The previous version was over a decade ago, and today’s version 10 is described as the “Final functional release with end game”. It has a decade-old Facebook group, with three posts, the most recent four hours ago, and mysterious talk of “advanced (private) discussion groups, which you will be invited to join once you reach the requisite entry level”. Here, there is @Ferret and Ferret. The IFWiki page mentions Twisty Little Passages but some ferreting around (obviously) reveals that the book doesn’t contain the word “ferret”…
Has anybody here ever played the game? One member of IFDB at least, and somebody called Adrian is listed as having the honour of completing Phase 1!
Your comments are appropriate to the situation. At the time the game was converted from a proprietary environment to an “open” environment (if Windows was ever open) it contained mechanisms to try to make money as players progressed through the game (using gateways that needed licence keys to progress to the next stage).
Time moves on and the money-making boat sailed. In the back of my mind was to produce a release with the gateways removed so that it could be played to the end. The game was designed for expansion by releases of new sets of rooms and puzzles. Those two factors encouraged me to add the last phase to make it a complete game that could stand alone.
It is true to say that it is not the most popular game, but there you go. Its heyday was in the late eighties when these games were very popular but then it was limited to Data General computers. Moving to Windows was an intellectual challenge to see if it could be done. Ideally, I wanted to get it running on Linux too, but there is a distinct lack of fully featured PLI compilers on Linux.
Adrian (on the honours board) used to play the DG version and had a brief flirtation with the Windows version.
Sorry for the necromancing! But we’re actively playing it over at Jason Dyer’s blog (https://bluerenga.blog/). Any help is greatly appreciated! As far as I can see, we’re moving in completely unexplored territory right now, and the game is extremely cruel.
This is amazing. My plan was to play this myself as soon as I got the time… but realistically I might just follow your progress at a distance! Good luck
Agreed; this game could certainly hold its own against all of the other mainframe games of the seventies / eighties for sheer toughness. Unwinnable lock outs a plenty and there can surely be no doubt that it is the biggest piece of IF ever created (Chimaera by Chris Newall notwithstanding). I haven’t been around to play it in the last week but I have made it to Phase 3 Awakening and am currently stuck outside a steel door. I even managed to wheedle a small hint out of the authors in return for posting a few bugs that I have found.
