Click on the image for a PDF version of the map.

Work has delayed me a bit in finishing Stuga, but also Stuga itself has been stalling me; I’ve been having a hard time working up the energy to play it in my spare moments. I’ve being trying to isolate why. One reason is the puzzles (more on that in a second) but also because Stuga turns out to be another “find the treasures and gather them in the right location” plot, but without any time limit via expiring lantern batteries or otherwise. This seems like it ought to make it easier for me to want to play, but oddly once I realized there was no time pressure it was causing the opposite. I think it’s perhaps because there’s appeal in these old games still (and uniquely for the era) as an optimization puzzle, and I was having fun in Zork (for example) plotting out the best route to take to grab the diamond, like I was a real adventurer plotting over a dusty map. Stuga makes me feel not like I’m a character in some world, but an avatar of an avatar; like LASH, controlling someone not myself who is themselves controlling a robot from a distance. This is all weird and irrational and imprecise but that’s the best way I can express how it feels.

The puzzles, also, to use the words of Jimmy Maher, are either extremely simple or blatantly unfair. In my last post the word SESAME was mentioned in a room, prompting David Welbourn to say his next command would be OPEN SESAME. Well, it’s almost as easy as that — it’s just SESAME, and you use it at a locked gate and that’s that.

On the other hand, there’s a dark room. If you type TAKE (not TAKE ALL or any other variation) you will pick up a hidden lamp, and then be told the lamp will disappear if you leave the room so you should “stay put”. So you type STAY and then wait (in real time, yes, you actually sit still for 30 seconds) and then you get scooped out of the room and get to keep the lamp.

The Muppet sequence in my last post has been the best puzzle so far, just because it turned out to be a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure interlude with binary choices where figuring out the correct route led to a treasure. It was so unique and weird it was oddly fun to work out.

You are on the edge of a deep well. If you jump down you won’t get back up!

u

Little you is winding.
Fozzi the bear is sitting here asking:
What’s your name ? Jason
Someone says: This is THE MUPPET SHOW with tonight’s guest artist: jason
The curtain rises and you are on a stage with Kermit the frog. The puppet audience is applauding.
Answer RUN or PERFORM : perform

Kermit asks you if you want to sing or tell a story.
Answer SING or TELL : sing

You start singing: I’m a poor lonesome cowboy and a long way from home…
The audience is cheering but the singers Wayne & Wanda are angry with you for taking their place. They want to kill you!
Answer PEACE (with Wayne & Wanda) or FOLLOW (Kermit) : peace

You approach Wayne & Wanda to make your peace with them.
You decide not to sing anymore so that W&W can keep their job. Fozzi comes up and says:
Enter an interest that you have! Dice
Fozzi gives his thanks and leaves. There is a door to your left.
Answer FOLLOW (Fozzi) or LEFT : follow

Now Fozzi enters a door. There’s also a door forward.
Answer FOLLOW (Fozzi) or FORWARD : follow

You are inside a torture-chamber. The door locked itself behind you! The walls are closing in. The only way out is blocked by a monster!
Answer RUN (out) or STAY : run

You run straight into a monster devouring vegetables! He grabs you and throws you high into the air.
You are in the loft, a small nook at the top of the house. From here you can go everywhere. On the wall it says: SESAME

A little faun runs in intending to tread on your foot but he loses a shoe and runs away howling.
You are in the Swiss clock room.
There is a faun shoe here.

GET SHOE

Ok.

FORWARD

A horde of fauns comes rushing out. Nnnnnow you are a pulp.
Do you want me to bring you back to life ? no
WHAT? Don’t you trust me? Only yesterday I revived a DEC-2020 and it worked for several minutes…

But I won’t make a fuss. Have it your way.

I’m starting to get the hang of this, somewhat. The short minimalist descriptions do have one advantage: they make it entirely reasonable to play in a split screen format, with a map on one side and the game window in the other.

The only issue is once I swapped my mental key as to “top of page” meaning “forward” and “bottom of page” meaning “backward” so my forward and backward exits were all wrong in a section.

Since “I just mapped some more” doesn’t make an exciting post, let me mention ASCII art. I’ve seen two instances so far in Stuga, here’s one:

A small faun appears.
He throws a knife at you… It hits you! !
Do you want me to bring you back to life ? yes
OK, but don’t blame me if something goes wr…
POFF!!! You are surrounded by a cloud of green gas!!
You’re alive! When the gas has dispersed You can see that
You are in a grave. There’s a musty smell here. The priest is looking down. He looks like this:

It’s interesting that Zork from the early 1977-1978 period also had ASCII art. It’s like the impulse for graphics was already bubbling.

With Zork even though there were numerous passages where going west and then east would not lead you back where you started, with here the tendency is pathological and it’s impossible to even guess what a good spacial relationship would be. With my tangled mess up there I can see the Hilbert room and its accompanying exits could be better placed, but I only knew that after painstaking drawing and testing. I’ve taken up saving when I enter a room with many exits and restoring to test all of them rather than returning the way I came because so often I don’t know which way to go back.

My second attempt made LEFT = left side of map, RIGHT = right side of map and so on for an ounce of sanity.

It’s still somewhat insane and disconcerting, though. Even though it’s functionally equivalent to N/S/E/W I’m still very uncomfortable while playing. Do any of my Swedish readers know if this became a common thing in Swedish games, or if most of them are in traditional compass directions?

Also: the lift has access to nine floors. Eek!

The alternate ending for Twilight.

I’ve been corresponding with Bob Sorem, authors of one of the ports of Mystery Mansion. It’s easy to to forget the context of these games: this was a mainframe game in the time many did not own personal computers, and so for some this was the only computer game they had access to for years. Hence: obsessive playing and perfection. Bob writes that he was disappointed if he got anything less than 999 out of 999 points.

(Bob answered all of my questions and also sent a complete map set which he has given permission to post here, so I am very grateful to his help.)

One of the peculiar things I learned from him which doesn’t seem clued at all in the game, is that the odd messages I’ve mentioned
YOU HEARD A WOMAN SCREAM
YOU HEARD A WOLF HOWL
YOU HEARD A CROW CAW AS IT FLEW BY
YOU HEARD SOME ROCKS FALLING NEARBY
which occur every hour (on the half hour — there are traditional clock bells on the hour) are also scoring opportunities. Immediately after one of those messages occurs you can SCORE POINTS to get a bonus 2 points. This can be awkward timing if you’re about to stake a vampire or fight a wolf so does cause a little extra caution, like one of random Achievement challenges in a modern game (shooting all the cameras in Portal, say).

I approached things with lower standards than 999 out of 999 points. I consider a winning run to:
a.) Kill the threats: vampire, werewolf, wolf, and warrior.
b.) Expose the murderer and hand him or her to the police.
c.) Raid the treasure in the “treasure trek” maze.

Still, this was rather a challenge to wrangle everything.

• The characters will sometimes pick up items and wander off with them. Relatedly, the murder weapon (needed to accuse the murderer) can be tricky to locate. Fortunately there’s a parrot that can be used to FIND items (it says so in the description, so you don’t have to guess at that at least).
• Part of a successful run requires a trip to a “mole maze” where the mole sometimes changes the exits. Should I marvel at the innovation (dynamic map changes!), or just be really annoyed? My method of coping was to tackle the maze first thing after getting the compass, but even then multiple attempts were required.



• In the “treasure trek” maze (which occurs after figuring out the amulet-cavity deal from my last post) you are also outrunning rising water so you have to be careful not to drown. (Trivia note: when activating this section the route to the mole maze collapses and the mole maze rooms are “reused” for this maze as a way of saving memory.)



• The conditions where you can or can’t do things are mysterious and seem to occasionally depend on the time of day. For example, there’s a wooden wedge in a pile of wood, but sometimes you can’t reach it.
  

  >GET WEDGE
  THE WOOD IS STACKED TOO HIGH.

  then for no reason I am quite sure of, later attempting a staking sometimes result in

  > kill vampire
  YOU HAVE NOT FIGURED OUT HOW NOT DO THAT YET.

Fortunately there’s an alternate (brilliant) way of killing the vampire which I will discuss in the comments.

• To be a little more positive, there’s just so many ways of handling things. For example, to find the murderer you can question people until someone gives their suspicions, LISTEN during a conversation (for example when the MASTER and the BUTLER are in the same room), hear it on the radio from a police announcement, or learn about it from a magic scroll. Alternately, you could presume everyone is guilty and shoot everyone in the house (Grand Theft Auto mashed up with L.A. Noire, so to speak).

One bit that helped was an extra dollop of science fiction onto the genre pile

IT IS THE LABORATORY OF THE MAD SCIENTIST. THERE ARE SEVERAL PIECES OF EQUIPMENT HERE WHICH ARE ALL HUMMING READY TO WORK. IT SORT OF LOOKS LIKE THE TRANSPORTER ROOM OUT OF A STAR TREK MOVIE. LARGE WINDOWS OVERLOOK THE GROUNDS. THERE IS A DOOR TO THE SOUTH AND A SMALL DOOR ON THE FLOOR.

There’s a MATTER XMITTER and a MATTER RECEIVER that let you BEAM UP and BEAM DOWN to teleport to the laboratory and from the laboratory to where the matter receiver is. I placed the matter receiver at the exit so I could teleport at the very end.

In any case, after midnight the Mansion explodes, so I made my exit to triumph:

YOU HAVE BEATEN THE ODDS AND HAVE DONE THE IMPOSSIBLE. YOU HAVE SURVIVED MYSTERY MANSION AND YOU CAN NOW SEE IT GOING UP IN SMOKE BEFORE YOU.

YOUR SCORE INCLUDES 84 POINTS FOR THE ITEMS YOU HAVE WITH YOU.

NOW YOU HAVE TO WALK TO THE BIG CITY.

YOU SCORED 804 POINTS WHICH RATES YOU AS A SLEUTH.

YOU PLAYED 70 MINUTES REAL TIME AND 18.0 HOURS GAME TIME OR 31 % UTILIZATION.

There are three parts I missed, according to the nebulous and nearly incomprehensible source code. First, there’s gold coins found by doing … something … somewhere. Also, SLEEP is not just an intransitive word (see the image clip on top of this post) and there’s even a way to succeed (ranking Mystery Mansion as the first computer game of any type to include sexuality) but I have no idea how. Finally, there’s a way to call a taxi (you don’t have to walk back to town as per the ending text) but the phone always gives me a busy signal; I don’t know if I need perfect timing or what exactly.

Still, I think I’ve got the full experience. I can start to see — at the end of my journey, mind you — why HP mainframe users were addicted; once the game is “figured out” it becomes more of a re-playable strategy game with multiple endings. Getting a perfect score would require reckoning with the random aspect to the mystery, the strange SCORE POINTS mechanism, and the fact visiting every new room is worth points.

While two word parsers (which I’ll be seeing more of in 1978) are problematic, usually with a verb list it is possible to work out how to communicate.

There’s also the ideal of Zork and beyond, which is a multi-word parser that handles both two word and complex sentences smoothly enough I don’t have to pull my hair over the parser.

Then there’s Mystery Mansion, which also understands more than two words in its parser, but this turns out quite unfortunate.

For example, LOOK AT THING is how you examine objects. EXAMINE doesn’t work as a verb, and just LOOK THING gives a “not understood” message.

Here’s another example that increased my blood pressure:

> kill warrior

YOU KILLED THE WARRIOR
> look at warrior

YOU ARE LOOKING AT THE WARRIOR
WHO HAS:
A METAL SHIELD
A PARANOID PARROT
A MENACING MACE
AND IS DEAD
> get parrot from warrior

I DON’T SEE THE PARROT
> take parrot from warrior

YOUR BOOTY NOW CONTAINS THE PARROT

Note that GET by itself normally does work

> get note

YOUR BOOTY NOW CONTAINS THE NOTE

but in the case of taking from a dead body, only TAKE works. You can also TAKE just by itself, no preposition

> take mace

YOUR BOOTY NOW CONTAINS THE MACE

but the failure of GET led me on a extremely long battle with the parser where I presumed some sort of prepositional phrase was necessary and I just needed to guess the right phrase.

I’m struggling at the moment with amulets and a lever system.

YOU ARE IN A LARGE TREASURE ROOM. IT LOOKS LIKE THERE USE TO BE A LOT OF VALUABLE ARTICLES HERE ONCE. YOU NOTICE A SMALL CAVITY IN THE MIDDLE OF A DRAWING ON THE WALL. THERE IS A LADDER GOING UP, WHICH IS ALL SLIMY.
> look at drawing

YOU ARE LOOKING AT A DRAWING OF SOME KIND OF A LEVER SYSTEM CENTERED AROUND A TRIANGULAR CAVITY CUT IN THE WALL.

According to Bob Sorem I’m supposed to use the amulet somehow, but I have yet to find a two-word or many-word phrase that does anything at all useful. I have a verb list. I’m not playing just guess the verb, but guess the phrase.

The back cover from the commercial version of Stuga.

I’m not that far in Stuga yet (I’m close to a finish on Mystery Mansion and should have an ending post soon) but some things are immediately striking. A short excerpt should illustrate what playing is like in general.

SOUTH

You are in the forest, southwest of the lake.

EAST

You are south of the lake. A cavern leads EAST.

EAST

You are on the shore of an underground lake beside a huge gambling machine. On it is written: ‘PULL THE LEVER IF YOU
HAVE A FAUN SHOE TO STAKE’

EXAMINE LEVER

I don’t know what that means.

You are on the shore of an underground lake beside a huge gambling machine. On it is written: ‘PULL THE LEVER IF YOU
HAVE A FAUN SHOE TO STAKE’

E

You are on the shore of an underground lake.

N

The water is still, you swim fast.

You are in a cemetery. You are standing by a tombstone on the edge of a grave. A path leads forward and backward.
There is a spade here.

F

You are in a misty rock shelter. Cold raw air is blowing in your face. There is a wardrobe here.
A path is leading upwards and downwards.

U

You are in Thorvald’s room. A big sealed up chest is standing by the wall. In the ceiling is a hatch and in the floor is a hole.
On the wall it says: CORKSCREW HELPS WITH THE SA…
There is a diamond here.

D

You are in the Hilbert room, a room with four doors and holes in the ceiling and the floor.

B

You are in an empty room. There is a hole in the ceiling and a set of wall bars leading there. Doors lead to the right and to
the left.

R

You are in the Hilbert room, a room with four doors and holes in the ceiling and the floor.

Some observations from the text:

1. Outdoors compass directions work, while indoors it’s FORWARD/BACKWARD/LEFT/RIGHT only. I’m not sure yet if they’re fixed (like Hunter, in Darkness) or if they adjust based on the direction a room entered from (like Mystery Mansion — that is the game keeps track of which way the player is facing and describes left and right based on that).

2. The map moves around. Going north from the underground lake has led me to four different destinations, seemingly at random. The mismatch with Rock Shelter -> up -> Thorvald’s -> down -> Hilbert room (instead of Rock Shelter) seems to be more an instance of the destination shifting rather than a strange connection.

3. EXAMINE doesn’t work. This is like Adventure, but unlike Zork or Mystery Mansion. This isn’t absolutely a bad thing: a while back on the rec.games.int-fiction group there was a spirited defense of games that don’t allow examine:

I HATE EXAMINE!
There, I feel better…
Far too many games involve “puzzles” whose solution is “Oh, you didn’t notice you could ‘x minefield’ or ‘search countryside’ because these were built into room descriptions”. I was brought up to believe that the computer was your eyes and hands. Thus if the dial is set to 8, you get told this, without having to say ‘x dial’ every time.

– Peter Killworth

4. The room descriptions are oddly minimalist, even moreso than normal for the era.

You are in a dark room.
There is an old man sitting here wearing a pearl necklace.
In his arms is a water bottle.

The entire effect I’d describe as “surreal gonzo”, slapping together ideas without pattern or reason. It’s the stereotype for all games from the area, but while it fits this game I’m not sure if it’s a fair characterization in general; even the wildly out-of-place robot in Zork was in a technological section of 3 rooms rather than dumped in the middle of the map.

In the meantime, I wanted to try the next game on my list: what appears to be the first adventure game in a language other than English.

Du står på en brygga någonstans i Småland. Bakom din solvärmda rygg åker man vattenskidor. En kyrkklocka (som du inte ser) slår tolv. Du ser ett hus rakt fram.

You’re standing on a jetty somewhere in Småland. Behind your sun-warmed back people are
water-skiing. A church bell (which you can’t see) strikes twelve. You can see a house straight ahead.

[Source.]

“Stuga” is Swedish for “cottage”. According to the website above, it was one of the most widespread PC games in Swedish during the 20th century. Four years ago it was ported to Inform by Fredrik Ramsberg and Johan Berntsson, and two years ago Johan Ottosson translated it into English. That’s the version I’m going to play.

But first, a little history straight from the ABOUT text:

The first version of Stuga was written in 1977-78 by the brothers Kimmo and Viggo Eriksson (Viggo’s last name is now Kann) and their friend Olle Johansson. When the project started in the summer of -77 the authors were 10, 12 and 14 years old . . . The game was written in DEC Basic on the mainframe computer Oden at the Stockholm Computer Central for Research and Higher Education, QZ.

Through QZ the young authors had come into contact with the mainframe game Adventure by Crowther and Woods, which was released in 1975 and practically invented the text adventure genre. All three of them already had some experience making games: Kimmo had written a gaming machine simulator, Viggo a Hangman-like guess-the-word game, and Olle a Mastermind game where you played against a character called Thorvald.

They started talking about combining all three games into one – a kind of virtual gaming arcade where you would choose which of the games to play. Inspired by Adventure they added some surroundings to walk around in, and the idea of making a Swedish counterpart to Adventure started to take shape. At one point Kimmo’s father commented on the project: “That’s impossible – you can’t write large programs in Basic!” The gauntlet had been thrown: they decided to make the game, and to make it big.

By how I’ve been dating mainframe games, I’ve been using the first year people outside the author or authors were able to play the game in some form. In this case the game was started in the summer of 1977 — right when Zork was still being developed — but nobody other than the authors had access until 1978.

The history of early computer games seems to be full of young authors; in addition to this game Greg Hassett started writing adventures in 1978 when he was 12, and a teen-aged Richard Garriot was soon to come out with Akalabeth leading to the Ultima series. Are there teen authors out there publishing any more? It seems like the resources are out there.

For an old-school adventure, this step is necessary to me. Some insights I have difficulty seeing from the close, avatar-in-the-game-world perspective. The best example from Zork was how I realized I forgot to test my magic boat on a particular portion of water, hard to notice while running around individual rooms but to easy to see while studying the map.

…

General tasks

• Create a partial (maybe not move-by-move) walkthrough covering what order I want to tackle potential tasks. Should I kill the vampire first? Or make a beeline for the mazes which have torches which will burn out with time? Maybe I should try to catch the killer first thing?
• Search each room carefully for secrets. It’s starting to look like every potential item, even the scenery, is important.
• Finish map of garden — does wolf have a “patrol path” or some system?
• Figure out what’s going on with BRIBE system
• Muck about with magic words some more

Puzzles

• Cold corridor timing. Always seems to be fully open and closing when starting to go down it — is it possible to trigger that, wait until it closes, and then enter just as it starts opening so there’s more time?
• Door in roof. Poke open with something long? Secret catch in room?

Loose objects

• Experiment with talismans — protection from particular attacks? magic spells on right action?
• Try searching for items and people with parrot and globe
• What’s oil for? Try on random creaky places.

…

A final note on ports: I worked out how to save games in the James Garnett port: SUSPEND. So I’m playing mostly his version 19.4 now. There’s only one save game slot, but I’m repeating my system I used with Zork and storing multiple files with the mighty power of DOS batch file programming.

After a lot of confusion I finally read James Garnett’s Mystery Mansion Spoilers, which serve enough to clarify what is going on without giving too much away.

* There are treasures to collect, but it’s much more nonobvious than Adventure or Zork. Every item in the game — including mundane ones like the broom and the rusty shovel — gives points. It’s just some give more than others, and there’s an inventory limit. There are 13 “major” treasures (that give 10 points each) and 3 “minor” treasures (that give 5 points each). I’ve only come across two of the treasures so far, so I’ve got a ways to go.

* There’s a map you can pick up that tells you what you’ll find in each cardinal direction:

> READ MAP

THE MAP SHOWS THAT IT IS:
NORTH TO THE BACK GATE
EAST TO THE STRANGE STREAM
SOUTH TO THE DENSE WOODS
WEST TO THE DENSE WOODS

The map only works on the outer edges of the map (not indoors or in the garden).

* The screams I was hearing are just the game’s way of counting time. At every hour on the hour something noisy happens off of this list:

YOU HEARD A WOMAN SCREAM
YOU HEARD A WOLF HOWL
YOU HEARD A CROW CAW AS IT FLEW BY
YOU HEARD SOME ROCKS FALLING NEARBY

* There’s a fair amount of alternate solutions for things. For example, there’s a secret passage (the west rooms on each floor) that can be entered in 8 different ways. The identity of the murderer, weapon, and location of the crime can be discovered completely by working out how to unroll a magic scroll, or piecemeal by questioning suspects and finding random messages on walls. There’s a vampire that can be killed in two different ways (one of them clever enough to be a worthy puzzle in a modern game).

* There’s a book that gives a single random possible verb depending on which mystery number (1 up to 999) you are playing. If you want to get a complete verb list you are technically supposed to return to the book over and over until you’ve randomly manage to hit upon every possible word. (For two of the magic words, this appears to be the only in-game way to find them.) I said “hmm, no” to that and cut and paste out of the source code instead (I already needed to look at the verbs to find out LIST stood for INVENTORY anyway).

* There’s some random distribution of objects based on the mystery number. Normally there’s an AXE to the east that I go to as my very first move but on rare occasions (possibly when it is the murder weapon) it isn’t there.

* You have one day of time to solve the mystery, grab as many treasures as you can, and escape. Oddly this bothers me more than the lamp-running-low-on-power time limit in Adventure and Zork. I think it’s because you have a certain measures of control over the lamp and can coordinate and plan to save lamp energy. With this game time passes even if you are goofing around looking for a secret passage with the lamp turned off. Also, the lack of a hard score limit makes me less inspired to try and grab all the treasures (I am unsure if it is even possible to carry all the major treasures at once).