Game #112: Savage Island – Part One Victorious!

I would definitely not be the first nor the last to describe Savage Island as “brutally difficult”. I was able to beat the game last night but it took a 5 hour marathon session that had me up until 2 a.m. This game was released in 1980 and it followed Scott Adam’s Ghost Town which I thought was hard. The aspects of Ghost Town that made that game difficult are carried over into this game and Mr. Adams pulls no punches.

In hindsight; now that I’ve finished the game; many of the game’s puzzles are fair and once past the bear puzzle the game seems to move along quite nicely. There are several things that are responsible for the game’s moniker of being especially difficult.

One of the aspects carried over from Ghost Town is that not all exits or destinations are obvious to the player. You may need to interact with your environment in order to arrive at a place. So when you see a volcano described in the text; rather than GO EAST (which you are not allowed to do) you instead have to type GO VOLCANO and then you suddenly find yourself on the rim of the volcano looking down. There are several instances of this that occur in Savage Island and it broke interactive fiction conventions for that time period.

The second game mechanic that added to the difficulty level was a randomization factor that involved dealing with both the weather and the bear. This threw me for a loop for awhile because I was very used to an IF / THEN kind of ideology in the text adventures I’ve played thus far. What I mean by this is that I was used to a system of games whereby if I took an action in that game which resulted in failure than I knew not to take that action again. It was the wrong course of action and I had best try something else. Scott Adams broke interactive fiction tropes by including a randomization factor. The bear may have decided to eat me right away when I first entered the volcano however that did not mean that entering the volcano was a wrong course of action. I may try again and find that the bear doesn’t eat me the next time I try the same action. So I had to throw convention out the window and realize in Savage Island that my course of action may not necessarily have been the wrong course of action; it just may have been committed at the wrong time or merely been a victim of a randomization routine. So it became a matter of attempting the same thing several times and expecting a different outcome; which in some circles is called insanity.

So in Savage Island I found myself saving the game repeatedly with many different save titles. I think by the time I finished the game I had 21 different saved game files. In one sequence of actions the high winds may kill me in five moves. In another RESTORE the high winds might kill me in 3 moves or 11 moves. In one game the bear might sniff me and immediately eat me upon encountering it. In another RESTORE the bear might not eat me right away and I have a couple of turns to take an action. The bear is tricky because it is attracted to the sweat or salt on your body. If you have taken a lot of actions prior to encountering the bear the game assumes you are perspiring and it has an affect on the randomization routine. You can bathe in the lake and reset that condition before you meet the bear however encountering the bear causes you to become nervous and this nervousness causes you to begin to perspire. CHOMP!

This may be the only interactive fiction game up to this point where the theme of much of the game is quite literally man against nature. This was a very different theme for this period compared to all of the other interactive adventures to have come before it. You had, I believe I counted 62 turns, before a hurricane hits the island and you’re dealing with heavy winds. When you move about in those winds there is the very real danger of dying. When you combine the randomization of the hurricane winds with dealing with a sick bear it creates quite the difficulty loop. I call it a loop because dealing with both the weather and the bear gets very tricky. You have a sequence of actions that you have to get right to be able to deal with the bear and weather. You also had to deal with swimming in a realistic fashion, finding a place to sleep, and building a raft with what you have on hand. Certainly a different theme than any that have come before it.

Correctly dealing with the bear and weather loop puzzle involves you first finding a bottle of rum and deciding what to do with the contents of the bottle, which took a lot of my time. What you do NOT want to do is pour out and waste the rum that is in the bottle. So the most difficult puzzle of the game involves you having to carry the bottle of rum into the volcano hoping that the bear will not eat you; safely storing the rum in a certain location; and then figuring out how you’re going to take the empty bottle back out of the volcano.

Wait. Why would carrying an empty bottle out of the volcano be difficult? You did, after all, carry it in. Because the only way to leave the volcano and make your way back to the island’s shores is to swim an underground lake. However you can’t seem to carry any items at all with you while swimming or you’ll drown. So you need to leave said bottle, swim empty handed across the lake; make your way back to the island shores; retrieve an item that will help you with the lake inventory; and make your way back to the volcano with it.

SPOILER ALERT

I’m talking about the palm log. However the palm log replaces the bottle conundrum in that you have to ALSO get the palm log back out of the volcano as well; and it isn’t by swimming with it across the lake. How to get the log out of the volcano was another time suck for me as I played through this game.

END OF SPOILER ALERT

Once you solve the problem of the bear, which is not easy, you can safely make your way into the dark opening and this time you can WAIT inside without fear of the bear eating you. Once you do that the storm outside passes and you are then able to break that weather & bear loop. For me, once I broke that loop, I found that the game progressed at a much more manageable difficulty level.

I had guessed correctly that I had needed to build a raft. Once the raft is built you will find that you can visit two different places: the atoll and a beach. Once again the randomization routine rears it’s ugly head here. Like most other interactive text adventures I had thought that there is just one correct path to get from point A to point B but not so in Savage Island. Whether you reach the atoll or the beach first seems completely random as well as the directions that you take to get there. I also found out the hard way that you want to visit the atoll first before you visit the beach so my numerous saved games helped me there.

Once you visit the beach the game takes a decidedly weird turn involving aliens, the prehistoric past, and alien machinery. You’ll find that you have to go back to the main island you escaped from and you’ll finally get a chance to explore the dark cave complex just past the bear. It is only now that you finally have your light source and in my opinion this was probably the second hardest puzzle in the game. Solving this puzzle requires many steps. The first is realizing that you can explore the bottom of the lake by holding your breath! Make sure you retrieved not one but two items from the bottom of the lake. The mysterious plastic box was a huge time suck for me. Make sure that you carry it with you at all times. In the caves off the beach you find by raft is where I actually had to resort to getting a hint that involved the force field. I was mad at myself after I did so because I succumbed to the same trick that had already been used in the game several times. I blame the late night playing session; wink. I also just couldn’t wrap my mind around walking right into a force field.

The end of the game will involve repaired alien machinery and a caveman who will give you a password in order to start Savage Island – Part Two.

I feel like I’ll need to do some push ups and eat a protein bar before I even begin to think of tackling Savage Island – Part Two. I played Savage Island on an Apple emulator and it took me roughly 20 hours to complete the game. I have been extremely busy with my J O B and so many of those early hours with the game were spent in short 15 to 30 minute bursts and involved me starting over many times. Trying to free yourself from that weather and sick bear loop is not the sort of Groundhog Day comedy that you want to subject yourself too much to.

I really felt a sense of accomplishment after having finished this one because it required much time, patience, and experimentation on the part of the player. I think this game holds the record for me now in the interactive fiction category for the amount of time needed to complete; beating out Zork I and Empire of the Overmind. To reiterate; I feel that many people had so much trouble with Savage Island – Part One because it introduced a number of firsts in the interactive fiction category. It is true that Scott Adams set out to make it difficult but part of that difficulty involved him continuing to experiment and play with the medium that he’d already published nine other adventures in.