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This Halloween week, I'm continuing a recent trend and filling in more gaps in my coverage of the SoftSide disk magazine adventures, with SoftSide Adventure #8 - Windsloe Mansion Adventure, published in January of 1982.  It seems apparent that the game was meant to come out closer to Halloween -- it's filled with traditional monsters and spooky (not horrific) references, and the very plot as stated in the intro text sounds seasonal:  The world famous 'Pumpkin Man' has been kidnapped and is being held prisoner in the dungeon of Windsloe Mansion.



The introductory screen goes on to inform us that the player's goal, as we might have guessed, is to rescue the Pumpkin Man and return him to our starting location, making use of the neighboring Blair house which is connected to Windsloe Mansion.  We earn points for killing or dispelling the monsters and rescuing the Pumpkin Man; the highest possible score is 230.  (It's an interesting historical coincidence that Mrs. Windsloe is reputed to be a known witch, and there's a Blair house involved... more than a decade before The Blair Witch Project.)  There's no onscreen or code-level author credit, but some sources attribute this game to Steven Neighorn.

The game opens with a PLEASE WAIT...INITIALIZING message uncommon to the SoftSide series, and the interface is also quite different, resembling Brian Moriarty's approach in the games he created for ANTIC magazine before he moved to Infocom.  A VISIBLE OBJECTS window alternates with the player's INVENTORY display, and as there's no room for scrolling we usually have to hit the return key to acknowledge messages from the game.

As (almost) always, I encourage interested adventurers to explore Windsloe Mansion independently before proceeding here.  The game's puzzles are not difficult, though the limited parser dictionary causes some issues along with its occasional insistence on single-move solutions; the main storyline can be finished without solving every last puzzle.  My full 230-point walkthrough is available at the CASA Solution Archive, and is also included at the bottom of this post.  In between, I will provide detailed commentary about the game and its approach, which means there will certainly be...

***** SPOOKY SPOILERS AHEAD! *****




We begin standing on a sidewalk outside the Blair house, and we should note our location since to win we have to return the Pumpkin Man to this very spot.  We have some money available, which we can discover only by using the I command, not INV or INVENTORY.

This town seems to have no zoning regulations, as its residential areas are haphazardly intertwined with the commercial district, filled with many shops, none of which have more than a single item on offer, and only a few of which insist on payment, as it turns out.

To the immediate south of our starting point is a Chinese restaurant containing a fortune cookie.  We can't OPEN COOKIE or READ COOKIE or EAT COOKIE -- IT'S BEYOND MY POWER TO DO THAT! in this last case, which seems strange, but maybe that's why this restaurant has no customers.  It wasn't until much later in the game that I figured out we have to SMASH COOKIE to get at the Chinese Proverb inside.  It reads, "DON'T BE FOOLED BY A HALLOWEEN PRANK THIS YEAR. WATCH OUT FOR THEM APPLES!" -- which sounds more like a Kentuckese Proverb.  There's a HALLOWEEN APPLE on the sidewalk outside the Blair house, but by the time I got around to reading this message, I didn't need the clue anymore.  Still, I had to confirm that if we EAT APPLE, then I'VE EATEN A RAZOR BLADE! I CAN'T CONTINUE THIS ADVENTURE!


In the Spirit Shop south of the restaurant we find a Ghost Neutralizer, unusual in 1982 before Ghostbusters made the idea popular, and we can use it to NEUTRALIZE GHOST (three of them, actually, though we don't actually have to dispatch them -- being discorporeal, all they can do is slow us down while the game engine makes their presence known.) 

A Lumber Shop contains a wooden stake, so we may conclude that we'll need to deal with vampires too.

Despite the intro text, which mentions a husband and wife owning the Windsloe mansion, a room description later places us ON A SIDEWALK OUTSIDE OLD LADY WINDSLOE'S MANSION.  (We will find evidence of Mr. Windsloe's existence later in the game, however.)  We can't get into the house this way, but a device called an AUDIOTEX III is sitting on the Windsloes' front porch.  We can LOOK AUDIOTEX (there's no EXAMINE verb here, but LOOK works to reveal more detail, unlike other SoftSide games) to learn that it's a UNIQUE SAFE CRACKER.  So that should be handy, should we encounter a safe.

Dave's Tobacco Shop appears to be empty.  The Pharmacy contains a vial of poison, like the old-fashioned apothecary, apparently; the really old-fashioned kind that served the Capulets and Montagues, I mean.  And the Plaid Pantry store contains a can of dog food.

The GUN'S [sic] UNLIMITED STORE has a .45 automatic for sale.  And unlike most of the other stores, if we just go ahead and GET .45, we are busted for shoplifting and the game is over.  We have to BUY .45; in fact, if we try to BUY GUN we are incorrectly told that THE GUN DOESN'T COST ANYTHING!  We can run around and SHOOT things, even if we don't have the gun in our possession yet, which reveals a key detail about the gun's intended use, as we learn that SILVER BULLETS ARE NO MATCH FOR A [whatever it was we attempted to shoot].


Having toured the neighborhood, it's time to explore the Blair house.  Kitchen has a note reading, "GIVE TO DAVE."  Presumably this refers to the note itself, and not to some sort of charity -- and ah, yes, we can GIVE NOTE in Dave's Tobacco Shop to obtain a packet of Tobacco.  We can't OPEN PACKET, but we can LOOK PACKET to find a key.  If we do so a second time, however, the key returns to the floor of the current room, and the game doesn't remove it from the inventory count, which soon causes item limit problems.  So we should try to avoid this.


The Blair house's game room contains a cue ball and some... POISONOUS DARTS?  Interesting games these people play.  The storage room to the south provides a pool cue, and the attic to the north features a crowbar and steel sword.  All of these things seem potentially useful, but our inventory limit grows tight before long and we will need to figure out what to do with some of these things before we haul them around.

The Blairs are hosting a party, apparently, as there is a party room filled with people.  And there's a safe in the Blair bedroom.  The bedroom closet leads into an underground passage, where we run into a ghost, and at the end of the passage we find a storage room, and a tool room with a crucible and mallet.  There's a razor on the ledge outside the tool room, perhaps left there by someone suicidally indecisive.

To the south of the tool room, we suddenly find ourselves inside the Windsloe house's master bedroom.  Another ghost is in the bedroom closet (no skeletons though).  And a book in the library reads, "BURN WITCH WITH FIERY STICK!" -- rather an odd book to have in the home of a purported witch.  There is a convenient stick in the parlor, which seems even stranger.

The maid's bedroom has a bed, but no maid -- all we can do is MOVE BED to find a trap door.  If we choose to OPEN DOOR, then A HAND REACHES UP AND PULLS ME THROUGH THE DOOR. IT'S THE MOSS CREATURE!  We need to act quickly here -- if we try to leave the room or do anything else that the designer doesn't want us to, we learn that THE MOSS CREATURE HAS HUNGRILY CONSUMED ME!  We need the bottle of acid from the Windsloe kitchen - we can THROW BOTTLE to destroy the moss creature, though why it doesn't work on anything or anyone else remains a mystery.

Beyond the Moss Creature we encounter a Vampire, so we can guess that we need the wooden stake and mallet, but given inventory limitations I didn't have them with me at the time.  If we encounter the vampire and are not ready to deal with him, any wrong move means THE VAMPIRE HAS SUCKED MY BLOOD! and the game is over, so I chose to come back here later.

The Entertainment Room has a pinball machine, though we can't seem to do anything with it at first or even find out what sort of machine it is.  Related to this is a head in the bathroom with a sign reading "SHAVE ME."  What does shaving the head get us?  Some puzzle solving, at first -- it seems that having the razor is not enough, but we can CUT the Halloween APPLE to obtain the razor blade inside.  Chilling!  Even with the razor and blade, though, we can't SHAVE HEAD.  We also can't INSERT BLADE or USE RAZOR or LOAD RAZOR -- we must PUT BLADE - IN WHAT? - RAZOR.  Now we can SHAVE HEAD, and... THE HEAD THANKS YOU AND A QUARTER POPS OUT OF HIS MOUTH!  Quite a bit of work for two bits.


A werewolf in the MUSTY DARK ROOM south of the Kitchen tears us apart if we try to go past him, or, again, fail to do exactly the right thing.  I wondered if we could possibly dispatch the werewolf with poisoned dog food -- disrespectful, I suppose, but it seemed like a possibility -- so I went back to the Plaid Pantry and found that we have to BUY CAN, not GET CAN, which again gets us busted for shoplifting.  But with the can of dogfood and the vial of poison in hand, I still couldn't figure out how to combine these items.  And we can't seem to SHOOT WEREWOLF despite the gun's silver bullets -- though this was a red herring, a misleading impression engendered by the game's standard response text.

There's a broom in the Windsloe house's closet, though I never found a use for it.

I was running out of ideas, so I wondered if we could use the AUDIOTEX III to crack the safe in the Blair bedroom.  But it seems we can't CRACK SAFE, OPEN SAFE or UNLOCK SAFE.  Hmmmm.

Back to kill the vampire, it took me several restores to discover that we have to HAMMER STAKE; I died numerous times frantically trying to USE STAKE and STAKE VAMPIRE and USE MALLET, all to no avail.  Once I knew the right command, I learned that we can try to HAMMER STAKE before we run into the vampire to get a hint that most players will find useful only in hindsight: THERE IS NO VAMPIRE HERE, SO WHY HAMMER THE STAKE!

Beyond the vampire, we find a room adjoining the dungeon; the door has a lock requiring a key. 
The Circuit Control Room contains a coil of rope.  The Utility Room in this area contains a toad, and a KILLER DOG, so we can guess that the poison and dog food must be meant for this situation.  Figuring out how to use the poison is tricky, again due to parser limitations and the fact that THE DOG HAS TORN ME TO SHREDS! if we don't know what to do immediately.  The parser uses specific text strings for comparison, and is annoyingly inconsistent here -- we have to BUY CAN (not BUY FOOD) but we have to POISON FOOD (not OPEN CAN or OPEN VIAL or POUR VIAL or POUR POISON or POISON CAN) to produced POISONED DOGFOOD. We cannot, apparently, drop our handiwork after this point -- at least, we can't DROP POISONED or DROP FOOD or DROP DOGFOOD.  All we can do is FEED DOG.

Going back to the safe, I learned that if we try type a long command line (e.g. OPEN SAFE WITH AUDIOTEX) that wraps around the end of the display line, the whole display gets out of synch by one line, looking odd from that point on.  To open the safe, we have to PUT AUDIOTEX - ON WHAT? - SAFE.  This reveals a Magical Amulet, and also reveals that the parser does occasionally get a little more ambitious, but the purpose of doing this is not clear.  We can't WEAR AMULET, and I never found a reason to bother with it -- perhaps it was meant for an idea that never quite got implemented.

Back to the cellar to finish off the moss man, vampire and killer dog, I learned that we can't get out of the cellar until we finish killing most of the monsters down there, and we need the key to unlock the dungeon door.  Or rather, not UNLOCK DOOR or OPEN DOOR or UNLOCK LOCK or UNLOCK DUNGEON, but... INSERT KEY!  Dang parser.  So we need to come down here with a full load of very specific inventory.

And in the Dungeon we find... the famous PUMPKIN MAN!  We never do learn what he's supposedly famous for -- perhaps it's the fact that he's very portable, as we can just put him in our inventory.  But we still need to find a way out of the cellar -- I thought perhaps I'd arrived at the finale a little too early, but we can THROW ROPE (which normally drops it, but it seems we can't SWING ROPE or CLIMB ROPE) to get back up to ground level.  And then we just have to walk back to the starting location -- as soon as we arrive there with the Pumpkin Man in tow, victory is ours!




But we're missing quite a few points, with 135 out of a possible 230, and the clues found along the way suggest that we have some killing left to do.

The descriptive text suggests that we can use the Crowbar on the Blair house porch, which has some suspiciously cracked boards.  But we can't PRY BOARDS or LIFT BOARDS or GET BOARDS.  We have to summon our superhuman strength, or our willingness to delve into the BASIC code, to discover that we actually have to LIFT PORCH -- which reveals some SILVER INGOTS!!!  (Exclamation points not mine.)

We can then PUT INGOTS - IN WHAT? - CRUCIBLE in the Tool Room.  Presumably this will let us actually make the silver bullets alluded to earlier, since the .45 doesn't seem to do us any good against the werewolf.   We aren't told that there are also bullet molds handy, so it's fortunate all we have to do is POUR SILVER to make this work.  Then we can load the gun with the silver bullets and SHOOT WEREWOLF.... or at least it seems like we should be able to.  We can't actually LOAD .45 or LOAD GUN.  It seems like we really are supposed to SHOOT WEREWOLF, because if we're in the room with the creature, that command yields I CAN'T DO THAT... YET! while anything else leads to immediately being ripped apart by the werewolf.  We have to LOAD BULLETS, then we are finally informed that GUN LOADED!  Now at last we can SHOOT WEREWOLF, and get 20 points for our trouble, and now we can get to WITCH WINDSLOE'S EVIL SPELL ROOM, where we find... an incubator?

The witch isn't here at the moment, but we can surmise that we're probably going to need a way to light the stick on fire.  We can INSERT QUARTER in the pinball machine -- and, oddly, TWO PIECES OF FLINT FALL FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE MACHINE!  So we can presumably make a fire now.  But we can't MAKE FIRE or LIGHT STICK or BURN STICK or START FIRE.  We must RUB FLINT -- and then FLYING SPARKS IGNITE THE ALCOHOL SOAKED RAG ON YOUR STICK!  The Windsloes really don't protect themselves very well, what with all this witch-burning paraphernalia in the house.

What else?  Well, we still haven't done anything with the cue ball, pool cue, sword, or poisonous darts.  LOOK CUE reveals that THE POOL CUE IS A DART SHOOTER!  We can BLOW DART anywhere we please, but it's no good against the giant wasp in Mr. Windsloe's taxidermy room or the werewolf.  The ball LOOKS MORE LIKE AN EGG THAN A BALL!  Okay... now we know what to do with the incubator.

We can kill the wasp with the sword (not KILL WASP, but SWING SWORD) and THE WASP FALLS TO THE FLOOR IN TWO PIECES!  We don't gain anything but points for the effort, however.

There's an incubator in Witch Windsloe's evil spell room.  We can PUT BALL - IN WHAT? - INCUBATOR, and THE EGG HATCHES INTO A HIDEOUS ALIEN.  We can BLOW DART (at last!) to take the alien out with a dart to the heart.

Beyond the spell room is WITCH WINDSLOE'S EVIL WORSHIP ROOM.  There are some chemicals here, along with WITCH WINDSLOE.  As before, if we don't act fast and BURN WITCH, then THE WITCH HAS TURNED ME INTO A FROG!  So we need to have the fiery stick in hand before we enter her lair.

I had to dig into the code again to see if we were now close to done, because there's no way to find out our score without dying or QUITting.  We get 10 points for neutralizing each of the three ghosts; 20 points for throwing acid at the Moss Monster; 15 for staking the vampire; 15 for shooting the werewolf; 20 for killing the dog; 20 points for cutting the wasp in two; 25 points for killing the alien with a poison dart; 35 points for burning Old Lady Windsloe; and 50 points for returning the Pumpkin Man to the starting location.  Committing all of the requisite homicides yields the entire 230 points:



Windsloe Mansion is one of those early, nonsensical adventures -- there are lots of puzzles, but many are incidental to the main plot, such as it is.  The parser is problematic because so many puzzles depend on very specific phrasings, so even when we know what we want to do, it's hard to convince the game to let us do it.  But I enjoyed the adventure and it seemed just the right choice for the Halloween week.  My full walkthrough is below the fold.


**** WALKTHROUGH ****


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Last weeks excursion into Lurkley Manor inspired me to seek out further TRS-80 Color Computer adventures from the pages of The Rainbow magazine; I had almost forgotten that several adventure-focused issues were published over the years.  I tracked down a readable PDF file of the January 1983 adventure issue, and was actually considering typing in one of the contest-winning games the old-fashioned way.  But further research turned up a collection of disk image files containing the entire Rainbow Book of Adventures, including eleven more contest entries which were described but not printed in the magazine.  And so it is that this week, as a more-or-less random selection, were playing through Polynesian Adventure, submitted by Don Dunlap.



The interface borrows from the Scott Adams style, with an upper window displaying location, obvious exits, and objects, and a bottom section for command entry and feedback.  It runs at good speed for a BASIC game, and while the simple music commended by the Rainbow judges at the time no longer impresses, Polynesian Adventure remains an attractively presented game that fits the CoCos limited 32x16-character text mode well.

Interested readers are encouraged to take a Polynesian Adventure of their own before reading my playthrough notes below, of course.  Its not a difficult game at all -- most of the treasures are simply lying around for the taking, the map is not large, and there are no fatal puzzles.  But simplicity can be deceptive; I tripped myself up near the end by assuming I was keeping all the details straight in my head, when I should have been drawing a map.  At any rate, my experience (embarrassing details and all) is documented below, and therefore there are certain to be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****






We begin at a Polynesian Treasure House, though there are no treasures visible here, so well step outside to the south.  This brings us to a road, where a Trans Am car looks interesting; theres no EXAMINE verb, but if we GO CAR we can LOOK COMPARTMENT to examine the glove compartment.  Inside is a boarding pass, which we will presumably be needing at some point.  We can try to DRIVE, but I CANT DO THAT.

Getting out of the car proves a bit of a puzzle -- there are no obvious exits, and EXIT, GET OUT and OPEN DOOR all fail miserably.  We have to GO OUT, at which point we can explore a discount store to the west to pick up an empty gas can, and a gas station to the east where we can FILL CAN.  Oddly, if we try to FILL CAR now, were told that YOURE MISSING SOMETHING, but we can FILL TANK successfully; it seems the parser often focuses on the verb and a small collection of valid objects, which sometimes leads to strange behavior.  The display doesnt always indicate nearby objects, either, so we have to remember what were doing and where we are on our own sometimes.

With a full gas tank, we can DRIVE to find ourselves on a pier near a boat.  It turns out to be the Love Boat (remember, this was 1983) -- its not very big, with just a dining room and a hallway leading to the cabins for us to explore.  READ PASS tells us that our cabin number is G7 and our table is A1, so we can go to the dining room, GO A1, steal the *SILVERWARE* there, and then go the cabins and GO G7 to get our voyage underway... and pocket the *GOLD NECKLACE* apparently provided in lieu of a complimentary mint.  We achieve no SCORE for just picking these things up, though; well probably have to take them back to the Polynesian Treasure House at the end of our voyage.

Our first stop on this cruise brings us to a Samoan Village, where we see a pink hibiscus.  We cant TAKE it, LOOK at it or MOVE it, but if we SMELL it we are stung by a bee and rushed back aboard the boat for medical treatment.  Fortunately, this doesnt otherwise interfere with our adventuring.  We can see a FIRE KNIFE DANCER in the community house, though we cant GIVE him or her a treasure or anything.  And we can GET PEARLS from the council house, robbing the local community of its poorly-guarded assets.  Well GO BOAT this time, even though its not immediately clear that we can do that, to save ourselves the sting and ensuing medical treatment.

We GO G7 again, and when we emerge from our cabin and debark again, we find ourselves near a Maori village, with a colorful red tulip tree at hand, the smelling of which earns us nothing but another bee sting.  We can loot the local museum of its *VALUABLE RELICS*, without a second thought, although at this point we learn that YOURE TOO WEAK TO CARRY ANYMORE, i.e., weve hit the games five-item inventory limit.  Well have to risk leaving our treasures in our cabin, it seems, and as theres no SAVE game command and entering the cabin automatically moves us along to the next stop on the cruise, Ill just start over in case we cant come back here later.

Our next stop turns out to be Fiji, where a beautiful plumeria tempts us into getting stung once again.  The local chiefs house sports *A DIAMOND HEADED SPEAR*, and a nearby hut contains Tonga coins which are not denoted as a treasure.  Well steal them anyway, since were not like those other suckers on this trip who are probably just here for the scenery.

Next up, Tahiti, where *A HAWAIIAN ORCHID* greets us -- it can also result in a sting, but well steal it as subtly suggested by the glittering asterisks.  In a prayer house to the south, a group of Boy Scouts is singing "Kum Ba Ya," and we can lift an *EXQUISITE CARVING OF A FISH* from a fishermans house to the east.  Back to the boat!

We now find ourselves in a Tonga village -- maybe we need to spend those coins here.  Theres a waterfall here, and for once in adventuring history we cant GO WATERFALL to reach a hidden cave of any kind.  A Queens Bedroom to the south contains a bird of paradise, though the parser doesnt recognize BIRD as a noun so we cant really interact with it.  A Tongan Festival offers FREE HULA LESSONS, but we cant TAKE LESSONS or LEARN HULA just for fun.  No treasures here, apparently -- maybe weve been preceded by fellow looters.

Next stop -- Marquesas!  An active volcano looks scary, and in a cooking house to the south we can see *A GOLD KNIFE (VERY HOT)*, too hot to GET, apparently.  Theres a guest house to the east of the cooking house, a tattooing house north of that, and a warriors house to the east of the tattooing house, where we can acquire *AN EMERALD STATUE*.  Well have to come back for the knife when we can figure out a solution; for now well proceed to...

Our original location again!  Of course, we arent carrying our treasures, having left them in the cabin, so well have to tour the circuit again until we can unload.  Well do that, returning to our cabin six times to complete the trip, and then DRIVE back to the Polynesian Treasure House.  Dropping the four treasures we can carry (along with our boarding pass, which it seems we ought to keep) gets us up to a SCORE of 40 out of 100, so there must be ten treasures to collect, of which we have found eight so far.

On our next circuit, lets see if we can do something with the Tonga coins.  We cant GIVE or THROW them to the fire knife dancer, and DROP COINS doesnt catch anyones attention either.  The Boy Scouts arent interested in our money, and the games design, which plays a rooms theme music whenever the location is entered or re-displayed, forces us to listen to three renditions of Kum Ba Ya while we DROP and GET our coins back.  Our money is no good at the Tongan Festival either.  But while Im here, I realize that I forgot to head east from the Queens bedroom, into the Queens Bed.  Theres a *BEAUTIFUL WOVEN MAT* here, which we can steal.  Fortunately there dont seem to be any antiquities officials on the lookout for globe-trotting, heritage-plundering adventurers like us!

We cant READ MAT -- it just reads our boarding pass instead, another case of a single-purpose verb.  The hot knife cant be KICKed or MOVEd or BLOWn on or FANned, it seems, and I cant find a way to carry water from the waterfall to cool it down.  Trying to PICK KNIFE provokes another verb anomaly and gets us sent back to the boat, as it is unlawful to pick flowers.

Four more treasures dropped off gets us up to 80 points, and it occurs to me that the gas can, now empty, might be useful for carrying water.  But we cant seem to FILL CAN at the waterfall, or GET WATER either; the gas can can only be used to carry gas, it seems.  The fire knife dancer might be able to handle the hot knife... but we cant PAY DANCER, GET DANCER, ASK DANCER, or TALK DANCER... so that doesnt seem like a good idea.

And I seem to have misplaced the Tonga Coins altogether somewhere along the way... hmmmm.  I guess its time to cheat and peek at the original BASIC listing from the Rainbow Book of Adventures.  Were on the right track with the idea of using water to cool the knife, some text fragments suggest, but we have to jump through a few hoops now.  I had filled the gas can at the station again, and while we cant FILL TANK at the pier to empty it, we can do so after we drive back to the road where we first found the car.

Now that we have an empty can again, where can we fill it with water?  Ive tried the pier, the boats boarding area, and the waterfall location.  The FILL CAN code only responds in locations 3 and 17; 3 is the gas station, and 17 is the... lagoon?  Where is there a lagoon???

Oh, man, its right there, just east of the Maori museum!  I guess I was too busy helping myself to the relics to finish my map -- actually, because this game only has a handful of locations, I hadnt even bothered to draw a map.  My mistake -- my incomplete tracking of the obvious exits displayed onscreen made for tougher going than necessary.

Now we can FILL CAN at the lagoon, POUR CAN on the hot knife (were not allowed to do this when the can contains gas), take the now-cold knife, and deliver it to the Treasure House.



The final tune, for some reason, is Amazing Grace -- I dont feel particularly amazing or graceful.  But victory is ours!



Some non-commercial adventure games are really easy, and Polynesian Adventure is hardly difficult, but my experience here confirms that observation always remains important, even when there are no mazes and the puzzle solutions seem obvious.  Mr. Dunlaps effort provided a pleasant evenings diversion, and Im planning to dig into some of the other Rainbow magazine adventures now that Ive located this treasure trove.  Forward, into the past!

My first post about Below the Root, with all the talk of spirit skills and series-specific jargon, most likely gave the impression that this game might only be enjoyable to fans of the books. I thought the same to be honest after my first attempt at playing the game was ultimately a confusing and daunting one. I struggled to know which character to play as, where I actually was without any form of map, and what half the options were in the menu system such as Pense, Grunspreke and Kiniport. Picked up items such as shubas and trencher beaks held no meaning to me either, so it quickly became apparent that, unlike games today with their built in tutorials, I was going to have to read the manual before and during playing Below the Root.

Aardvark (known under various similar names during the 1970s and 80s) produced a number of text adventure games for early microcomputers, most of which are a little bit buggy and obtuse.  The company also released two graphic adventures for the TRS-80 Color Computer, which as a "CoCo" owner in my youth I remember seeing listed in Aardvarks catalogs.  I never came up with the financial means to play them at the time -- college was coming up in a few years -- so Ive been on the lookout for these titles for quite a while.  I managed to play Graphic Mars, like this one an illustrated version of an earlier text-only title by Aardvark founder Rodger Olsen, back in 2011, and I have been trying to track down a copy of Graphic Pyramid without much success.  So now that its finally turned up in the online archives, thanks to a recent reader tip, Im looking forward to playing it, even though I expect to run into some issues in the mighty Aardvark manner. 

The illustrated version was reprogrammed by Roderick Smith, and it was published in 1984, when the company was calling itself Aardvark Action Software.  Im playing using the VCC Color Computer emulator; reds and blues are probably reversed in these screenshots, as the CoCo was notoriously inconsistent in its hi-res artifact color mode and VCC doesnt provide any way to randomize or switch the palette interpretation.


As always, interested readers are encouraged to visit the Graphic Pyramid (or its text-based predecessor, Pyramid) before reading through my comments below, although based on my experience it may be a much more pleasant experience just reading about my travails, especially near the games conclusion.  (You can discount the old Aardvark marketing claim that this "tough" game takes 50 to 70 hours to complete -- it took me about five hours in the Internet era, with help on a couple of sticking points in one section.)  Whatever you decide, be forewarned that beyond this point, there are certain to be...

***** SPOILERS AHEAD! *****

We begin in an Archeologist Hut (spelling was never Aardvarks strong suit) where we find a knapsack, shovel, and sign, of the traditional "BRING TREASURE HERE. TYPE - SCORE -" variety.  We have nothing in inventory, and we can OPEN KNAPSACK, though after doing so we cant seem to EXAMINE it or SEARCH it or LOOK in it... ahhh, wait, we have to pick it up before we can examine its contents.  LOOK and READ are treated as synonyms, so I can my case I ended up with READ KNAPSACK to discover a tin can, a pistol, and a flashlight. 

Well also take a moment to confirm that theres no SAVE capability here (and VCC does not have a save state capability), so well have to be careful as we progress.  We cant OPEN the DOOR visible in the illustration here -- its LOCKED, apparently -- but we can go N to exit the hut.  This brings us to a path with exits in the cardinal directions; walking further north takes us to the steps of the pyramid, festooned with vines and featuring a heavy door, also LOCKED.  (Actually, we can try to OPEN DOOR in any location at all, and if theres not even a door there well be told its LOCKED.)  We cant CLIMB VINES here, either.

From the path, we can also head east into the desert, where we find an aardvark, a monkey, and some bananas, though the illustrators have opted not to show us any of these interesting things, probably because the engine doesnt support objects overlaid on the background.  Heading further east wraps back around to the path, so this is not a very large area so far.

Can we TAKE BANANAS and then TAKE MONKEY?  Nope, MONKEY WONT LET ME (old BASIC issues with single quotes persist in this machine-language update), though the aardvark is more compliant.  And theres nowhere else really to go here, either, as the desert wraps back onto itself to the north and south.  Can we FEED MONKEY or GIVE BANANAS? Nope.  But we can PUT BANANAS -- WHERE? -- ON VINES to attract the monkey to the pyramid steps.  (Actually, it seems the monkey is just following us around now, as the parser did not actually recognize ON VINES and just dumped the bananas on the ground where we stand.)

Now what?  We can TAKE VINES -- and now trying to TAKE anything else yields HANDS FULL, so weve hit the inventory limit.  Fortunately, we can PUT VINES - WHERE? - KNAPSACK to tuck them away, at least, not a bad implementation there (or so it seems for the moment...)

What else?  Well, we can DIG with our shovel on the path, to fall through to a cavern with steep walls and a boat parked in the sand.  A stream flows into a hole in the wall.  We can TAKE ROCKS from the cavern floor, and GO BOAT, then go D to return to the cavern.  We cant LAUNCH BOAT or PUSH or PULL or TAKE it.  I seem to be stuck here without a way to SET SAIL or otherwise escape, so well start over... QUIT... I DONT KNOW HOW.  Uh-oh -- your persistence is admirable, but I really want to... lets see... DIE?  TOO HARD.  Well, yippie-ki-yay... I guess we have to hit the reset button.

What can we try?  Well, we can TIE VINES -- TO WHAT? -- TO DOOR at the pyramid.  But that doesnt seem to really do what we think it might; in fact, it does nothing at all, though the parser doesnt respond with anything one way or another.  After we dig and fall down into the cavern again, we can try to PULL VINES -- WHERE? -- but I cant come up with a useful response.  Aha!  This parser only uses two significant characters.  So PULL = PUT.  And DIE = DIG.  Theres a reason most of these early games recognized at least three characters...

It seems if we put the vines anywhere at all, the monkey arrives, though I would have put my money on the bananas under other circumstances.  If we OPEN the TINCAN from our knapsack, it produces some matches.  We can try to LIGHT VINES, which produces no response at all, or BURN VINES, which indicates only that, oddly enough, they WILL NOT BURN.  Neither will anything else around here, it seems -- the monkey, the aardvark, the boat, the SCORE sign and even the matches are similarly fireproof.

So we have some vines and a monkey who clearly likes them, but no clear way to use this information.  The tree visible near the pyramid is not recognized by the parser.  SHOOT MONKEY with our trusty pistol yields NO EFFECT!  Hmmmm.  Ah, we can PUT ROCKS -- WHERE? -- STREAM and now the water is rising.  Fine time for the game to tell us we cant swim!  Well get back on the boat and see what happens.

Ahhh -- now the boat has floated to a new location.  Somehow, immediately after we step off the well-lit boat, its TOO DARK and I CANT [sic] SEE.  We can GET FLASHLIGHT from our knapsack, though, and LIGHT FLASHLIGHT to see that were in an ANCIENT CAVE.  Heading up from here takes us to an empty treasure room, with a sword and an altar.

The sword confuses the traditional Egyptian mythology a bit here, as its apparently PROPERTY OF ALI BABBA, the off-brand Arabian hero.  I cant figure out whether Im trying to PRAY or PRY, as it responds, WITH WHAT?, but I cant find a way to MOVE ALTAR or otherwise do anything new here.  But it feels like this is a one-way trip so far, so there must be some way to make progress.

Starting over, I figure out that PR stands for PRY, as if we try to PRY the heavy DOOR of the pyramid, were prompted WITH WHAT? and SHOVEL returns, THAT IS A SOLID DOOR. NOTHING HAPPENED.  Back at the altar, I try to SACRIFICE AARDVARK to no avail.  Aha!  We can GO ALTAR for a different perspective.

Once on the altar, we can try to JUMP ALTAR... NO???  Ahhh... SA is not SACRIFICE, and if we SAY SESAME here, presumably with Ali Babbas sword in our possession, we end up in a twisting corridor with exits south and east.  To the south is another twisty passage, leading south and east again; we can READ INSCRIPTION here to see:

  XBMMT IBWF TFDSFUT

If Aardvarks other adventures are anything to go on, this will prove to be not ancient Egyptian but modern English encoded with a letter substitution cipher.  And yes, if we just shift all the letters one place to the left, we get:

   WALLS HAVE SECRETS

South of this point we encounter a skeleton -- we cant do much with him, but if we GET SKELETON we hear (I hope) a TINKLE.  Yes, a KEY has been revealed!  We cant learn much about it, though, so well just keep it in the knapsack in case we find a lock, a reasonable likelihood by adventure game conventions.

Heading E of the skeleton takes us back to the corridor with the inscription.  To the west is another section of corridor with exits south, east and west.  Mapping is going to be important here -- while trying to get my bearings, I encounter a MUMMY who WILL NOT LET ME PASS and later run into a floorless room that leads to my first design-based demise.  The game doesnt allow us to try again or even exit back to the operating system after we die -- we have to do a full system reset, and load the game all over again.

Trying again, I am more careful to map the twisty corridors.  Most of them follow standard geography but there are a few tricky loops and nonsensical connections.  The section where I fell through the floor earlier was in fact preceded by a north-south corridor where the FLOOR FEELS FUNNY, so Ill take that as a hint not to proceed in those areas, at least for now. 

Theres another section east of where we enter the corridors that has a funny-feeling floor, and some GRAFITTI [sic] that translates the same way as the other to:

    THREE TREASURES HERE

That seems like useful information, at least.  I also find a DEAD END in the passages that displays an illustration instead of a black screen, and confirm that ignoring the FLOOR FEELS FUNNY messages tends to kill us with a fatal fall if we proceed in either such area.

Starting over again -- with no SAVE support this will be a frequent necessity -- I try to BURN MUMMY with the matches.  This produces no response.  SHOOT MUMMY has NO EFFECT!   While going through my belongings, I notice that the knapsack has a limit -- once its full, PUT [object] -- WHERE? -- KNAPSACK just drops it on the ground, without mentioning that to the player, so Ive misplaced some items along the way.  I try to LIGHT MUMMY and LIGHT MATCH and THROW MATCH... and Im not quite sure what I did, but now the mummy is reduced to ashes and we can travel south.  First, though, well LOOK ASHES and see that SOMETHING GLEAMS -- if we GET ASHES, we dont actually pick them up, but an amulet is revealed on the ground.

South of the mummy, we find a crypt with a sarcophagus that gives us the key to the inscriptions with "CAT=DBU" if we read it, but weve already cracked the code.  We can OPEN SARCOPHAGUS here to obtain a DEATHMASK OF GOLD.  Cool!  One treasure down, it seems, assuming we can find a way back to the hut to SCORE our haul.

Can we do something at the dead end?  We cant seem to CLIMB WALL or WAVE AMULET or SHOOT WALL.  We cant seem to JUMP in the areas with the shaky floors to reach a new area.  But we can GO SARCOPHAGUS in the crypt to find ourselves in a dusty cellar that looks just like the dead end in the other part of the maze.  Examining the floor and walls doesnt seem to yield any new information, however.

Can we do anything here?  Ive been doing pretty well up to this point, but I think Im going to have to do a little cheating.  I wasnt having any luck finding a walkthrough for the Aardvark version of either Graphic Pyramid or the original Pyramid, but the CASA Solution Archive comes through again with Dorothy Millards walkthrough for an alternate version of Pyramid distributed by Mogul Communications, here. 

Now I can learn that... Ack!  The game actually recognizes two variations of the verb PU -- while I have been assuming it always means PUT up to this point, and I tried without success to MOVE WALL earlier, the parser will accept PUSH WALL in the dead end room.  IT SWINGS!, and this opens up an exit to the south.

This takes us into an empty room, with a very small hole in the floor. LOOK HOLE reveals a lock mechanism, and we can use that key to open it... well, at least we ought to be able to.  I couldnt UNLOCK LOCK or OPEN LOCK or OPEN MECHANISM or USE KEY, or... INSERT... KEY... or...  INSERT... MONKEY?

Ah, thanks again, Dorothy!  It seems this isnt the kind of lock that works with a key, but the kind that has to be blown open.  We can OPEN PISTOL to find some BULLETS, and then OPEN BULLETS to get some... GUNPOWER?  Well assume its supposed to be GUNPOWDER, and PUT GUNPOWDER -- WHERE? -- HOLE.  Retrieving the matches from the crypt, where I left them earlier, we LIGHT GUNPOWDER and an EXPLOSION results -- fortunately, being at extremely close range does us no damage.



Now this is strange indeed, as the image displayed post-explosion appears to be a corrupted version of the Martian character from Graphic Mars!  Theres now a BIG HOLE in the floor, and we can go D to a narrow ledge near a chasm.  LOOK CHASM reveals a dagger with a jeweled handle lying at its bottom.  Can we use the vine to retrieve it?  TIE VINE -- TO WHAT? -- DAGGER yields DONT SEE IT HERE, which is fair enough as its at the bottom of the deep chasm.  Maybe this is why the monkey has been following us around, though. TIE VINE to MONKEY doesnt work either, though.

We can, however, TIE VINE to BANANAS and then PUT BANANAS into the CHASM -- the monkey climbs down and brings back the dagger!  Have we found the three treasures, then?  SCORE yields only, NOT HERE.  Hmmmm.

Well, weve been refused our attempts to JUMP quite a bit along the way, and if we JUMP CHASM here... I WAS YOU HEAVY AND DIED.  What the... Hey!!!

Ahem... since it feels like weve been getting plenty of exercise in this maze, Im going to assume this text was supposed to be I WAS TOO HEAVY AND DIED, and that it means were carrying too much when we try the jump.

Restarting and finding our way back here again, we try jumping across with nothing but the flashlight in hand, and we land in the Throne Room -- where we see some killer ants!  Can we make it across with the aardvark and the flashlight both in hand?  Well, we might be able to, were it not for a bug here that seems to think our hands are full when we have nothing at all in them, making it impossible to pick up the things we want after dropping too many items, apparently.  Aarrrrgh!

Trying again, I learn we have to LIGHT MATCH before we can LIGHT GUNPOWDER -- apparently the match burns indefinitely once its been lit, but with a fresh game I have to light it first.  This time, we successfully JUMP CHASM with the aardvark and the flashlight in hand, as well as the key that we havent used yet, so we can apparently take three objects with us.  We DROP AARDVARK -- with a quick GOBBLE, the killer ants are gone, opening an exit to the south.  If only the aardvark could gobble up the games other bugs, but well soldier through.

Going south leads to the Hall of Columns.  Theres a door here, visible in the illustration though it isnt mentioned in the description -- Im not sure how this worked at all for the original text version.  We can OPEN DOOR with the key, and find ourselves on the steps of the pyramid again, back near the start of the game.  And fortunately, with the heavy door unlocked, we can now reenter the pyramid to the north, so we should be able to start putting our treasures away with a nice straightforward path from the maps beginning to its end.

Of course, I have none of the treasures yet, but I do learn that YOU HAVE 0 OUT OF 4 TREASURE-SCORE 0.  Wait, *four* treasure... treasures, I mean?  Hmmmm.

Well, nothing for it but to round up whatever treasures we can now.  And it seems the Dagger counts for two -- after I drop it, we have 2 out of 4 treasures, for a score of 50.  The jeweled handle must count separately?  Odd.

Okay, lets grab the amulet and the golden deathmask again... except I am once again running into the nasty item carrying bug.  And the game thinks I am too heavy to jump the chasm even though I am empty handed!  This is getting ridiculous.  It seems we have to keep at least three things in hand to avoid this issue, more inventory juggling than we bargained for.  Something is getting set to -1 somewhere, methinks, and breaking all of the inventory count logic.

One more go... we have to LIGHT MATCH and then BURN MUMMY to get the amulet.  And I think I see a cause of the item carrying bug -- after we use the vines and the bananas to retrieve the dagger, we temporarily have five objects in inventory, when were normally only allowed four.  Im going to be careful here and try to bring all the treasures across the chasm, one at a time, so I dont have to jump it again later.  And now the bug works to my advantage, as after I deliver them to the throne room side, I can now carry all of the treasures at once, without running into the four-item limit.  At least, I think I have all of them...  And yes!  We dont actually have to DROP them at the hut, just have them in our possession -- the instant I check my score, with all four of the treasures in hand (the sword does count as one, which is why I was getting credit for two earlier), we have achieved victory!



After several decades of anticipation (if low expectations) for Graphic Pyramid, Im glad I finally had the chance to play it.  Despite the bugs, spelling errors and a few strange puzzles, I had fun working my way through what is in the end a fairly straightforward little treasure hunt adventure, once some of the technical issues are worked around.  Pyramid and Mars must have been Aardvarks best-selling titles, as it seems theyre the only ones given an illustrated upgrade.  And now it seems I have some other CoCo adventures to follow up on...