My girlfriend and I are new to interactive fiction. We’ve been playing the free version of Anchorhead, the 1998 version, for about a week now and hugely enjoying it, but now we’ve come to a serious block: the church. We lost the flashlight early on day two, because on day one we jumped off the bridge into the river and it got waterlogged, so we only have the lamp and matches to light our way when we get to the church, but when you jump to the riser you lose whatever light source you’re holding, which means there’s no way to see in the darkness once we get up into the church, because either:
we extinguish the lamp, pocket it, and use the matches as a light source to jump, meaning we lose the matches and can’t light the lamp; or,
we use the lamp as a light source and lose the lamp, which we’ll probably need for the rest of the game; or,
we leave the lamp outside the church, use the matches as a light source, and lose them when we jump.
We have four matches.
Is there a way around this, or have we soft-locked our game?
I don’t remember the behavior of the game from 1998, but I can tell you that in 1998 everybody would have looked at you funny and said “Well obviously ruining your flashlight is bad. Don’t do that. When was your most recent save?”
The idea that ruining an important game object should be a recoverable mistake just wasn’t on the table.
EDIT: I’m not making fun of you for making a mistake! I’m pointing out that the term “softlock” didn’t exist in the 90s, and if you tried to explain it, people would have said “Oh, you mean when it’s time to restore an earlier save.”
Yeah I sort of got that sense (I’ve been into the history of parser IF for years but hadn’t played till now). I regret to admit that when the flashlight did break, I thought it might be a serious issue but kept quiet because I wasn’t sure. Stupid. I asked this more out of a last ditch sense of “might as well ask before I lose a couple days of progress.”
Me and my gf tried a number of ingenious strategies but couldn’t get anything to quite work, so we’re starting over. Gonna use a Python Xlib script to automate the catch up process.
I detected a deadend and some zombification here when playing Anchorhead last year.
If you get the flaslight wet jumping from the bridge to the water you won’t be able to procceed in the darkness pit.
You need to drop some light source to the bottom of the pit in order to be able to jump from the ending of the rope.
