ADVENT - Page 4
Still alive. Any player making it this far would probably consider themselves extremely lucky... or persistent. Still, great challenges lie ahead. Of the three exits from this room, only one doesn't lead to immediate destruction.
Both forms of death are obviously inspired by Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. We had this on video at home and, like the Star Wars trilogy, I watched it until I could quote every line.
A change in writing implement implies the passage of time between coding sessions. The most likely scenario is that I was told to go to bed. (I remember late nights reading by the light of the street lamp in the dormitory window, but it would have been too awkward to write with one's head under a curtain.)
The code breaks new technical ground here with the maintenance of state - the variable N$ ($ variables hold strings) is used to record whether the user was sensible enough to pick up the key that just had to be lying around. In most games, this would be an obvious move - but a player who'd made it this far might sensibly be worried about the possibility of horrible death from poison or electric shock.
Spot the bug - taking the key automatically moves you South, due to case fall-through. Can you guess what the first two words on the next page are? This makes the game impossible to complete as written. Oops.