“I’m sorry, officer, I misunderstood. The law says only Berliners are allowed to drive here, and since I’m a foreigner…”
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Another wave of big assignments has come up, so I haven’t been able to poke at this more this week. But my next plan is to search for scenery that could be relevant, things that can be SEARCHed or LOOKed UNDER. I’m a bit suspicious we haven’t interacted with the Wall itself, given how it’s the big crucial set piece of this vignette, so maybe we’ll be able to find another tunnel underneath it that lets us stick our head up in No Man’s Land.
If that fails, Google tells me hares eat dry grass and berries, and a berliner has jelly in it, so maybe it will work as a lure?
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Maybe we can observe the hares and draw them later from memory?
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I experimented a bit around Berlin and you have a missed exit.
You can climb the fence into No Man’s Land from the Alleyway.
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That was the key!
I have to say, I consider this a decidedly unfair puzzle on multiple counts. In most places, this is what happens if you try to interact with the Berlin Wall:
Which do you mean, the north wall, the south wall, the east wall, the west wall, the northeast wall, the southeast wall, the northwest wall or the southwest wall?
In Inform, directions are objects like any other. But this means that the parser will happily accept commands like TAKE NORTH. In order to give reasonable responses to these things (if the author hasn’t coded a special refusal message), earlier versions of Inform gave these objects the names “the north wall”, “the northeast wall”, and so on: “you see nothing special about the north wall” sounds much more reasonable than “you see nothing special about north”.
The problem with it, though, is these “wall” objects tend to be misleading. In the Corner, for example, there’s the Berlin Wall to south and west, and the derelict apartment building to the northeast—all of which are entirely separate from the direction objects!
(The other problem is it encouraged authors to require EXAMINE NORTH WALL in every location until you find the secret door. This isn’t really Inform’s fault, but I suspect it also contributed to later Inform making directions a special type of thing and disposing of the “north wall” handling.)
As a result, in most locations, EXAMINE WALL just gives a strange disambiguation prompt. Except in the Alleyway, where it redirects to something else:
>x wall
(the fence)
You see nothing special about the fence.
The fact that the fence is implemented separately is the hint that you can CLIMB it. But I still wouldn’t have figured that out without Henrik’s hint, because trying to cross the Wall anywhere else says (quite reasonably) that it’s hopeless: the whole point of the Wall is that you can’t cross from East Germany to West Germany that easily.
In this particular location, though, it’s possible—though certainly not easy!
>climb fence
Taking a deep breath and a big chance, you scale the barbed-wire fence. With a few cuts and bruises, you make it over, but that wasn’t the hard part, compared with staying alive in…No Man’s Land
Perhaps the most dangerous urban area in Europe. For the moment the Vopos haven’t seen you, but escapes are very rare. Even East Germany, over the barbed-wire fence, looks a haven of safety.
Our goal now is to find the location with the hares. Even though we could see them through the fence, we can’t see them from here:
>sketch hares
You can’t see any such thing.
This is effectively a very small maze. Going the wrong direction kills you instantly, so I think the intended approach is to try directions at random and UNDO if you die. (If there’s a hint somewhere about which directions work, I haven’t found it.)
>w
As you stagger west across No Man’s Land, you step on a concealed land-mine!
>nw
As you take a diagonal path across, your ankle catches a hidden motion detector! The machine-guns are quite automatic.
And so on. The correct direction is southwest.
>sw
As you take a diagonal path across, you crouch low and keep out of sight of the guards…The Middle of No Man’s Land
Fifty yards from the East. Fifty yards from the West. Five seconds from death. A hare looks up briefly, wondering what kind of animal you are.
This is where we can sketch the hare, and…
Coming out of nowhere, a pack of savage dogs scents you! It isn’t long, or pretty, until
*** You have died ***
I took too many turns to get here. Going north and south in No Man’s Land don’t kill you instantly—it just says you move parallel to the wall and make no real progress. But trying that puts you in a walking dead state, because the dogs will catch you before you make it back to safety.
We’re out of UNDO range now, so reload a previous save and try again. Then back to brute-forcing directions:
As you lurch across No Man’s Land, the Vopos in the nearest watch-tower catch sight of you! It’s said that you never hear the bullet which gets you: anyway, you’ll never be able to tell the world whether or not this is true.
The minefield gets you on the way back. There are no second chances here.
And so on. The correct direction this time is southeast, which brings us back to the first No Man’s Land location.
>climb fence
Taking a deep breath of relief, you scale the barbed-wire fence. Safety! - Of a kind.
And now we have our sketch. Remember that, at this point in the game, we still don’t know why we have to sketch these animals—I’m using my meta knowledge to tell you we can’t finish the game without it. So in game, White is scaling a barbed-wire fence and navigating a maze of mines that they have no way of knowing about, to make a sketch they have no way of knowing they need.
I think this violates the first five tenets of Graham Nelson’s “Player’s Bill of Rights” all at once. (It makes in-universe sense that trying to cross No Man’s Land will get you shot, but I haven’t found any hint that this specific sequence of actions—SOUTHWEST. SKETCH HARE. SOUTHEAST.—will avoid it.) The one saving grace is I think it might be optional: I know you can’t get to the endgame without sketching some animals, but you might still be able to win if you miss one or two.
Anyway. Enough grumping. Let’s go take down the East Berlin telecom network!
With an enormous wrenching sound, the Skoda leaps forward and you jam on the brakes just in time to crash into the Wall’s first fence. The tow-rope trails behind, dragging a bundle of telephone cables. You’ve probably just paralysed the whole East Berlin phone system!
But not the Vopos. You scramble out of the car and dive for cover…
Haha! Take that! I’d been hoping we’d get to ram the Skoda into the Wall eventually.
The air here suddenly seems disturbed, and a kind of cloud gathers from light winds and currents.
From inside the rucksack, you hear a bell ring.
Right on time, too. We can activate the device, jump into the ball, and make our way safely back to the Land.
>footnote a3
[ Footnote a3: ]Berlin was occupied by four armies at once at the end of the Second World War, and the city divided into one sector for each of the “four powers”: American, British, French and Russian. The Russian army’s war losses were not as high as claimed by Stalin (who used doubtful census records and included his own purges) but were still perhaps 50 times those of Britain or the US (including some 352,475 casualties in the 17-day battle for Berlin alone). By mid-1945 Russia had occupied land so far west that Berlin was soon an isolated pocket of Western army occupation.
As the Cold War ran on, the issue of recognition of East Germany as a separate state was a flash-point over which the Third World War might easily have been fought. For a while it seemed possible that a united but neutral Germany might be agreed; as in Austria, where Vienna was reunited.
Tension increased as refugees began to flood through Berlin. Kennedy signalled that, rather than go to war, he would prefer to stabilise the situation. In August 1961, he got his way. Overnight, and catching the Western foreign ministries (all on holiday) by surprise, the Wall was built. For the first day, it was easy to break through; for the first week, not too hard; and after that, little short of impossible, though just about everything was tried.
About 200 (estimates vary widely) were killed attempting crossings. The Wall fell in the great year of revolutions, 1989, after the Iron Curtain collapsed in Hungary: the elderly East German leadership lacked the vigour, ability or perhaps imagination to fight back.
“Freedom of choice is a universal principle. It knows of no exception.” - M. S. Gorbachev, addressing the UN in late 1988.
I think this is the most recent vignette in the game, happening only a decade before its release in 1999.
Next up: the Suez Crisis, the last vignette before we commence the endgame!
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Oh, I did also discover one bit of information we’d missed before:
> e
The Skoda chokes but lurches forward.Checkpoint Charlie (in the white Skoda)
One of the 13 border crossings, Checkpoint Charlie is rather unimpressive to look at. A broad boulevard four lanes wide simply extends south across a gap in the Wall: there is no cover or shelter of any kind. Uniformed police shuffle about at each end, and here and there is the glint of gun-metal. Far to the south is a blockhouse.> x blockhouse
The West German police impose no restrictions, and are relaxed but vigilant. Behind them is, of all things, the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, though nothing about this place is gone. Narrow, gaudy shops begin at once, as if it were a perfectly ordinary street.You’re pretty sure you recognise Black in the queue of Westerners presenting papers to get through… The others are mainly Turkish kids who’ll smuggle back cigarettes from the subsidised Intershop, and old women visiting exiled
children.
Oh hey there, Black! This is where you said you’d meet us, right?
If we do this ten more times, Black slowly gets closer to the front of the queue, and then:
Black finally reaches the front of the queue, crossing the checkpoint towards you. And is turned away by the guards, politely but at gunpoint. Back on the Western side, all Black can do is to stare. So much for Black’s attempt to meddle in history this time!
But you feel uneasy, not triumphant.
Plan foiled by East German security! So we’re not actually undoing Black’s meddling here: we’re just trying to bring down the Wall for the good of the people of East Berlin (and to ensure history goes as we remember). History would be ruined even if neither we nor Black interfered—which raises even more questions about the nature of time here. By trying to improve the past, aren’t we doing just the same thing as Black? And if history would change without our involvement, in what sense is it really “history”?
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This is the longest game I have seen by now!
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I concede that it’s very hard indeed to sketch the hare, by the standards of modern IF. But if memory serves (and I have to say it doesn’t serve me very well in this thread - I had completely forgotten the puzzles here), sketching every last animal is a sort of expert-level bonus game. I’d also say that in 1995, there were so few works of IF available for public play that those games which were out there were often re-played, and played by teams as well as individuals, a little like this thread. Providing some super-difficult stretch goals was a sort of service to that way of playing, when people would go back for a second play-through, trying to squeeze out every last secret.
Or possibly it’s just too much, of course.
The title of this chapter, “Old Cartridge Cases”, is from a canto of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s masterpiece The Sinking of the Titanic (1978) - a poem really about the foundering of all of civilization:
I write these words in Berlin, and like Berlin
I smell of old cartridge cases,
of the East, of sulfur, of disinfectant.
It’s one of the great poems of the century, a constantly surprising theme-and-variations piece from which almost every line is worth quoting. Enzensberger did indeed live in West Berlin during its island existence.
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This thread is unfortunately going to be on hold until I finish my final exams, because finishing up teaching, grading, taking my own exams, and running an experiment which can’t extend past the end of the semester is taking its toll on me. But I want to comment on one thing before too much time has passed:
This is entirely possible—I don’t actually know how the animals come into the endgame, just that you can’t access the finale without having the sketchbook. If the hare is meant to be a Last Lousy Point, a challenge for expert players rather than a necessary part of the game, I can be a lot more forgiving of that puzzle. (I’m certainly guilty of making my own unfair Last Lousy Point puzzles for the same reason!)
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Going back to the Enigma chapter for a second:
I’ve just tried this and got this message:
>jumpYou jump up on the spot, your ghostly self rising impossibly high. This is exhilarating but unrevealing, except that at the highest point you notice (still above you) two cogged wheels of some description on top of the wardrobe.
I can’t remember if I got this message when I last played. You still need to fly to see which wheels they are. I wonder if we’re playing the same version of the game?
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I believe I jumped outside in the fields rather than inside the shack when I was testing that.
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Ohhh, I see!
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And we’re back! I once again have free time, which means it’s time to finish this!
As a reminder, here’s where we’ve gotten to now:
>list
a1 a growth of mould in a Petri dish (solved)
a2 a 33 r.p.m. vinyl long-playing record (solved)
a3 a wall covered with graffiti (solved)
a4 parklands strobed by laser light (solved)
b1 a moustachioed invalid in bed (solved)
b2 rolling, low sand dunes (solved)
b3 a silver USAF-marked plane (solved)
b4 white folds of snow (solved)
c1 a cocktail in a glass, with tonic and ice (solved)
c2 a horse-drawn state carriage (solved)
c3 a racing steam train (solved)
c4 the full moon in a blue sky (solved)
d1 parklands with wrought iron gates
d2 a lady wearing a crinoline dress (solved)
d3 a Victorian country house (solved)
d4 a shipping barge in a canal
We can’t go to D1 yet, which means D4 is our penultimate destination. (Or maybe antepenultimate: I imagine something has to happen in the Land. It’s a lovely bit of symbolism on its own, but when the game is straining the limits of Z5 I don’t think the author would have dedicated 16 rooms to symbolism with no gameplay importance.)
So, as has now become familiar, we…
>set clock to 59
The clock starts, silently and slowly, and the jigsaw board pulses with a flickering amber light, warm and erratic as though from an oil lamp.>press d4
The piece at d4 presses in smoothly, like a button, then releases. You are sucked up once again into the time vortex. As you slow down, you briefly make out hand-held cine film of Kennedy’s assassination and then everything begins to change…[Press SPACE to continue.]
Chapter Fourteen - Out of the East
Eastern Hotel Room
A sweaty, mouldering hotel room in a third-rate establishment. A three-bladed fan lazily pushes the air about, to little effect. Cockroaches crawl along the edges of the floor, but at least shutters are provided to keep out the mosquitos. There’s a door in the northern wall.The management have done their best to provide you with the English papers, in as much as the latest edition of the “Eagle” comic is laid out on the dresser.
It’s 7:04pm, some time in 1956—based on my very rudimentary knowledge of this time (and the Wikipedia page), I suspect it’s between June (the Suez Canal gets nationalized) and October (the invasion starts).
Let’s see if I’m right.
>x eagle
The “Eagle” comic for October 19th, 1956, read by every boy in the British Empire. “Dan Dare, Pilot Of The Future”, accompanied of course by Digby, Lex and Flamer, is crashing through the atmosphere of the planet Cryptos after a tense dog-fight with the drugged and deceived forces who serve the evil Phants. Fear not - Dan and Co. will bring truth and freedom to the natives, as is their duty. Good stuff.
The Israeli military invades on 29 October, so we don’t have much time to fix this! Also, I couldn’t find any scans of Eagle from 1956, but here’s one from 1959:
The “door in the northern wall” is locked, and doesn’t actually seem to be a door: trying to go north tells us we can’t go that way, rather than saying the door is closed. So I suspect it’s a red herring. There’s something else we need to do here, which doesn’t involve leaving the room. (It’s somewhat a coincidence, since we chose the order of the pieces, but there’s a symmetry here: we started in the parklands, then went to the hotel room in Sarajevo; now we’re in a hotel room in (presumably) Sinai, and once we finish we’re going to the parklands.)
There are zero pieces left to find here (of course), but one animal to sketch, and I think I see it right away!
>sketch cockroach
That’s not something you need to refer to in the course of this game.
Drat. But what did the description say about mosquitoes?
…at least shutters are provided to keep out the mosquitos…
>open shutters
You give the damp-warped wood a good hard push, and the shutters burst open onto a sultry Egyptian sunset. The red sun is suspended timelessly against the sparse fields and low concrete buildings, glinting off the motorcycles and open-topped cars. Below the window, a river runs north-south, the banks running parallel and about seventy yards wide. A few small local barges ply up and down. In the far distance are beautiful trees against the skyline.
When we did this, a mosquito got in, as evidenced by flavor text appearing every few turns:
The mosquito whines, gratingly.
However:
>sketch mosquito
(the winged mosquito)
It’s far too small and rapidly moving to be more than a dot to you.>catch mosquito
You’re unable to catch it with your hands.
And then after a few turns:
The mosquito succeeds in biting you. Almost at once you succumb to a sudden, unnatural sleep, of feverish dreams and exploding visions. Perhaps this illustrates the virtue of shutters?
*** You have died ***
So here we have our first puzzle. We need to somehow catch this mosquito within about five turns, before it bites us and we die of rapid-onset malaria. We do have the mosquito powder from the Wright Brothers, and shaking it keeps the mosquito out of the room entirely, but then we can’t sketch it.
So, how are we going to catch this bug?
21.txt (7.5 KB)
d4.sav (7.9 KB)
Inventory behind the cut
You are carrying:
a delivered note
a Cyrillic-lettered key
a basket-weave purse (which is open but empty)
a berliner
a cloth cap (being worn)
a sparkler (providing light)
a canvas rucksack (which is open)
wheels III and I
a spent cartridge
a RZ-ROV gadget
a beige folder
a Geiger counter
Rukl's "Atlas of the Moon"
a British Army officer's uniform
a wooden broom
a cargo capsule (which is empty)
a gnomon
Waldo
a mandolin
a box of mosquito powder
a Sixth Officer's jacket
Place Names of Carolina
a green cap
a Richard's anemometer
a paper dart
a madeleine cake
Black's Kaldecki detector
a second note from Black
a first aid box (which is closed)
the 1911 Boy's Book of the Sea
a curious device
the Victorian ormolu clock
Emily's sketch book
a charcoal pencil
three keys:
a little key
a elegant key
a tagged key
an intercept
a travel permit
a checklist
a chit signed by Lenin
a handwritten invitation card
a White Star Line scribbled-on towel
a folded note
a white party ticket
three newspapers:
a crumpled newspaper
an historic edition of Pravda
Le Figaro
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A bit more experimentation reveals:
- The fan and dresser aren’t implemented
- We can’t go through the window: “There’s nowhere to go, unless you count the door” so we might not be able to leave at all?
- The RZ-ROV doesn’t work on the door
- CATCH MOSQUITO WITH X says “You’re unable to catch it with your hands”, regardless of what X is, but it is parsed correctly (I’ve tried the purse, the cap, and the madeleine)
- HIT MOSQUITO gets a quip: “You’re a Westerner, presumably. In a straight fight between the two of you, the smart money’s on the mosquito.”
- (I’m curious about the “presumably” there. We saw White’s memories of childhood in England, back in the Proust sequence.)
- We have four keys, and all of them have been used already—a handful of people across history are probably quite annoyed we took these, if they don’t have spares
- We’re at 94/100 points, which suggests we haven’t missed too much!
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Are we sure the mosquito is the animal? Haven’t most of them been vertebrates?
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They all have been so far (“The book contains sketches of a night-jar, various street horses, the caged white mice, a domestic mouse, a Yorkshire terrier, a snow goose, a snow leopard, a mallard, a nightingale and a hare.”) but the mosquito gets a special response about moving too fast if you try to sketch it, rather than saying it’s an invalid target.
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What happens if you shake the box of mosquito powder after the mosquito is in the room, rather than before?
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Great question! One turn later:
The mosquito, (entirely sensibly) repelled by the odour, makes its escape through the window.
So what if we close the window first?
> close window
You close the shutters in a vain attempt to keep the whine of mosquitos outside.The mosquito batters against the window, trying to escape.
I think we’re on the right track! But CATCH MOSQUITO still doesn’t work. There may be another step first.
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Perhaps have another go at the door?
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This is not something I would have gotten without prompting, but:
> open door
It seems to be locked.> kick door
It only seemed to be stuck, after all - the wood had warped and expanded in the damp atmosphere, jamming it in the frame. It’s open now.
Sometimes violence really is the answer.
>out
Faded Landing
The hotel landing was designed to resemble an opulent Parisian staircase of the 1870s, but time, neglect, misunderstanding and poor taste have made the result more like a brothel. At least the bathroom door (northeast) is slightly concealed.Right where the portrait of the Empress Eugenie ought logically to be, there instead hangs a framed photograph of a handsome young Arab.
At the foot of the off-red stairs, a half-dozen Egyptian soldiers in not much of a uniform are standing around, gesticulating and chattering to each other. There’s enough hostility to make your presence seem ill-advised.
Having not experienced Parisian brothels myself, I’m curious what this effect is. I’m guessing the “handsome young Arab” is the President of Egypt, Gamal Nasser, who I wouldn’t necessarily describe as “young” at the time (he was 38) but was certainly good-looking in his youth.
He became something of a folk hero after nationalizing the Suez Canal, so he seems like the one they’d make inspiring portraits of, though it could also be someone local instead.
>x photograph
“President Gamal A. Nasser”, it would appear.
Called it!
>get photograph
You carefully lift the photograph off its hook.
Souvenir.
>x soldiers
The words “testosterone” and “pride” come to mind. So does “armed”.
I’ve missed this game’s sardonic tone.
>d
The Egyptian soldiers do not look like pleasant company this evening. Are you perhaps under house arrest?
Huh. Presumably we’re not under house arrest, but if the intended occupant of this suite is, it’ll be awkward to explain how we materialized out of thin air.
>ne
Indescribable Bathroom
(No, really.)A portion of rancid soap, like horrid yellow butter-fat, rests in something… best not described.
Ah of course. A perfectly normal bathroom.
>x soap
Don’t.
Well, disgusting or not, it’s portable. So you know what we have to do!
>get soap
(putting the berliner into the canvas rucksack to make room)
Taken (with extreme reluctance).
Yes, best keep that away from our berliner. But maybe it’ll help us with our mosquito problem?
>close door
The wood has warped too much to get back into the frame.
Hmm. Hopefully that won’t pose an issue.
Let’s find out!
>open window
You give the damp-warped wood a good hard push, and the shutters burst open onto a sultry Egyptian sunset. The red sun is suspended timelessly against the sparse fields and low concrete buildings, glinting off the motorcycles and open-topped cars. Below the window, a river runs north-south, the banks running parallel and about seventy yards wide. A few small local barges ply up and down. In the far distance are beautiful trees against the skyline.The mosquito whines, gratingly.
>shake mosquito powder
You give the box a good shake, sneezing as the horrid powder scatters into the air.>close window
You close the shutters in a vain attempt to keep the whine of mosquitos outside.The mosquito batters against the window, trying to escape.
>catch mosquito with soap
You manage to snare to mosquito onto the rancid soap. Not the most aesthetically pleasant act of today.The mosquito twitches pathetically on the soap.
I’m not sure why rancid soap is our tool of choice here, but maybe it’s sticky enough that the mosquito gets stuck in it, like flypaper?
>sketch mosquito
(the winged mosquito)
You sketch in a picture of the winged mosquito.
We can now kill the mosquito if we want to, though the game doesn’t recognize the verb SQUISH.
You kill the helpless mosquito.
This seems a little unfair, given that it’s carrying rapid-onset malaria. Protecting animals is all well and good, but I’m going to prioritize human lives over insect ones in a case like this.
But it might also be a hint that we need the mosquito later for something, so let’s undo that for now.
We have two additional inventory items now:
a bar of rancid soap with added mosquito
a photograph of Nasser
But not many more places we can go. We can’t interact with the soldiers, either to give them a parasitized mosquito or to show them a photo of the President, which means for now we’re limited to the three rooms upstairs (one of which is undescribed).
What next?
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