Exactly that. Seeing the messages, just for fun!
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For the Pluto door:
The cylinder erupts in a raw white glare.
Less poetic than the new star above the doomed city, but this was a less poetic nuclear test too.
Also, I forgot to do this before—like with Jigsaw, I’m going to make a save right inside each mushroom, for experimentation.
pluto.sav (1.7 KB)
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Can you hear anything on the walkie talkie? Can you transmit anything?
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A bit of experimentation hasn’t revealed anything yet; my guess is that it has a channel selector specifically to indicate that it won’t be useful until I have a channel number. But I’ll play around a bit more and post some excerpts!
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It’s a bit more visible in the printed version, but I guess that doesn’t help if it’s a color perception thing.
I like how the phrase “It’ll never work” gets repeated over and over in the comic.
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The exact message depends on if you’re standing next to the device or not, but yeah… not a chilling as the doomed city.
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The way I remember it, the first time I got to this part I had by chance brought the magpie along, like some forgotten verse of Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat.
Earth Orbit
You’re five hundred miles above a sea of ice, hurtling in profound silence over the Arctic atmosphere. Layers of crimson and violet describe the curve of the horizon, blending imperceptibly into a black sky crowded with stars.
The white door drops away behind you.
The total lack of air pressure is making you uncomfortable. The magpie isn’t looking too happy, either.
You watch helplessly as the white door dwindles to a distant speck, vanishing at last between the horns of the rising moon.
Hmm. It seems that your blood is beginning to boil. So is the magpie’s, from the look of it.
Nice attention to detail! (Though from what I’ve read, your blood wouldn’t actually boil in a vacuum? Not that I’m volunteering to find out!)
Even less than that, because the shadow moves away from the current door before it reaches the next one:
>WAIT
Time passes.The tip of the shadow touches the toadstool.
With a faint creak, the white door in the toadstool swings open.
>ENTER DOOR
You explore the door’s edge with a timid foot.
[bunch of blank lines]
Underground
You’re in a narrow underground chamber, illuminated by an open door in the east wall. The walls and ceiling are gouged with deep spiral ruts; they look as if they’ve been routed out with heavy machinery.
A large cylinder occupies most of the chamber. The maze of cables and pipes surrounding it trails west, into the depths of a tunnel.
A lantern is lying in the dirt at your feet.
>TAKE LANTERN
Taken.[Your score just went up by 1 point. The total is now 10 out of 100.]
The door swings shut with a faint creak. You stare in wonder as the door shimmers and fades from view.
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It should be set to the correct channel already. So turning it on an raising the antenna should be enough.
Though the messages aren’t particularly interesting, except for adding a bit of urgency I guess.
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It’s my patriotic duty!
I felt basically no urgency in that scene and didn’t actually realize there was a time limit until Max brought it up, so maybe I should have done that!
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Technically, it’s true you don’t use the pram to get into the fantasy world… just to get you to the omega door entrance.
Now, think about where the alpha door is in the fantasy world…
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pours one out for the skink preemptively and it’s contribution to saving the multiverse 
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*blows some dust off this thread*
Well, after a rather exhausting January (getting sick multiple times in succession sucks), time to come back to this! Next up, the Neptune door, and we see what the god of the sea has for us!
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Ooh, excited.
By the way, the voice on the walkie-talkie that we skipped behind the Pluto door will just count down from eight to one. So yeah, not that interesting, but adds plenty to the atmosphere, I think.
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I’m pretty sure you can repeat each door until they’re solved - any time limits restart (you’re outside of the time stream, Marty!) Especially since there’s little clue where you’re going or what you need the first time you enter.
I believe they’re all “minutes before a nuclear explosion” optimization mini games that require repeated attempts. The goal isn’t so much to stop the explosion as to get what you need from each one and get back out.
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Unfortunately not—when you exit through a door, the door disappears for good. (Or maybe it comes back the next day? Haven’t tried that yet.) That’s why I’m making sure to save before each one.
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I’m sorry - it’s been a while since I played and I’m confused. Usually if you fail a mushroom you die and restore. I don’t know if I ever made it out of one without dying or completing it. You’re right!
Infocom making unwinnable cruel content, who’d’da thunk? 
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Yay for more Let’s Play! I somehow didn’t see this thread until yesterday. I greatly enjoyed the Jigsaw thread and look forward to following along with this one too. I never played most of the Infocom-era games back in the day (I was just a little bit too young to be the target audience) and have little patience for the old-school limitations now. This one seems a little more forgiving than Jigsaw, but not by much.
It also feels like a smaller game, at least so far – is that accurate, or maybe there’s more to do in mushroom-land than it seems? Jigsaw had sixteen puzzle piece chapters, some short and some fairly substantial, vs seven mushroom areas in Trinity: the opening scene was pretty substantial, but the bomb test scene was pretty small. There’s a gradually-assembled alternate world vs a wide hub area almost fully explored early on. A recurring and mysteriously characterized rival vs… a bird woman and a bubble boy? And a mysterious unseen voice?
This isn’t a criticism of Trinity at all. I haven’t played it myself, and I haven’t seen enough of it yet. It’s just an early reaction to comparing it with Jigsaw. Trinity seems so far to be smaller but more focused, being about the atomic bomb specifically rather than the broader effects of changing history. I’m interested to see what else it will do with the theme.
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Trinity is definitely smaller than Jigsaw; most of the vignettes are only a couple of rooms each, and you only have a handful of turns there before the bomb goes off. The bigger puzzle is how to sequence the vignettes to get everything you need, since you can only visit each one once—and then the endgame, which is much, much larger!
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I think that was the appeal (for me) for Trinity - the Wonderland-ish mushroom world was delightful with some challenging but logical puzzles I was able to make progress on when I was in my early teens.
To me, it feels like Trinity is epic, but it truly isn’t a huge game. It’s made of several small environments, but it’s got some enormous set pieces like the gnomon controlling astronomical events and the fact you can flip the entire environment backwards. It’s a great example of “hub and spoke” narrative design where the player spends longer time in a well-defined area rather then exploring corners of a larger map.
It’s a dense game, and I think in its day it required a bit more memory (128K?) because it’s more text-heavy than some Infocom titles, and included parser upgrades like box quotes and “sentence” inventory (for which there is an Inform extension to replicate it!)
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