This was a great game when I played it so many decades ago. I started it again last summer, but only reached the mid game. I look forward to your reports.
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Did going northeast during the “black shapes” cutscene avoid a few turns of it? I can’t think of any other way to get more information about that…
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I tested this out, and no. The black shapes scene consists of exactly the five lines of text seen in the transcript. It starts the second time you arrive in the Parking Lot, whether that’s because you’re returning from the skyscraper or because you left in the time machine and then came back again. It also pauses when you leave the area, whether by walking to the skyscraper or using the time machine, and picks up from wherever it left off when you return.
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Hooray, First Things First! One of my favourites. It happens that I have been replaying this recently so I will be very careful about potential spoilers! Looking forward to reading!
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I’ve just spent a while longer wandering around without making any progress to speak of. I can’t do anything 20 years in the past because I get lost in the forest, I can’t find anything to do on the construction site apart from getting the miracle-grow taken away, I can’t figure out anything to do in the bank, I can’t find where I might have hidden a spare key to get inside the house, I can’t find anything useful to do in the fire-wracked future and in the distance future I can’t get anywhere without a name to give the security guard.
It sounds like there are quite a few people reading this who know the game quite well, so anyone want to give me a nudge about which time period/area I ought to be poking around in first?
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Well, I don’t know the whole game (I haven’t played since the other day) but I do know this one:
Fred knew what he was talking about when you asked him about your key
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Oh, I figured it out! I even saw the thing I’d missed while I was glancing over the transcript from the earlier session but forgot about it again before checking it out. And I was pretty confident that Fred was pointing me in the right direction, but I still needed someone to tell me as much before I actually put it all together …
Getting started on the next installment now!
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I’m greatly enjoying this Let’s Play! This was my favorite game from last year’s People’s Choice Tournament, so it’s fascinating to see someone else’s approach to it.
Concerning the forest (hint, not a solution): It’s possible to map it, but it’s a tedious process, and there’s an easier way to navigate it. You may be close to finding this already,
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Part 4 - medium-sized dry goods
I didn’t make a whole lot of additional progress in this installment, but I did manage to follow a few steps of a simple but pleasing little puzzle chain, starting here:
Front of house
This is the front of your house. A couple of stones lying about make up your half-hearted attempt at landscaping. Your driveway is to the northeast. A small path leads northwest and southwest. The front door stands invitingly to the west.You see a doormat here.
While I was looking back over this transcript, I thought to myself “oh, next time I play I should check there’s nothing important about those stones which are conspicuously mentioned in this location description.” Fred also hinted to us that we’d probably hidden a spare key somewhere in the vicinity of the house. But it still took a nudge from @username5243 before I realised we should:
>X STONES
Just a couple of cold grey stones sitting in the soft dirt.>LOOK UNDER STONES
You find a spare key![ Your score just went up by 3 points. ]
There we go! Does this mean that actually we are going to get inside the house after all?
>TAKE KEY
You already have the spare key!>UNLOCK DOOR
(with the spare key)
This key doesn’t fit the front door lock. It must open something else.As you move the key away from the lock, you are hit with a strong sense that it is going to be a long and complicated night before you’ll be able to unlock and open this door.
Right, there we go. That resolves the question of “how is the game going to keep us from getting inside the house despite obviously hinting at the existence of a spare key?” and also seems to confirm that getting inside the house really is going to be left for the endgame.
At the same moment, something causes your spine to shiver. Something is definitely in the air this evening, but you don’t know what.
>LISTEN
You hear nothing unusual.>WAIT
Time passes…
Whatever that ominous feeling was, it doesn’t seem to be causing us any immediate issues, so it’s time to figure out what we can do with this key. There’s one obvious possibility:
>NE
Driveway
You see a little car here.
>UNLOCK CAR
(with the spare key)
Unlocked. So that’s what this key is for.>OPEN CAR
Opened.>GET IN CAR
Okay, you’re now in the little car.Driveway (in the little car)
The interior of the car has gotten a little dusty with disuse, but the seats are still comfy. The only obvious things to see are the glove compartment, an armrest compartment, and the steering wheel. The little car is open.>X WHEEL
I see nothing special about the steering wheel.>TURN IT
It’s fixed in place.
Not sure if we can actually do anything with the steering wheel, or if it’s just implemented for completeness (it would be weird if the car didn’t have a steering wheel, after all). But the other parts of the car mentioned above present some more obvious affordances for interaction:
>OPEN GLOVE COMPARTMENT
It’s locked.>UNLOCK IT
(with the car key)
Unlocked.>OPEN IT
Opening the glove compartment reveals a garage door opener and a school pencil.[ Your score just went up by 5 points. ]
>TAKE ALL FROM GLOVE COMPARTMENT
garage door opener: Taken.
school pencil: Taken.
I don’t know what we might need this pencil for, but we haven’t been able to get into the garage yet, so this seems like an obvious lead.
>X ARMREST
The armrest compartment is in between the two front seats, and is big enough to hold a couple of soda cans and a bunch of maps. The armrest compartment is closed.>OPEN IT
Opening the armrest compartment reveals a tourist map.
Wow, we’ve been playing for barely an hour and we’ve found the tourist map - this game is way easier than Curses.
>TAKE MAP
Taken.>X IT
It’s a tourist map of Paris. Must be left over from some other adventure.
Oh, haha, that actually was the joke!
>OUT
Okay, you’re no longer in the little car.Driveway
You see a little car here.
>X PENCIL
It’s a standard school pencil. It’s got some teeth marks, the lead is blunt, and the eraser has worn off.
Just to make sure that it seems as useless as possible, I guess? Presumably this is needed for a puzzle later, but the car was the most natural-seeming place to put it?
>W
North of house
>X OPENER
There’s one big button on it.>PRESS BUTTON
You push the opener button. Click.The garage door smoothly glides open.
>S
In the garage
This room is a total mess. No wonder you keep your car in the driveway. It would take a long time to sort through the junk in here, and even then it seems unlikely there would be much point to it. There is a garage door button on the wall. A closed door to the south leads into your house through the kitchen. The only other exit is the way you came in, which is open.You see an opener button here.
>X JUNK
I see nothing special about the junk.
The game implied that we’d be unlikely to find anything useful in the junk, but I’m not one to be deterred …
>SEARCH JUNK
You find a crowbar!>OPEN DOOR
Which door do you mean, the garage door, or the back door?>BACK DOOR
It’s locked.>S
You’ll have to open the back door first.
Doesn’t look like we can get into the house this way (unsurprising), but we’ve picked up a new item to continue our puzzle chain, and this one also has an obvious application.
>N
North of house
>E
Driveway
You see a little car here.
>E
Sidewalk
You see a mailbox here.
>E
Bend in path
You see a sewer grating here.
>OPEN GRATING WITH CROWBAR
I don’t see any crowbar here.
And it turns out that unlike the spare key, which we picked up automatically upon noticing its existence, we’ve left the crowbar sitting in the garage.
>W
Sidewalk
You see a mailbox here.
>W
Driveway
You see a little car here.
>W
North of house
>S
In the garage
You see an opener button and a crowbar here.
>TAKE CROWBAR
Taken.
We didn’t actually try this button when we were here before, so let’s double-check:
>PRESS BUTTON
You push the wall opener button. Click.The garage door smoothly glides shut.
>PRESS BUTTON
You push the wall opener button. Click.The garage door smoothly glides open.
>N
North of house
>E
Driveway
You see a little car here.
>E
Sidewalk
You see a mailbox here.
>E
Bend in path
You see a sewer grating here.
Let’s try this again:
>OPEN GRATING WITH CROWBAR
You pry up the sewer grating. The sewer hole is now wide open.>TAKE BILL
Taken.[ Your score just went up by 4 points. ]
>X BILL
Money: You have five dollars.
I wondered if we might have to contrive some mechanism to grab the bill from its resting place, but it was described as only being about eighteen inches down, which I guess isn’t too hard to reach.
>I
You are carrying:
a library book
the time machine manual
a newspaper
an old tennis ball
a blank
a car key
a garage door opener
a school pencil
a tourist map
a crowbar
some money (five dollars)
So now we have five whole dollars. We’ve hypothesised two potential uses for the money once we could get hold of it: to use compound-interest time-travel shenanigans to become extremely rich, and to buy a sandwich. We can’t currently do anything in the bank because we don’t have an account, so we’ll have to settle for the latter.
>N
In the village
>N
In the sandwich shop
Fred, the sandwich guy, is standing at the counter.
Fred smiles and says, “Back for more, I see. How goes the time travel business? Keepin’ you busy?” He winks and flashes a broad grin.
I appreciate the fact that Fred remembers we tried to tell him about our time machine, and is now treating us affectionately like a harmless lunatic.
Fred stirs the hot meatball sauce.
Since we’re playing a game from 2001 when polite/merciful games were very much in the minority, before we spend any of our newly-earned money on this sandwich, we’re going to:
>SAVE
Saved.>BUY SPECIAL
You hand Fred five dollars, and he hands you the sandwich and your change.Fred says, “Thank you. Come again.”
Fred stirs the hot meatball sauce.
>I
You are carrying:
a library book
the time machine manual
a newspaper
an old tennis ball
a blank
a car key
a garage door opener
a school pencil
a tourist map
a crowbar
a cold cut special
a paper napkin
a penny
some money (four dollars)
I didn’t properly take this in while I was playing, but as well as the sandwich, we’ve now gained a paper napkin and a penny. The penny, in particular, isn’t listed with the rest of our money, which implies that we might need to do something with the penny as a physical object rather than just spending it.
Fred whistles a half-remembered melody.
>X SANDWICH
Which sandwich do you mean, the cold cut special, or the hot meatball sandwich?
In order to avoid confusing the sandwich in our hands with the ones on sale, let’s just do this elsewhere.
>S
You don’t see any s sandwich here.>S
In the village
>EAT SANDWICH
You eat the cold cut special.
Since eating the sandwich doesn’t produce any interesting effects, I think we’d better:
>UNDO
(Undoing one command)In the village
This little shopping village is attractively decorated with colored signs pointing you to this merchant and that. To the west is the bank, and to the east is the public library. Because it is late, the only thing open is the sandwich shop, which is to the north. The road leading back home is south.
So we’ve followed a satisfying little puzzle chain as far as gaining a sandwich, but it’s not now clear what we’re meant to do with it. One possibility for finding someone who might want a sandwich is on a construction site, so we take a trip back in time (elided for brevity) and end up ten years in the past at …
South of house
There is a whoop from a nearby card game being played by a team of idle roof shinglers.
>NE
Front of house
A somber man winds past, unfurling a length of thick cabling behind him.
We already know that none of the people mentioned in the incidental text can be interacted with, so this is a bit of a futile endeavour, unless we think we’re going to suddenly find someone in need of a sandwich who happens to have appeared now that we’ve acquired one.
>Z
Time passes…A set of floor tiles is laid out on the ground and inspected.
>Z
Time passes…A slouching plumber trundles by, snapping his chewing gum.
>Z
Time passes…A tall man with a hard hat checks the crossbeams with a level.
“Just about perfect,” he intones.>NE
You can’t walk across the newly-poured cement driveway.A huge truck departs, diffusing the sunlight with its smoky exhaust.
That’s a new one. Is that the truck that was mentioned as being visible on the other side of the driveway before? If so, I hope we weren’t supposed to do anything before it drove away!
>Z
Time passes…Two young boys scamper by, tossing a ball back and forth. Someone shouts, “Hey! Get your kids off the site!”
>LOOK
Front of house
You are standing in what will be the front of your house. The house is currently under construction. The wooden frame has gone up, but apart from that, there’s not much to see. A construction blockade is to the northeast, preventing you from stepping on the freshly-poured cement driveway. You can walk around the house to the northwest and southwest. You can go around the driveway and find the road into town to the east.A voice cries, “Higher! Higher! Keep going! Stop!”
Was this where the truck was mentioned before?
>X DRIVEWAY
I see nothing special about the wet driveway.An old gent with nails clenched between his lips totters by, carrying a selection of hammers.
>NE
You can’t walk across the newly-poured cement driveway.A beautiful woman walks by, slips on a cable, and breaks one of her high heels.
“Ooohh!” she yells, enraged.>X TRUCK
I don’t see any truck here.
I’m sure there was a truck we could interact with before, at least superficially, right?
>NW
North of house
Someone cries, “Hammers! Hammers!”
Another voice replies, “Ol’ Meretzsky just went by!”
This is another Infocom reference, although I’m not sure of the significance of the hammers.
>E
You can’t walk across the newly-poured cement driveway.Four electricians push their way through, carrying cartons of wiring and
sockets.>X TRUCK
I don’t see any truck here.>SE
Front of house
A voice yells, “We need more of that one, and less of the other!”
Someone responds, “You mean like this?”
The first voice shouts, “No, the other way around, Artie!”
It doesn’t seem like there’s anything new we can do on the construction site, apart from possibly worry about the departure of the truck. I also checked out the bank at this point, but it’s exactly the same as before; we can’t even offer the sandwich to the bank teller because you get kicked out of the teller’s location as soon as it turns out you don’t have an account.
We try one more option for someone who might want our sandwich, twenty years in the future:
Expansive lobby
You see a security desk here.
There is a security guard here, sitting behind the desk.
>GIVE SANDWICH TO GUARD
The security guard rejects the offer.
This security guard is no fun at all.
And one more option in our present:
South roof
A squirrel is here.
The squirrel pouts, looks excited, then pouts again. Just your usual squirrel business.
>GIVE SANDWICH TO SQUIRREL
The squirrel isn’t hungry. Besides, squirrels don’t eat sandwiches.The squirrel scampers back and forth on the rooftop.
“Squirrels don’t eat sandwiches” is a legitimate objection here, but I had been assuming that it was food which we were going to have to give the squirrel in order to trade for the acorn. If it’s not hungry, I’m not sure what else we might offer it.
Anyway, further suggestions for what we might do with our newly-acquired sandwich are welcome, but it’s not urgent yet - next installment, we’re going back to twenty years in the past to more thoroughly explore the woods!
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I’ll fully admit I haven’t tried to buy a sandwich until I have explicit reason to think i might need a sandwich, or run out of other things to do.
Should I give some advice about navigating the woods before you try? No, I don’t think I will, at least not for now. *evil laugh*
Pencils do usually present obvious lead.
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If you’d like some hints, there’s an area you can get into which I don’t think you’ve entered, because it’s not obvious from the game directions that you can; and a couple of places where objects can be found. But I won’t say more unless you’d like me to!
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On second thought reading this, I’m now tempted to wonder if the author envisioned that most players would find this (and thus start the whole sequence leading to getting the $5 bill) *before* hanging out enough to get the time machine to appear, hence that message appearing here rather than, oh I don’t know, when an actually existing time machine appears n the forest for reasons we’re still working out.
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I think that makes sense. Examining everything mentioned in the description of the first location isn’t exactly a stretch. I might have been less likely to overlook it myself if I hadn’t been doing this LP and therefore slightly less inclined to type LOOK every third turn because it makes for so much transcript bloat …
Part 5 - Lost in the forest
Previously I concluded that there’s nothing yet to be done twenty years in the past, where the time machine deposits us in the middle of an impenetrable forest. But @Rax hinted that actually I might have missed something, so I went back to take another look …
Forest
The woods surround you on all sides, although there is enough space around you to consider it a clearing of sorts. Light streams prettily through the canopy of leaves above. The ground is hard and flat and clean.You can hear the soft gurgling of a stream nearby, but the foliage is so rich and dense that the sound of it is dispersed. You aren’t sure from which direction it originates. You can barely keep your bearings straight, as each direction looks the same as every other.
You see a time machine here.
Sometimes there’s an environmental clue to be found in an area like this:
>X TREES
I see nothing special about the grove of cedar and live oak trees.>LISTEN
You hear the sound of a stream gurgling somewhere nearby.>N
You get all turned around in the dense forest growth and end up back where you started.>S
You get all turned around in the dense forest growth and end up back where you started.
So, because the location description doesn’t mention any obvious exits, and the first few directions I tried gave the same failure message, I’d assumed that every direction would be the same. But it turns out I was being insufficiently thorough for a puzzle game like this one:
>NE
In the forest
The woods surround you on all sides. You can hear the soft gurgling of a stream nearby, but the foliage is so rich and dense that the sound of it is dispersed. The foliage is so rich and dense that you can barely keep your bearings straight. Each direction looks the same as every other.
This looks basically like a reprise of the previous location, but without the clearing. “Every direction looks the same as every other” is an ominous phrase to come across in parser game, because it suggests we might be dealing with … A MAZE.
When First Things First was released in 2001, mazes like the one from Adventure were a largely discredited trope within the post-Infocom hobbyist community. But I don’t know for sure whether the same applied when @jrw started writing the game in 1996, so I don’t know what to expect here.
Do we have any different environmental cues?
>X TREES
The foliage is thick and tangled.>LISTEN
You hear the sound of a stream gurgling somewhere nearby.>LISTEN TO STREAM
I don’t see any stream here.>S
You get all turned around in the dense forest growth and seem to end up back where you started.
That’s another dead end.
>N
Forest
You see a time machine here.
And that brings us back to the previous location, but north is very much not the direction we arrived from.
>NE
In the forest
>E
You get all turned around in the dense forest growth and seem to end up back where you started.>W
You get all turned around in the dense forest growth and seem to end up back where you started.>S
You get all turned around in the dense forest growth and seem to end up back where you started.
So there’s nothing new in any of the cardinal directions; what about …
>SE
In the forest
The woods surround you on all sides. You can hear the soft gurgling of a stream nearby, but the foliage is so rich and dense that the sound of it is dispersed. The foliage is so rich and dense that you can barely keep your bearings straight. Each direction looks the same as every other.
We get a bit of a meta hint here: I’m playing in TERSE mode (called BRIEF in the Infocom games) which means that the location description is only printed by default the first time you enter a location. You can see this up above when we went back and forth between the clearing and the first part of the forest maze. The fact that we get the location description printed again here, even though it’s the same as the previous one, gives away that we’ve actually entered a new, identical location at this point.
>X TREES
The foliage is thick and tangled.
Let’s check if we can backtrack first.
>NW
In the forest
This is either the location we came from, or the same location we just left.
>N
Forest
You see a time machine here.
Okay, so from the second identical forest location, we can backtrack to the first one by retracing our steps. Let’s return to anonymous location #1:
>NE
In the forest
The standard strategy for making these mazes more tractable is to drop an item in each location so that they’re no longer indistinguishable.
>I
You are carrying:
a library book
the time machine manual
a newspaper
an old tennis ball
a blank
a car key
a garage door opener
a school pencil
a tourist map
a crowbar
some money (five dollars)>DROP BALL
Dropped.>SE
In the forest
>DROP BLANK
Dropped.
Now we can set off into the unknown again, confident that if we end up back in a location we’ve visited before, we’ll know which one it is.
>S
In the forest
The woods surround you on all sides. You can hear the soft gurgling of a stream nearby, but the foliage is so rich and dense that the sound of it is dispersed. The foliage is so rich and dense that you can barely keep your bearings straight. Each direction looks the same as every other.>X TREES
The foliage is thick and tangled.
Did we remember to … ?
>SEARCH FOLIAGE
You find nothing of interest.>S
In the forest
You see an old tennis ball here.
And we’ve looped around again.
I won’t include all of the remainder of my explorations here as they don’t make for thrilling reading. For a brief while I thought that the pattern established by the first two rooms of “one way forwards, everything else is a dead end or backtrack” was going to hold up, which would have made figuring out how to progress a lot simpler.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be. I’ve now mapped out seven forest locations and their interconnections. Twice when I had nearly exhausted every possible direction I stumbled on a new, hiterto-unexplored location, but both of those eventually turned out to link back only to places id already been.
So, either I’ve made a mistake in my mapping (possible), I’ve missed some more subtle trick to navigating the forest, or there just isn’t anything to do here (yet, or ever).
Here are my notes, along with the full transcript of my exploration if anyone’s really desperate for some mind-numbing reading. Thoughts about what I ought to have been doing instead of all this tedious wandering around are welcome!
Map (in text form)
Time machine:
NE ball
Ball:
N time machine
S nowhere
E nowhere
W nowhere
NE nowhere
NW nowhere
SE blank
SW nowhere
Blank:
N car key
S newspaper
E nowhere
W car key
NE opener
NW ball
SE nowhere
SW nowhere
Newspaper:
N ball
S ball
E blank
W nowhere
NE pencil
NW blank
SE car key
SW opener
Pencil:
N opener
S blank
E blank
W car key
NE tennis ball
NW crowbar
SW newspaper
SE car key
Crowbar:
N newspaper
S opener
E car key
W car key
NW blank
NE nowhere
SE pencil
SW blank
Opener:
N nowhere
S ball
E ball
W car key
NE newspaper
NW ball
SE blank
SW nowhere
Car key:
N nowhere
S blank
E opener
W ball
NE nowhere
NW ball
SE blank
SW nowhere
session5.txt (28.6 KB)
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Just let us know if you want a hint; I’ve worked this part out. 
I do think traditional-style mazes of the Zork/Advent type were very much out of style by then, though those with other tricks still showed up. Mulldoon Legacy (which IIRC came out a few years before this) had a good-size maze section as one of the last puzzles, though very much not of the “drop stuff in each room” type. And if memory serves you got to see the whole section’s layout earlier in the game.
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One famous discussion of the original Adventure said the all-alike puzzle was a maze and the all-different puzzle was a spreadsheet. That is, the all-different puzzle has no coherent geography you can draw a map of; the best way to document it is to assign a number to each room and make a table.
I think this forest is a spreadsheet.
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For illustration, here’s Dave Platt’s map of the all-alike maze:
And the all-different spreadsheet:
Warren Toomey, another Adventure mapper, decided to map it like this instead:
Room North South East West Up Down Description
107 - 139 131 137 138 135 West End Maze of Twisty Little Passages
137 - 136 132 139 112 134 Little Twisty Maze of Passages
139 - 134 138 132 133 137 Maze of Little Twisty Passages
132 - 133 134 138 135 Little Maze of Twisty Passages
138 - 135 136 131 134 133 107 Maze of Little Twisting Passages
131 - 138 139 112 107 Maze of Twisting Little Passages
112 - 132 Vend 133 137 139 138 Little Maze of Twisting Passages
133 - 137 112 136 132 107 Twisting Maze of Little Passages
135 - 107 133 134 136 112 Twisty Little Maze of Passages
136 - 112 135 107 131 Twisty Maze of Little Passages
134 - 131 137 135 139 138 Twisting Little Maze of Passages
And Ed Wright did it like this:
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I think so too, but as far as I can tell, I’ve filled in every cell of the spreadsheet and failed to find anything interesting, so there must be something else I’m missing.
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In my mind, it’s a maze, but perhaps it’s better described as a hybrid.
No doubt the maze was deliberately laid out to be difficult to map, but yeah, you’ve missed a connection.
As I mentioned before, there’s a much easier way to get through. If you want a hint as to where to start, the garage is your friend.
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