During
my initial run at Oo-Topos, I had explored 77 rooms of this strange
alien planet, solved very few of its mysteries, and left a few stones
unturned. My final adventure of this run took me through a one-way
vactrain leading to a confusing maze called the "fly room."
As
it turns out, with the exception of that room and whatever else lay
beyond the vactrain tube, I had already explored most of the map
available to me without solving puzzles. The only further rooms
uncovered by my post-hoc thoroughness were a pool of water near the
garden and an oubliette below the catwalks where a rainbow-colored cloth
sat.
The
fly room itself is a six-room area floating above the top of a
staircase. It isn't truly a maze, and can be visualized as the interior
of a six-sided cube where unusual gravity permits walking on any side,
and the compass points become relative directions. Within each side is a
portal that you can enter by going "down," leading to yet more areas.
The
west side of the fly room opens into a small security room with a
pressure suit and a viewscreen, through which we can see a cold storage
room where the serum is kept.
The
top side, on which a seamless box is found, opens to a pyramid, which
can't be entered but a PSI cube rests at the top. Inside, mosaic
patterns show a ramp extending from the prison roof to the jungle below,
and a bar of silver can be found. Taking it causes an alien mummy to
pop up, curse you, and take your valuables (which at this point
consisted only of the silver bar).
The
north side opens to a bending tunnel that exits to the jungle, another
maze. With 16 rooms, most of them having seven or eight exits, this is the biggest one yet, and made tricky
because while not all of the rooms have the same name, several of them
do, with three rooms called "jungle," four called "dense jungle," and
three with a variation of "jungle path." Without using items as breadcrumbs, you might travel north from "dense jungle," arrive in "dense jungle," and have no way of knowing if that was a different dense jungle than the one you left or not. Gathering enough breadcrumbs is another problem in itself - you
can only carry six items at a time, and finding your way back to the
tunnel so you can collect more isn't trivial, as the non-othographic
layout means you can't simply reverse your steps if you're lost in the
middle of the jungle. And then there's the problem of getting back to
the other side of the one-way vactrain.
Finishing
the jungle map was my greatest challenge yet, and yet once mapped, it's pretty
elegantly laid out. While there's nothing at the end of the maze except
for some thorned bushes, within the maze I found a double helix healer
at the top of a tree, a navigation chip, some Terran relics, some seeds,
and an emerald flower. A pit south of the start held a 6502 processor
and a path to a gravtube dumping me back into the fly room, and a path
north of the start was left unexplored.
The
bottom side of the fly room opens to a dead-end with the words
"Tugo-tusta" on the wall. Typing these words teleports you to the
solarium and back, which was how I got more items to use as breadcrumbs.
The
east side leads to another pit. At the bottom is a fearsome beast
called a "tras," and a needler weapon by its feet. I tried shooting it,
but it dodged, and the tras attacked, which I automatically dodged. I
walked away into a room full of bookcases but only one book - a repair
manual for intergalactic class ships, written in English. The tras
followed and blocked my only way out, so lacking any other evident
options, I shot it again, this time killing it. Another room accessible
here is a steel door to a room that's too cold to enter, which must be
where the serum is kept.
I
returned to the unexplored path, which bent around the prison, and led
east to another maze, one made of shifting vegetation, beach, and sea,
where I found the stripped hull of my ship lying in the center. This
maze was smaller than the jungle, but no less confusing, and to make
matters worse, entering spawned a "crabbette" which followed me around
everywhere, even leaving the beach, and each turn would have a small
chance of killing me with a venomous bite. Shooting it with the needler
did no good either.
 |
| For real? |
After
mapping it out with ample use of item breadcrumbs, I was pretty
satisfied that I had charted most of the game. At 135 rooms and
counting, Oo-Topos may be the biggest microcomputer text adventure game
I've played yet, edging out Cranston Manor Adventure's 132 and Colossal
Cave Adventure's 127. Only MDL Zork and its 161 rooms dwarfs it, and
Oo-Topos may prove to be bigger still.
My
next challenge is to solve Oo-Topos' puzzles proper. To repair the
ship, overcome the obstacles, and maybe even fix that bug that makes it
impossible to get the serum.
My map so far - note that to keep the mazes readable, I have eliminated many of the redundant passages:
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