huts lie to the east and west.  A similar location to the north contains another pair of huts, and then loops back to the main Sahara desert location if we continue north.

Before I check out the huts' interiors, I want to map the desert a bit more -- we can go East from the main Desert to another similar location, then north to an Ancient Temple.  We can enter the temple to see an inscription on the ceiling -- it reads, "FIGURE ME SOUTH. ONLY TWO PITS = DEATH. FIGURE ME IN FIGURE ME OUT."  Hmmmm.  Cryptic!

We're still traveling light, inventory-wise, so let's see if we can find anything useful in those village huts.  In the village's south end, the small western hut is vacant but the large eastern one is a Trading Post.  It's operated by a stereotyped Chinese merchant named Woo Fooy, and he has... wait for it... a KNIFE AND SHOVEL FOR SALE.  We are prompted DO YOU WANT TO BUY THEM?..Y/N.  I'll answer Y -- after all, I do want to buy them -- but of course, WOO FOOY SAYS AW FOOY YOU NO GOT GOLD COINS and kicks us out of his establishment with its wonderful but limited wares.  At least we've learned something about the coin of the realm, and we can keep an eye out for some gold coins.

The northern end of the village is similarly laid out.  In the small western hut, we find A MYSTERIOUS MAN WRAPPED IN A BLUE SHROUD who shouts "BEGONE AMAHD," and a great wind drives us back out of the hut.  Interesting.  We can also reach the same Trading Post here, it apparently spans the north-south length of the village.

Our map is filling in bit by bit -- now I'll explore the region west of the Oasis, where we see the PYRAMID OF SATSOP II on the horizon.  The map, which is never too straightforward, gets even more convoluted here, with two different rooms where it LOOKS LIKE A HUGE PIT AHEAD.  We can work our way around the pyramid's other side to the west, and fall fatally into the huge pits if we're not careful with our navigation.  It took me a while to figure out what's going on here -- it seems there are also multiple locations where THE PATH HEADS SOUTH AND EAST/WEST, and one of them leads to THE ENTRANCE TO THE PYRAMID, but this only seems to happen after we've circled the pyramid's western side without falling into the eastern or southern pit.

Anyway, we've reached the pyramid's entrance and can now attempt to explore it, which seems exactly the sort of thing one should do in an adventure titled Mummy's Curse.  We enter it by traveling south into an entrance/exit area, and the pyramid presents a substantial mapping challenge.  Immediately to the east of the entrance is the CONFUSED YET? room.  There's a long hall south of the entrance which leads to (I think) a different CONFUSED YET? room, but I die of thirst before getting too far and have to restore and visit the Oasis to rehydrate.

The map is designed (and maybe forced by limited disk space) to confuse the player by featuring multiple identically named and illustrated rooms, but the geography is generally consistent and naturalistic.  Our main objective here seems to be to find some useful items.  A dead end in the southeast corner of the pyramid contains some matches.  Another in the southwest area provides the gold coins we need for supply purchases.  There's also a dead end with a FULL EWER.  The pyramid maze is messy to map, but eventually I manage to find my way back outside so we can head into the village to buy some supplies.  We don't have to make any choices here -- we buy the knife and the shovel in one turn when we answer the prompt in the affirmative with gold coins in hand.

I don't have a use for the knife yet, but I spend some time digging in the various locations on the map.  This proves fruitless, but in touring the map I've drawn so far I realize I have not visited the Nile -- there's still nothing to dig up there, but we can try to CROSS NILE... nope... GO NILE?  Nope.  SWIM?  YOU GOT TO MIDSTREAM AND RAN OUT OF BREATH AND DROWNED.  Whoops!

I also see that I missed a northeastern part of the desert, where THERE IS SOMETHING BURIED IN THE SAND.  Eureka!  DIGging here reveals STAIRS LEADING DOWN INTO A CRYPT!  It's the only part of the game so far where traveling Down is an option, so there we shall go...

THE EYE OF HORUS IS PAINTED ON THE FLOOR here.  To the west we see a rather large portrait of Cleopatra on the wall, and there don't seem to be any other rooms we can explore down here yet.  I try to PUSH WALL and TOUCH WALL and EXAMINE CLEO and TOUCH EYE and KISS CLEO, but nothing seems to have an effect.  The ewer is full of water, but that doesn't suggest anything.  I try to LIGHT MATCH and LIGHT STICK, but the parser is obstinate: WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO BURN THAT?  I poke around a little bit, but thirst sets in and I die on the way back to the Oasis before realizing I can DRINK WATER repeatedly from the ewer, as it's magically always full of water.

Anywhere else we haven't been?  The path that splits in the mountains has a westward branch that leads to a cliffside where we can see THE MUMMY'S TOMB.  We can't get to the tomb from here, but we can climb northward to the top of the mountain, where we find the AMULET (SMA).  Entering an old stone shrine here lets us acquire some incense, and we're told this was used as an alternate location when the priests couldn't find the crypt.

Maybe we can BURN INCENSE somewhere in the crypt?  I try this at the entrance -- SMELLS LIKE HIPPY HOLLOW.  YOUR INCENSE IS GONE.  Well, dang, that didn't do much.  But I do notice that we can go further down into the crypt, to a room with a picture of Isis and the AMULET (HORUS) available.  Another passage leads south to an image of the Phoenix, and west is an OLD RELIGIOUS ALTAR with an ax for the taking.

Can we use the ax on the big wooden doors?  Nope -- CUT DOOR just returns PUT YOUR AX AWAY UNTIL YOU REALLY NEED IT.

Standing on the southern bank of the Nile again, trying to find a way to the Mummy's Tomb, I try to MAKE BOAT -- YOU HAVE NO ROPE, but it seems this might be possible if I have the right elements.  I try to CHOP TREE at the Oasis, but am advised to LEAVE THESE TREES ALONE.  Have we seen any other wood or rope around?

Maybe I need to explore the pyramid more, its confusing map may be hiding some more artifacts.  I find a flashlight in a linear passage west of the entrance, and I think I've exhausted the pyramid now.

Can I BURN INCENSE at the old altar in the crypt?  Aha!  The altar opens and reveals a hidden room behind it.  The AMULET (APEP) is here, and a painting of Nefertiti.  I also visit the Temple again, and realize that the drawing on the wall is a rough map of the Pyramid.  Yes, it does look like I've cleaned that place out.  I try to LEARN MAP and MEMORIZE MAP but it seems to be a visual reference only.

What now?  Can I... MAKE TORCH?  MAKE KEY?  CARVE IT.  Really?  Wow.  CARVE KEY produces a wooden key!  Maybe we can open that massive gate now... and yes, we can!  The only thing behind it is the end of the path, a forested area with some strands of hemp.  I try to BURN HEMP, but fortunately the game won't cooperate, and I try to MAKE ROPE instead, which works.  Can I MAKE BOAT now?  No -- YOU HAVE NO WOOD.  But I can CHOP TREES right here -- clearcutting the whole area, apparently -- and GET LOGS.

MAKE BOAT now allows us to make a raft -- can we carry it all the way to the Nile?  Apparently so!  USE RAFT allows us to cross the Nile, and we are now standing at the threshold of the Mummy's Tomb.

The game warns us that there's only one way in and we won't get out the same way, so this is a great time to SAVE (the game provides a single save/restore slot, but I'm using the AppleWin emulator so I'll just save the entire machine's state instead.). Immediately upon entering, I have difficulty breathing, and shortly YOUR LUNGS EXPLODED IN FLAMES AND YOU DIED ON THE SPOT!  That's pretty strong stuff, whatever it is.  I try to HOLD BREATH, but that doesn't work.  Maybe these amulets are supposed to help?  WEAR HORUS isn't recognized, the parser thinks we are trying to WEAVE something.  When I USE HORUS, the amulet glows and vanishes AS YOU FEEL ITS EFFECT ON YOU, but I can't really tell what effect that's supposed to be, so we'll have to use a little trial and error here.

USE HORUS doesn't help us breathe, but USE SMA does and the parser confirms we have been saved by THE POWER OF SMA.  The next room seems to be a dead end -- we are told that "MUMMY DEAREST" was here but hid when he heard us coming?  The other amulets don't seem to reveal his whereabouts, and we can't DIG here, nor can we LIGHT FLASHLIGHT to seek him out.

What have I missed?  Ah -- thanks, CASA!  I never entered the Sheik's Palace, and didn't realize I could due to the map layout -- we go south to reach the Palace, then north to enter it, and I hadn't actually tested navigation in that direction. Inside, we meet ABDUL THE PALACE GUARD.  We can't LOOK GUARD or TALK GUARD, but if we SAY HELLO he lets us enter.

Inside the palace there are stairs going up and a hallway to the north.  The room to the north is empty -- BROTHER THIS GUY DON'T HAVE MUCH OF A PALACE, the parser comments -- and the upstairs room contains a STRANGE MIXTURE OF DIRT AND STRAW.  Mud?  Brick?  MAKE BRICK doesn't work, nor does MAKE MUD.  I try to POUR WATER -- and the mixture somehow softens and provides access to a new room, a north/south passage with a ramp heading upwards.

This map is a lot bigger than I expected for a single-disk game -- the ramp leads to stairs, leading up to The Dome Room, though there doesn't seem to be any reason to come up here.  The north/south passage connects to an east/west passage, where we meet the WICKED PRINCESS FATIMA of legendary mirror fame to the east, and find a trap door to the west.

I try to GO DOOR and OPEN TRAP to no avail, but when I try to simply go D the parser suggests that we need to pick the lock with a knife.  PICK LOCK does work, and now we find ourselves in a room with a mirror?  We can't BREAK MIRROR, but if we go N we walk into the mirror... and die.  It's safer to go S, into another east/west passage; a shimmering blue wall to the east takes us back into the palace's upper level, but we should probably restore and explore to the west first.

There are some traps down this hallway -- first, a small but bottomless pit.  We can't JUMP PIT, but if we go N, then THE STRENGTH OF HORUS kicks in and carries us over.  I realize that I must have USEd HORUS earlier when I was experimenting, as I no longer have any of the amulets in hand; fortunately, the effect is long-lasting, and so is the power of APEP that subsequently protects us from a three-headed snake.

We've reached an orange room, where we find a scepter that we should probably take along.  After finding our way back out the way we came in, it seems like a good time to go see if we can deal with the mummy yet.

In the room where the mummy is hiding, I WAVE SCEPTER -- and we rise to a location where the parser opts for minimal drama and punctuation: YOU HAVE FOUND THE GOLDEN MASK BUT SOMEBODY IS HERE TO SEE YOU.  HEY ITS THE MUMMY.

KILL MUMMY?  YOU UNFORTUNATELY ARE THE ONLY ONE THAT CAN BE KILLED.  BURN MUMMY?  WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO BURN THAT?  Hmmmm, there go all the obvious ideas.  I try to leave the room, but I can't escape and after a few turns of my fumbling about THE MUMMY JUST DID YOU IN.

Something unusual happens here, though.  After I die, I'm given the option to keep playing -- and when I do, I find myself back at the Oasis, with a victory message!

Apparently, when we reincarnate we don't lose any of our inventory items, and we've been given the Mask when we entered the room!  So even though we died in the process of reaching our objective, the game thinks we've won fair and square.  But this doesn't quite seem right, so I check the walkthrough and learn that I was supposed to explore an area west of the Pyramid to learn a magic phrase to use against the mummy.  Apparently if we have the flashlight and travel east from one of the LARGE PIT AHEAD rooms, we enter the pit -- and find graffiti on a wall in the passage reading, "HORUS = STRENGTH, APEP = SNAKE, SMA = LUNG," which we've already figured out by trial and error.  The text also tells us that AMAHD means ADVENTURER, so that's what the folks in town have been calling us.  Ah!  The mysterious man says "BEGONE AMAHD" and we are whisked away.  Does that work when we try it?  BEGONE AMAHD yields CLOSE BUT NO COOKIES, but BEGONE ADVENTURER sends us instantly back to the Oasis, with exactly the same victory message.  Basically, dying whisks us back to the Oasis, and so does employing the hard-won magic phrase, so either way we come out a winner if we've made it into the heart of the Mummy's Tomb.

Mummy's Curse is a more involved experience than I was expecting for a game of its vintage -- the map is very large considering the number of illustrations included, and the puzzles are intertwined and reasonably challenging.  The tricky layout sometimes feels like a bit of a design cheat, but the game is fair enough in its way if we're careful to draw an accurate map.  I'll have to try the other Highlands Computers games, if I can track them down -- these small, obscure companies often produced interesting adventures that are well worth playing, even if they're not well known.

Adventure of the Week: Troll's Tale (1983)

A few weeks ago I was reminded of Sierra On-Line's Troll's Tale, from 1983; it's another game for younger adventurers, using the same menu-driven approach as the company's Dragon's Keep and Gelfling Adventure.  It's almost identical in structure to Dragon's Keep -- instead of collecting animals held captive by a lonely dragon, we're collecting treasures stolen by an evil troll.  If the troll appears in the same picture as the treasure, we can't acquire the treasure at that time and must wander off to another location and hope the troll has moved on when we return.  We're playing the Apple II version here, but the game also appeared (with improved color) on the Commodore 64 and Coleco Adam computers.

 
One technical advance visible in Troll's Tale is that its graphics were implemented using Penguin's The Graphics Magician, a step up from Ken Williams' homegrown fill-and-vector graphics tool used for the early Hi-Res Adventures.  It provides more variety in fill patterns, has some simple animation capabilities, and appears to be more space-efficient, with all the illustrations fitting on a single-sided disk.  Programming was handled by Al Lowe of Leisure Suit Larry fame, with text and graphics by Mike MacChesney, and the design presages the Macintosh Hypercard game The Manhole with its simple and imaginative exploration-based style.

Troll's Tale does not take long to play -- there are no real puzzles, just a world to explore in search of the unhidden but scattered treasures, and no fatalities or dead ends.  I was able to finish it in about an hour while making notes, and I didn't even need to draw a map, although if I'd had to leave and come back it would have been handy for memory-jogging purposes.  It's clearly aimed at young players, and I can't say you're missing any great challenge if you opt to read on into the...

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


The game begins with an optional tutorial demonstrating the menu system -- we use the space bar to iterate through the available options (they are numbered, but we can't just hit the key corresponding to our intended selection), and RETURN to select.  We are informed that THE EVIL TROLL HAS HIDDEN ALL THE TREASURES OF MARK, THE DWARF KING.  The F key is used as an inventory command, showing the treasures we have already FOUND.

We're also given a handy list of treasures to find -- a flashlight, a candy sucker, a bag of gold, a chest of jewels, a diamond ring, a copper penny, a fiddle worth a fortune, a treasure chest, a silver shell, a gift for the guard, a lovely necklace, a gold brick, a pot of money, a silver cup, a bag of pennies, and "a dollar and a cent" -- sixteen in all.

The game proper begins with the player facing a dark cave, and we can choose to 1) GO INTO THE CAVE or 2) GO SOUTH INTO THE FIELD.  I'll follow my usual habit and poke around outside before taking the obvious route into the dark cave.

In the field, I find the flashlight -- one treasure down already, and the narration tells us this item will be useful inside the cave as well.  Next, we'll head west into the mountains, where we can read a stone tablet that reiterates the very basic plot with a note from King Mark about his stolen treasures, then head back toward the field.

We run across a tree on the way back to the cave, where a nearby sign again advertises the Dwarf King's plight; this monarch is starting to sound a bit whiny.  We can't always go back the way we came using the game's limited menus, so gameplay consists primarily of exhausting the available options.  A rare instance of genuine player choice occurs here as we enter the cave -- we can choose to turn on the flashlight before we enter the cave, or turn it on afterward when we find ourselves in the dark.

With the lights on, we can see a dwarven guard who, we are told, IS AFRAID OF THE TROLLS.  We have three choices at this point -- we can take one of three tunnels to the west, the north, and east.  I'll go west for now.

Here, we find ourselves LYING DOWN IN A NARROW HALL, with further crawls to the right and north and a door on the left, in an odd mixture of relative and cardinal directions.  I'll try the door on the left, where I run into the TROLL, though there's no treasure here so he really isn't a nuisance at the moment, beyond the fact that it takes several additional seconds for the engine to overlay his fearsome visage on the illustration.

There are three sets of stairs here -- left, center, and right -- and I'll keep exploring to the left.  There's a long winding road up here, and we can choose to GO DOWN THE ROAD, where we find the DOLLAR AND A CENT treasure, then turn around to come back the way we came.  The center staircase leads to a large area with two dark spots faintly visible to the north -- one is a doorway, the other proves to be an open safe containing the BAG OF PENNIES treasure.

At the door near the safe, we can either go through it or travel east to part of the Troll Underworld.  We can travel east again here, pausing to LOOK DOWN THE WELL, promptly falling in with a little bit of animation.  We can retrieve the FIDDLE WORTH A FORTUNE here before climbing up a rope to escape. 

I'm going to go back and check the door to the north before continuing past the well -- it leads into a Troll's Room with a bottle and a fireplace.  In an implied bit of safety education, we're advised against -- and actually prohibited from -- drinking from the unlabeled bottle, but we can find the SILVER CUP in the fireplace.  We're down to 11 treasures already!

Returning to the well, I head east, where we find two huts.  The one on the left contains a treasure chest, which provides an easy way to carry our accumulating treasure load in addition to counting as a treasure itself.  We can also enter the fireplace, where hot coals flame in a nice bit of animation; here, we can go left to exit the fireplace or continue to the right.  Going right takes us into a room with THREE MAGIC POTS, and we're allowed to put our hand in the left, middle, or right one.  The left one beams us back to the narrow crawlspace near the entrance, forcing a fairly long journey back but also providing an escape from this area; the middle one takes us to the location outside the huts; and the right pot seems to contain a treasure, though in my playthrough the troll randomly shows up.  I have to leave and return to claim the COPPER PENNY.

We've got 40% of the treasures in hand now as we exit from the hut on the right, the fireplace apparently connecting the two huts.  There's also a back door leading out of the left hut, to a tree with a hole in it, near a cave.  The hole in the tree leads into another branching cave, with paths to the upper and lower left.  The path to the upper left contains the QUEEN'S NECKLACE, and the other takes us to a large globe containing three levers we can choose to pull.

The left lever simply exits the globe.  The middle one takes us to a nondescript room containing a gold brick.  It sits on a box that is too heavy to roll out the door; we can take the brick, and are advised that it is heavy and we need to finish the game soon, though this warning doesn't seem to manifest in any concrete way.  The only exit from this room leads to a barrel floating in the water; we aren't allowed to go south into a dark, scary area, but we can walk east back to the globe.  The right-hand lever in the globe takes us back to the barrel; before we ride it, I'm going to look behind the globe using the available menu option, where someone is throwing rocks at the screen, forcing us back to the globe. 

Riding the barrel down the river, we can acquire the POT OF MONEY on a stretch of beach to reach 60% of our goal.  The river currents are weird and shifting things, it appears, as getting back on the barrel takes us back to the place where we found it.  Returning to the beach again, we wander east to find a SILVER SHELL.  This location is a dead end, but we are invited to close our eyes and think about a TUNNEL or a TREE.  The former takes us into the cave near the tree we hadn't explored yet, while the latter takes us to the tree standing outside this cave.  Pulling a ring inside the cave transports us back to the globe room -- this map is nothing if not self-referential -- so I'll take the opportunity to head west of the pot of money area to find a door set into the dirt bank.  This door leads, one-way, back into the Troll's Room, closing one of the map's many loops.

Making my way back to the cave by the tree again, I head through a lighted exit to find a small house, where we acquire a GIFT FOR THE GUARD, i.e. the dwarf we saw standing at the main cave entrance earlier.  I've finally exhausted this section of the map, so I'll go back to the well and head south into a room with a tile floor.  To its west we enter another tunnel area, with the BOX OF JEWELS claimable, and a passage south leads back to the narrow crawlspace.  East of the tiled room is the DIAMOND RING, which we must retrieve from its current installation as adornment for a troll statue. 

We can go south from this point to reach a crawlspace with a door on the east end, where we find the CANDY SUCKER treasure hidden in an assortment (we are not allowed to take any of the other suckers which don't belong to King Mark.)  A flashing text and rising musical tone alerts us that we have only one treasure left to retrieve!  If we STAND UP in the eastern passageway, we harmlessly bump our heads, triggering a parser joke implying the physical presence of the omniscient narrator, who bumps his/her/its head as well.   Doing this also clears that menu option, introducing another so that we can travel west out of this tunnel, back to the guarded cave entrance.

I haven't taken the staircase on the right yet, back at the western crawlspace area -- but it just leads back to the main cave entrance. The only treasure we're missing now is the bag of gold, and I'm hoping to find it somewhere in the northern tunnel.  And... yes, there it is, in the very first place we look!   We're told that YOU HAVE FOUND EVERY TREASURE and instructed to TAKE THE TREASURES TO THE GUARD.  I could just back out to the south, but I can't resist going north through another exit to make sure I've explored this world thoroughly.  This path just leads back to the tiled room, and I take the roundabout western path to get back to the tunnel system entrance.

We can choose to 1. TALK TO THE GUARD now, and he asks us to leave the cave with him, promising a "SMALL SURPRISE."  Outdoors, with the troll's tail conspicuously visible at the left edge of the screen, the guard thanks us for the treasures, and tells us to "PULL THE TROLL'S TAIL AND WE END THE TROLL'S TALE!"  This action reveals (to almost no one's surprise) that the troll-phobic guard is really King Mark, with perhaps the least dramatic prose possible:

And that's about all I can say about Troll's Tale -- victory is strictly a process of elimination, and tackling it in one sitting meant I didn't have to stack unexplored paths too deeply.  There's no real challenge here, but its open structure makes it a lot less linear than many "more sophisticated" games, and as an intro to the art form I'm sure it introduced a lot of kids to the joys of adventuring.

***** BONUS FADEOUT RANT *****

Whoops.  Sorry, Mark!  Yes, I am being sarcastic.  You didn't have to tell me the secret either, you know.  It's not like you gave me any kind of real reward or anything, and knowing you used to dress up as a guard for personal reasons I'm too polite to speculate about won't buy me a cup of coffee.  Maybe you should hire some security personnel or something to prevent your treasures being stolen all the time.  Sorry, your "treasures."  I left out the air quotes.  I hope your currency is staying stable on the candy sucker standard, there, King.  Yeah, yeah, you've got a bag of gold and a silver cup.  I had no trouble carrying your entire national treasure through a bunch of caves, if you hadn't noticed.  I also note that naming me an Honorary Dwarf costs you nothing at all, and to tell you the truth it actually feels a bit insulting.  You think I'm a coward?  A layabout who expects other people to clean up his messes?  Maybe a troll-phobe like your royal High-horsedness?  You know what?  I don't care that I told everyone your big secret.  Not one bit.  I had other things to do today, you know.  Maybe you should get your mom to sew name tags on your treasures, maybe that would help.  While you're at it, ask her why she named you Mark.  Didn't she know you were going to be King someday?  "King Mark"?  Really?  Does poor planning run in your family?

Ahem.

Onward!


 

Adventure of the Week: 4K Adventure (1996)

This week's wanderings through the online archives brought me to John Metcalf's 4K Adventure, written in 1995 for the PC MART Venture Forth programming contest.  Its primary feature is that it consumes a mere 4096 bytes of code and data in total, using a text compression technique to cram some nicely written text and a minimal but sufficient parser into a very small space.  I'm playing it this week because it sounded intriguing conceptually, and also because I had limited time available and ran into technical dead ends with a couple of other games I was hoping to tackle.  The old-fashioned PC DOS .COM executable file requires a DOSBox environment to run on newer machines, and that's how I'm playing it here.

The game begins with a surprisingly lengthy and evocative bit of text -- the player is cast as Grimbis, a black dwarf seeking to retrieve a stolen magical orb from some elves, in order to help our master Gawyn maintain his reign of eternal winter; nothing too substantial, but it's a nice change from the usual fantasy adventure heroics.

I can recommend 4K Adventure to any adventurer seeking a brief challenge -- the parser is very limited but there are a few interesting puzzles on hand, and Metcalf's design nicely avoids some of the traditional adventure design cliches.  As always, my playthrough notes beyond this point will give the game away in detail, so there are certain to be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! ***** 

We start in the depths of the forest, where we can hear water through some bushes to the west.  I'll avoid the obvious attraction here and go North, to a snowless area near a door in a wall.  The door is made of old oak, we learn if we EXAMINE DOOR; we can't OPEN it without a key.  I also note a parser limitation here -- LOOK [anything] is always a room-level look, regardless of the noun specified.

East of this area is a windy track near the edge of the forest, with a holly bush preventing travel north.  We can go further east to the edge of a gloomy forest, where we can see distant hills to the north, but this is otherwise a dead end for navigation.  Given the game's text-compression technical goals, I'm not surprised to find that the map fairly limited.

Heading south, we pass through a snowy forest clearing and reach the entrance to a prominent fissure cave.  Beyond navigation and a few verbs, there's not much room for parser vocabulary in this game, and we can't GO FISSURE or ENTER FISSURE; it's just here for atmosphere, it seems, exuding darkness that prevents us from entering.

I'm back at the starting location now, and head to the west to see the river Burre, the source of the sounds of water we heard earlier.  There's a boat tied up here, but I can't UNTIE ROPE or SET SAIL or RIDE BOAT or USE BOAT -- it seems we could CUT ROPE if we had a knife, but we don't yet.  EXAMINE BOAT provides more detail but only confirms that the rope has shrunk too tightly around its post to be untied.

Looking for a knife, I happen to EXAMINE BUSH along the windy track, and lo and behold, here's Gawyn's orb!  That part was a lot easier than I expected, and nicely unpredictable; the elves must have left it here, and now we probably just have to make it back to our master.  Where could that knife be?  EXAMINE RIVER reveals a pike, glimpsed momentarily in the murky waters, but I think it's pike as in fish and not as in head-on-a so it won't be a substitute for a proper knife.

I wander around for a while, trying to EXAMINE everything I can.  I finally discover, at the eastern edge of the forest where "The moonlight dances slowly in the thin icicles," that EXAMINE MOONLIGHT is unrecognized, but EXAMINE ICICLES finds a moonbeam trapped in a shard of ice.  Perhaps this will act as a light source so we can enter the dark fissure... and yes, it does!

Inside the narrow cave with the moonbeam in hand, we can travel east until the passage widens into a cavern of boulders.  An odd grey fungus grows here, so I'll GET FUNGUS just in case it proves useful.  Heading back west and then south, I find a pool of icy cold water and a small key.  Now we're getting somewhere.

The small key works on the door in the crumbling wall, providing access to a summer meadow, where our moonbeam melts, so I hope we don't need it anymore.  To the west of the meadow is a murmuring brook, containing pebbles of many colors.  We can't take these, but EXAMINE PEBBLES reveals a knife, so we can GET KNIFE and put it to good use.

CUT ROPE now lets us ride the boat across the icy river, and upon landing we can see Gawyn's Tower to the west.  We travel in that direction, and in an instant, victory is ours!

Apparently we get bonus "gold coin" points for acquiring the odd fungus, even though we never needed to do anything with it, and points for any items that survive in our final inventory.  I went back and checked -- we get 35 additional points if we keep the moonbeam frozen, by dropping it before entering the summery meadow and picking it back up after fetching the knife.

4K Adventure is a brief but entertaining experience -- not bad for 4 Kb of material!

Adventure of the Week: Gelfling Adventure (1984)

A longtime reader commented on last week's The Dark Crystal post to remind me that Sierra released a simplified version of the game a few years later, using the same illustrations, called Gelfling Adventure.  Since I'm pressed for blogging time this week, and its predecessor is fresh in my mind, this seemed a fine opportunity to see how this alternate version compares to the original. 

Released in 1984, a few years after the original game and the Jim Henson movie that inspired it, Gelfling Adventure is aimed at younger players.  Some of the darker story content is toned down, the map and plot are simplified to fit the game onto one double-sided disk, and it uses a simple choice-based interface, similar to Sierra's earlier Dragon's Keep.  Almost all the artwork is reused as-is from The Dark Crystal, with numerous scenes dropped for space reasons, but the new title screen utilizes early digitization technology, which might have helped the first game out visually had it been available in 1982:

If you're going to play one of these two games, I'd recommend the original The Dark Crystal over this simplified edition, just because it feels more like a proper adventure game than this choice-based redesign.  But feel free to satisfy your curiosity about this version with my playthrough notes below, which are, as always, certain to contain...

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

As the game opens, JEN IS PLAYING THE FLUTE -- there's no need to find it by digging with a piece of shale, so this is closer to the film's opening.  The Mystics are here referred to as THE OLD ONES, and as in the original game, we can't really do anything meaningful before one such creature arrives to summon Jen to the dying Ursu's side.  We have some conversation options -- we can say HELLO or GOODBYE or take a nap instead -- but we're not allowed to say goodbye before saying hello, and if we choose to sleep we dream that we must rush to the cave of Ursu, so the message gets through anyway.

Since I've played the original game, I'll opt to navigate to the west and then take a detour to the north to see what might be different.  In this version, Jen explicitly notices that the Valley of Stones casts shadows pointing to the top of a small hill, and there's no path here, just a tree which we're not allowed to explore at this time.  We still have some freedom to wander and avoid our destiny -- we can visit the pond with the lily pads, though if we try to communicate with them, we're informed that the animals' mothers have advised them not to talk to strangers, replacing the Dr. Doolittle joke used in the original game.

There doesn't seem to be a time limit here -- the dying Old One hangs on until we reach him -- but we're also not really able to do much beyond visiting Ursu's cave.  We do have the opportunity to glance at his bowl to see the image of the Crystal, and Ursu's advice is much simpler, replacing a few screens of text with the more direct "FIND AUGHRA. SHE HAS SHARD LIKE THAT ONE. USE IT TO FIX DARK CRYSTAL."  (The puppet characters -- created by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, so this was not technically a Muppet production -- all talk like cartoon cavemen in this version of the game, for some reason, while they were much more articulate in the movie and the original adventure.)

We don't have a lot of options for exploration in this version -- much of the swamp, mountain and forest map is cut out.  After Ursu passes away, we are given the option of going straight to Aughra's dome... but that doesn't actually work, so we will have to explore a bit within the constraints of the reduced map.

That tree on the hill is being emphasized as we exit the cave, and now that we're past our visit to Ursu, Jen is allowed to dig at its base (with his hands, apparently) to find a shiny golden key.  We can now talk to the frog-like creature in the swamp, though he's not helpful -- he tells Jen to "GET LOST," and Jen innocently says that he already is.  We don't have to mess with the lily pads at all -- we can just wade north through the swamp to the location where the babbling brook was found in The Dark Crystal, but here it's just a dry patch of land with some shiny pebbles obviously visible.

When Jen touches them, we hear a loud crash of thunder, but he is allowed to take these "MAGIC PEBBLES" and there's no sling available in Gelfling Adventure.  After doing this, Jen is lost in the swamp, and can choose to follow various passing creatures and sounds, some of which lead back to his starting point.  I feel like I'm headed in the right direction as I head out of the swamp toward the mountains and we're advised that "TIME IS RUNNING OUT"  to urge us along, even though there's no real time limit here.  I wander into the northern swamp, where Jen finds himself trapped by some vines, and as in the 1982 title, Aughra rescues Jen.  We don't have to answer a riddle in this version of the game; we can just tell Aughra we're looking for a shard, and she leads Jen to her observatory.

Here we only have three shard color choices, as compared to four in The Dark Crystal -- if we choose to play the flute, the melody is different, but the blue crystal glows as expected.  I am surprised to discover that we are actually allowed to take the wrong crystal, but if we do we don't get very far before Jen "accidentally" drops it and we end up back at Aughra's, sparing young players the more substantial frustrations possible in the 1982 Hi-Res adventure.

If we pick the blue crystal shard, the Garthim soldiers show up right on cue, and we can "choose" to escape (we can try to save Aughra or fight the Garthim, but those don't pan out and we're given another shot at the expected action, i.e. jumping out the window.)

Now Jen needs to find the Dark Crystal; we don't need to do anything fancy, we can just head toward the Pod People village, where we can "ASK THE VILLAGE PEOPLE FOR HELP."  (Perhaps Henson's whole story concept was just a metaphor for the ravages of disco?)

To meet Jen and Fizzgig, we have to intentionally head back to the east, get Jen lost in the swamp and select the CALL FOR HELP option.  Jen and Kira are introduced to each other telepathically via Dreamfasting when they touch hands, and the text confirms that Jen and Kira are not close relatives, just surviving Gelflings, something that was left open to interpretation in The Dark Crystal.

We don't have to solve any puzzles around the beetle shell, but our heroes still use it to paddle downstream and return to the Pod People village.  On the way downstream, we see a crystal bat flying overhead, and Jen is able to use Kira's slingshot to knock it out of the sky, referencing a puzzle that was apparently designed but never fully implemented in The Dark Crystal.

There's a continuity bug here, as the Pod People seem never to have seen Jen before despite our earlier visit -- they're suddenly afraid of him, whereas he seemed unremarkable just a little while earlier.  But this is a minor plot point, as Kira smooths things over and everyone shares a meal.

The important thing to do now is to talk to the Pod People again; they tell us how to find the Castle of the Skeksis -- "GO WEST, SOUTH, AND THEN WEST FROM LANDSTRIDER HILL."  We can't proceed to do that, though, until we opt to DANCE TO THE MUSIC and then flee the Garthim warrior that arrives (summoned by the deep throbbing rhythms of the village discotheque, no doubt.)  We can opt to drop the magic pebbles we picked up earlier, creating a crash of thunder that frightens the beetle soldier away.

Continuing to flee, Jen and Kira discover the ancient Gelfling hieroglyphs, called GELFLING PICTURE WRITING here for the benefit of younger players, with no mention of the ruined village.  We had to discover these on our own in The Dark Crystal, and the displayed image still depicts the flute, though it's not mentioned in the text.

Now Fizzgig is barking, and investigation reveals a Skeksis lurking nearby -- I think this is partially new artwork, as this scenario didn't occur in my playthrough of The Dark Crystal.  He invites us to follow him, but it seems more prudent to flee to Landstrider Hill, climbing aboard the creatures and following the Pod People's directions to reach the castle, where Jen and Kira encounter a group of Garthim soldiers.

At this point, I make the wrong choice, jumping off the landstriders and allowing Jen and Kira to be captured by the Skeksis!  The Crystal is left unrepaired as the three moons come together, and the game does in fact end unhappily!  We are allowed to read either the good news or the bad news first -- the bad news being that we've lost the game, the good that we can try again.  But there's no quick recovery offered -- we have to start over from the beginning, an unusual penalty in a game meant for younger players.

On the retry (from a saved AppleWin emulator state, in my case; the game has no save function as far as I can tell), I discover that, while we can wander around a bit on the landstriders, dead ends and the setting sun drive us inevitably toward the Castle of the Skeksis, even if we didn't learn about the recommended route earlier in the village. 

Choosing to ride into battle on the landstriders this time, we experience a similar scenario to the one in the movie and the earlier game -- we are knocked off the landstriders, and our only real option is to JUMP OFF OF THE CLIFF.  Kira's wings appear and Jen automatically grabs on to her legs, so there's really no choice to make until we hit the ground.

There are still some fatal scenarios possible here -- upon discovering the entrance into the castle, if we opt to SHOUT AND JUMP FOR JOY then our Gelfling heroes are captured and the story ends badly.  Choosing to follow Fizzgig into the opening is more productive, and we actually do have to navigate a simpler version of the sewer maze to find our way into the castle.

As in the original game, a Skeksis appears and kidnaps Kira and Fizzgig, leaving Jen trapped by a rockslide, though there's a difference here as Jen is actually trapped under the rocks and must move them.  After doing this, however, we skip some navigational puzzles present in the earlier design as Jen simply finds himself inside the castle.

We don't have to hide behind the curtain in the Skeksis' dining room, and Jen's not really in danger of being captured here, so we can listen to their conversation to remind us that Jen needs to heal the Crystal.  And we don't have to hide in a closet to avoid wandering Skeksis -- we can just use the door at the end of the hall to find and free Aughra (actually, she won't let Jen free her, as there's "NO TIME FOR THAT!"  This is allowed, but actually optional, in the original game.)

We're close to the end of the game now, and the story is very linear from this point on; any wrong move is either neutral or ends the game with Jen's capture by the Skeksis.  To succeed, we must go through a big wooden door, unlocking it using the gold key we found earlier, then jump to the Crystal from a balcony, dropping the shard in the process.  As in the earlier game, Kira throws it back, but in this toned-down version of the story, instead of being stabbed by one of the Skeksis, Kira is simply knocked fatally to the floor.

Jen heals the crystal using the blue shard, and some Old Ones arrive, merging with the Skeksis to unify both species into new creatures called the UrSkeks.  The Dark Crystal didn't clearly incorporate this aspect of the movie's plot -- perhaps because a final puzzle was needed, requring a Gelfling kiss to wrap things up, or maybe the scripted ending was modified after the game was underway.  At any rate, in this version, the UrSkeks restore Kira to health, as thanks for Jen's help.

We're offered an opportunity to see our score, and after a simple congratulatory message -- CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE WON "GELFLING ADVENTURE" -- we're told how many moves it took us to finish, 138 in my case, with 66 suggested as a target for improvement.

The existence of Gelfling Adventure suggests that The Dark Crystal itself was not a big seller, and this alternate version may have been designed to squeeze a little more revenue out of Sierra's Henson license, some while after the movie was released.  But online sources suggest this remake was not marketed well, did not sell well (the movie's unspectacular box office results likely providing little support in these pre-VHS days), and is quite rare today as a result. 

Still, it's a unique example of a studio implementing two different versions of the same basic adventure game design, and I'm glad I took the time to tackle it this week.   It also reminds me that Sierra Online published several other menu-driven adventures for young players during the pre-King's Quest years, and now I'll have to try to knock those off my to-play list as well.