Let's play Zork + Colossal Cave Adventure

Playing Let's Play!
51

Episode Z10

Stifled at every turn! We started with a lot of good ideas after making many discoveries in the last episode. But things just weren’t going our way today.

We wanted to take the clockwork canary to the coal mine—but the jeweled egg wasn’t were we had left it.

We tried to take the torch through the narrow passage past the coal mine (where it is too drafty for a match), but the torch is too large to fit. We were thinking about this puzzle all wrong—what we probably need to do is lower the torch in the basket from the Shaft Room, where it will presumably end up in to the dark room. (Our mental model was that the shaft in the Shaft Room would connect to the shaft at Mine Entrance, but that surmise was wrong.)

We tried to defeat the vampire bat by preliminarily eating garlic (to give us garlic breath). That doesn’t work either—probably we just need to hold the garlic, not eat it.

Our guess about the brown button in the dam maintenance room was correct. Pressing the yellow button activates the green bubble on the dam control panel (allowing you to to turn the bolt). Pressing the brown button deactivates the green bubble. Yellow and brown are idempotent, unlike red, which is a toggle.

We waved the sceptre, made the rainbow, and dug up the scarab, with the intention of taking it to the gold coffin. (Because they are both Egyptian?) But the thief robbed us of it all before we could get there.

We returned to the thief’s treasure room for another showdown. This time we threw the rusty knife at the thief, but it works the same as giving it to him. A ray of hope, though: we managed to do some damage to the thief (“a shallow gash”) before getting killed. We tried to take advantage of the ghostly vision you get after being resurrected, to see what’s in the dark room past the narrow passage, but it wouldn’t let us in (“You cannot enter in your condition”).

Starting a new run, we grabbed the jewel-encrusted egg and the torch and headed for the coal mine, intending to have another try at the canary in the coal mine and the operation with the torch and the basket. But the thief stole both items en route.

We tried again with the vampire bat. Just carrying the garlic (or dropping it in the bat room) is enough to make the bat leave you alone. We made one good discovery: TOUCH MIRROR teleports you from one mirror to the other.

We experimented with the boat. The stream in Reservoir North doesn’t lead anywhere. The stream by Stream View doesn’t seem to lead anywhere either. Re-flooding the reservoir lets you take the boat from Reservoir South to Reservoir North, but otherwise doesn’t expand the set of movement options. After grabbing the buoy on the river, the game says, “you can land either to the east or the west”, but we didn’t get a chance to try either one, before being forced downstream.

The fabric of reality started to unravel as dropped items inexplicably moved to different rooms, making us suspect some kind of memory corruption error. Next time we’ll start fresh!

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