VILLAGE OF DEATH Specsoft, 1984 ================ Solution by Exemptus - December 2022 Overview and general hints: --------------------------- In this adventure we have to investigate the evil lurking in a small Hampshire village that "has not been heard of" since months ago. Five men have died since the Army tried to go in, so clearly some uncanny force has the village on its grip. How this stands up as a scenario escapes me, because the odd thing would be to hear something about small Hampshire villages quite so often. In any case, evil is afoot and we are sent to investigate. This game is an oddity, and not in a good way. There is an introduction which sets the scene, but it is light and humorous, and strongly suggests that the game is a kind of parody played for laughs. Not so. The game is serious in tone and even tries to be gothic and creepy, failing miserably at that as well. Maybe this is meta-narrative and the true horror is the game itself, but this is from 1984 and no such introspection was to be expected. The adventure consists in making our way through the village. It doesn't end so much as stop, because it supposedly was to have a sequel, which apparently was never written, but there is an ending to the game, if not the story. There is no proper parser: there are a few verbs that can be used in all locations, which are N, E, S, W, PICK, DROP, HELP, LOOK, EAT, SCORE and SAVE; and each location has a possible set of additional verbs that are used to bypass obstacles, if present, which are specific to the location itself. Puzzles are simulated by closing connections that can be opened by using one of the right verbs along with the right object. Once a connection is open, it stays so. PICK and DROP are self-explaining, but we can only carry 6 objects and at most there can be 2 at a given location. HELP gives a clue on locations with obstacles: actually this is the only redeeming feature of the game. LOOK redescribes a location and gives an inventory list (there is no separate inventory command). EAT is necessary to replenish energy, as we need to do so from time to time: turns consume energy. And the game can be SAVEd to tape, but not before the player has reached the village's crossroads. Because reasons. There are some obstacles which require "using" an object in a way that destroys it, and it disappears from the game completely. But some objects need to be used for more than one obstacle: the idea then is to open all other connections before the one that makes the object disappear. My map of the game marks which connections destroy objects for the convenience of those that wish to give the game a go on their own. The worst is that the game is bugged to death. Objects can be totally ignored, because what matters is using the right words in the right place; some objects appear in our inventory when they shouldn't; the game rewrites its own variables in such a messy way that it ends up using all available memory and crashing; and the map is ill-designed in a way that allows the player to go around the main areas and arrive at places that shouldn't be possible to arrive at without solving prior puzzles. If this wasn't enough, there is even a location which irreversibly messes up the internal state of the game, crashing it in a very creative way. And if this even wasn't enough, there is a whole section of code which is unreachable and appears to be part of the database creation routine. An unusual quirk is that before you can tackle an obstacle, you need to try to move in the direction it is, then execute the action that clears the obstacle. If the prior action is not moving in the blocked direction, the game won't know what you are trying to do. The game can be finished even with all these bugs, by ignoring almost all of its content and directly going to the end location, using the right commands, objects and obstacles be damned. However, I have, driven by boredom, patched the code mess enough to fix most of the really hard-hitting bugs, particularly the out-of-memory problem. In doing this, I have had to fix the map to bypass one location, which is the steps up the vestry in the church. There was no clean way to deal with that, since it has an obstacle that requires re-using an object that had already disappeared from the game at that point (and it is the one that mucks up the game's state). The walkthrough follows a logical path, following a reasonable interpretation of the designer's intentions. Walkthrough: ============ [We begin at the South entrance to the village, carrying nothing. Our primary concern will be finding food, because otherwise we'll run out of energy way before reaching our goal. There are three food packets in the game, good for 100 extra turns each, which is plenty, but two of them are hidden in the well and it takes a while to acquire them. We'll only need one of them, as our solution is short enough for that.] N W [An allotment, there is a beanpole here] PICK BEANPOLE E E [Post Office] E [Our way is barred by a tall counter] JUMP [We go over the counter, there is a match and sweet pot here] PICK MATCH [We will need it much later] [Our way S of here is blocked by an evil hag, which requires us to KILL HAG WITH BEANPOLE, but there's nothing there that we will need] W [Note that we now carry an axe as well; this is a bug, but we'll ignore it] W N [An old man blocks our way N] KILL MAN WITH BEANPOLE [We now advance, see a corpse and a bent-knife] N DROP BEANPOLE [No longer needed] N E [Local inn] PICK BARREL N [Kitchen; there is food and a carving-knife here] PICK FOOD PICK CARVING-KNIFE EAT FOOD [We should have about 180 turns in our reserve now] S E [The purple-faced landlord, drunken, blocks our way] ROLL BARREL [The landlord is run over, and we advance to the top of a stair] [There's something we need in the cellar here, but we won't be able to explore it until we get another object, so we back up to the street again.] N [An old chained turnpike gate blocks our way] CUT CHAIN WITH CARVING-KNIFE [We are at the cross-roads] DROP CARVING-KNIFE E [We see a key here, which we ignore] E PICK SLEDGE-HAMMER W W S S W [The old oak door in the cottage prevents our entry] SMASH DOOR WITH SLEDGE-HAMMER [This creates a broken-door object here, which can be used at the End of E road location, where we found the sledge-hammer, in order to bridge a pit that blocks access to a location north. However, we won't need any of the objects to be found there.] DROP SLEDGE-HAMMER S [Disused toilet] PICK WATER N E N E E E [Cellar in the inn] N [The burning skeleton of a beer casket bars our entrance] POUR WATER [We pass] PICK BEER [This will be needed to enter the police station] S W W S S E [A policeman refuses us entry] GIVE BEER [We go through] S PICK SEARCH-WARRANT [Needed to enter the church] PICK SPADE [To exit the ruined cottage] N W [Out in the street again] PICK BENT-KNIFE N W W [There are locked doors to the S and W of here, and both can be unlocked by picking the locks with the bent-knife. We only care about the W one.] W [The locked door prevents passage] UNLOCK DOOR WITH BENT-KNIFE [In this location there is a davy-lamp, which we'll need, and the axe. Yes, the same axe that is in our inventory. Apparently it can exist in two places at the same time, but this doesn't cause trouble unless we try to interact with it in any way. So we won't.] PICK DAVY-LAMP DROP BENT-KNIFE E E E [S road again] N N E [Make sure you carry the spade before proceeding] N [A cottage falls down before our eyes] PICK ROPE S [Our exit is blocked by rubble] DIG RUBBLE WITH SPADE DROP SPADE W N N [A horse blocks our path] RIDE [We bypass the horse] N [End of N road] E [We are in the old school. We see a wall with a Macbeth mural and we are told there is an air of magic to it. Exits say E is a possibility, but...] E [You can't walk through a wall!] [A clue is probable needed here, which we can get by HELP, with a reference to act IV, scene 1. Given that magic is involved, the most famous quote in the play is appropriate here.] TOIL AND TROUBLE [The picture moves and we move to a hidden passage] E [It is too dark to go further] LIGHT DAVY-LAMP WITH MATCH [We can go on] PICK CRUCIFIX [This is what we came for] W W W [To N road again] W W [Enclosed field] S [Outside church] W [The old vicar denies us entry] SHOW SEARCH-WARRANT [And we pass] W [Nave of the church] S [A spirit stops us] SHOW CRUCIFIX [It gives a wail and disappears] [Now we are in the church's vestry. We can proceed S by throwing the rope, but this makes it disappear and we are brought into location 46, the tower steps, which also requires the rope. The connections table is inconsistent, so the game actually puts us in location 47, but we can't exit it since there is no way to get back to the vestry. The fixed game totally bypasses location 46, since it messes up the connections' array.] S [The door is locked] CLIMB [Strictly speaking, the rope is not needed, but we have it anyway] PICK CROWBAR [The last object we'll need] N N E E E E [Cross-roads] N E [Our path is blocked by a locked iron-grill] PRISE GRILL WITH CROWBAR [We are done. We are told we finished the first part of "Castle of Doom" (wrong game name) and we are asked to load the second part, which doesn't exist. Thank the gods for small favours.] [End of game.]