Missed Classic 133: The Paradise Threat (1982) – Introduction

 

Written by Will Moczarski

We’re back with our odd little company from Chapel Hill, NC, still going by the name of Med Systems in 1982. Although the company’s final adventure game was Asylum II they went on to release the three final games by the unusual and quirky game designer Jyym Pearson. If you’re interested in Pearson’s always surprising work you may want to read my coverage of his first six adventure games for this blog: 1 2 3 4 5 6. With Pearson’s two final games, the Med Systems marathon comes to a close, and I’m excited to have simultaneous coverage with Jason Dyer from over at Renga in Blue once again! Be sure to read his take on The Paradise Threat as well!

Once again, you say? Yes, we already teamed up for Lucifer’s Realm, you see, and The Paradise Threat is not only Jyym Pearson’s next game but a direct sequel to it! A quick reminder: In Lucifer’s Realm, our protagonist died right at the beginning of the game only to be sent to hell where Satan begged him to help him get rid of Adolf Hitler who had plans to overthrow the place. Because of our good deeds towards Satan (!) we are starting the next game floating up to paradise where a group of valiant men now needs our help way up there because Adolf Eichmann, one of Hitler’s most notorious followers, is causing trouble with the infernal Deecula Statue. 

The plot is dropped on you in an otherwise unusual introductory sequence which is barely interactive (you need to type “look” and “listen” once in a while) but for connoisseurs of Jyym Pearson’s work this is of course a technique already well known. I’ll let you read for yourself because it’s a premise you really don’t see every day in a text adventure game:

The sequence is even longer but you get the picture...

Because I have written so much about both Jyym Peason and Med Systems already and you can find links to all of the posts on the bottom of the page (as usual) I will get going right away! We are starting the game in a placid meadow cut in half by a wide river. To the north, there is paradise. To the south, the land is dying, and it’s apparently where I need to go as I have no means for crossing the river. But first things first: Abraham Lincoln gave me quite a few things in the introduction, so let us check out our inventory first. I am carrying a golden ring glowing with magic, a sword, a helmet, and a scepter with the image of a saint. Abe’s voice tells me to LISTEN to him, giving a hint to the uninitiated player of Jyym Pearson games (LOOKing, LISTENing and sometimes SMELLing and FEELing are very important here) but we will do that on every screen anyway. I then proceed to check out the environment: I find a “wood box” with no seams floating in the river and find myself able to pick it up.

    

Between Rivendell and Mordor, and guess where they send me...

To the south, there is the western side of a valley of rotting plants. Sounds inviting! The plants turn out to be ivy, and I can pick up one of the vines which will probably serve as a rope of some kind later, since the game describes it as being “long and strong”. On the next screen, there are more rotten plants, this time a large rotten tree “about to fall over”. I guess that this is one of Jyym Pearson’s famous timed events and I will have to come back again later. I try tying the ivy vine to the tree to convince it to fall over right now but that doesn’t work.

At the eastern end of the valley there’s a shimmering haze but not much more to see. I can see a pillar sitting in a muddy field to the east, and it’s interesting that the game tries to describe different rooms from afar. The pillar will become reachable later but for now it’s out of limits. If I go east, I get stuck in a field of quicksand, and – me being already dead – the game lets me starts again in the placid meadow with no further punishment (no lost items or the like). This is kind of convenient although it will lead to various opportunities for softlocks later on.

Significant shrinkage!

I don’t need to traverse the quicksand for now, though. The game is much more open than Lucifer’s Realm was right from the beginning. Going south at the shimmering haze will lead me to the far end of the valley where I can listen to Abe’s advice for the first time: “The statue is here Eichmann has the key..”, he says. Abe likes to save a full stop in the middle so he can have two of them in the end, it seems. I find out that Abe’s advice relates to a locked ancient door that can be found here. Is this already the path to the endgame? Is this like in Asylum II where they dangled the “Doctors only” exit in front of my nose from the get-go?

But where is Eichmann, Abe?

Even further to the south, there is the side of a sheer cliff with stone steps leading up to a cave entrance. When I get there, a horrid demon in a Nazi uniform appears and forces me to participate in his quiz show “Let’s make him squeal”. Fortunately, he’s not really playing hardball, and after just a couple of questions he just vanishes into thin air. If you want to take a shot at them: 

A bit random and not particularly evil but I'm not complaining.

Passing the quiz finally triggers the timed event back in the north, and the tree falls over eventually. The place is now swarming with termites and I immediately think of dropping the wooden box there – maybe they can help me open it. That, however, takes a long time. I do some more exploring in the meantime and find another location, a field with soft soil, and enter the cave entrance previously guarded by the demon where I get shot to death by an arrow immediately and need to start over at the beginning of the game. It is also notable that the steep sheer cliff can also be seen from the soft earth field, and there’s a cave entrance 30 feet up. That’s too precise to be a superfluous bit of information. I’ll keep it in mind for later. 

So you mean there's a 30 ft. ladder on Mars?

After a while, the termites FINALLY finish chewing up the wooden box and leave behind a packet. The packet is full of seeds, and my next step immediately becomes clear. I try to plant the seeds in the soft earth and when I come back to the place, a 10ft plant has grown. Nothing happens when I just wait around but time seems to pass more quickly whenever I die, and the plant grows another 10 feet each time I get myself shot with an arrow. After two more deaths it lets me reach the cave entrance and I can proceed with my exploration. 

The cave is a bit difficult to visualise. There is a crossbow tied to a rope, meaning the arrows come from a self-firing system of some kind. I can not climb down there because I’m perched up on a small bit of rock looking down both on the valley and on the “huge crossbow”. I can reach the rope, thought, and pulling it disables the mechanism. When I go back to the cave where I previously got shot I can now safely traverse it. 

Neither of them are visible items which stumped me for a while.

Because The Paradise Threat, like all other Jyym Pearson games, has a six-item inventory limit I decide to turn the previously dangerous place into my personal stash. I drop the packet of seeds because I assume that I won’t need it anymore and open the door to my right. The next room, a “round glowing cavern”, has another easy but enjoyable puzzle. There’s a plate on the ceiling with various objects sticking to it. Also, there’s a passage right next to it. The game informs me that my scepter is tugging and trying to rise towards the ceiling. Could it be magnetic? But if I drop the scepter I will probably lose it. I immediately get the idea: you need to tie your scepter to the ivy vine, then drop the scepter, enabling you to climb up the vine. In realistic terms it’s a bit hard to believe but for an adventure game puzzle I’m fine with it.

Premature Magnetism

Now that I’m up there I find myself in a narrow twisting tunnel. If you’ve never played a Jyym Pearson game you may not know that sometimes room exits can be reached only by typing “open”, “open door”, or climb. The Paradise Threat adds “jump” to it (although it may have been present in one of the previous games): you need to “climb” the vine in order to reach the tunnel – if you want to get back, however, you need to “jump” or “jump vine”. This was a stumbling block for me in my first few Pearson adventures but by now I take it into account right from the beginning. The narrow twisting tunnel is part of a network of four narrow twisting tunnels, all alike – thankfully it’s not a maze, though. I go south and west and reach a “dim half programmed room”, another instance of the protagonist meeting the maker, like in The Institute. There’s a phone attached to the wall, and it’s ringing. When I “answer phone”, no other than Jyym Pearson himself tells me that he ran out of memory before he could finish this room, “but here’s a clue..” The phone call then runs out of memory, apparently, and it’s not possible to answer the phone again although it may or may not keep ringing (the game is a bit zen about it). I become paranoid about having missed the clue right away and restore a couple of times but it’s way easier and more straightforward than I thought: looking at the phone, you find a “tiny key” lying there in the return case. Very meta, Jyym! 

I finished this room and have plenty of memories of it.

There’s another exit from the network of tunnels leading to a burned and blackened valley. Ancient steps lead south but I cannot reach them because a Nazi guard pulls a luger on me after a few moves. I try to “kill Nazi guard” but he just shoots me to death in the name of Adolf Eichmann, and I start from the beginning. Now another quirk of Jyym Pearson’s games is that the landscape may change revealing new objects after an event has transpired. The game doesn’t tell you about this, of course, so once in a while it makes sense to examine every room anew. That is just what I do and I discover that there’s a sinkhole on one of the first screens now. If you “climb hole”, you find out that what you’ve just climbed into is an old latrine. Congratulations, you’re covered in feces now. Will that help me blend in with the Nazis, at least? 

If you can't beat them, outgross them. (Old Idioms of Wall Street, p. 137)

It won’t, not by itself at least, but the stench is enough to knock out the guard when I go back to talk to him. What a weird puzzle! I can now “undress guard” and nick his uniform. The ancient steps to the south lead to an improvised Nazi camp. The hall is finished with rough lumber and upon closer examination I am able to “pull board” and pick it up. It turns out to be very long and I think I may be able to use it on the quicksand. But first things first. To the south I find Eichmann’s secretary who tells me to wait until he has finished his lunch. His lunch is standing out there in the open so I might be able to tinker with it, however, I don’t have any objects that may be useful. Maybe I can grab another ivy vine?

Yeah I will yeah

That’s not the case but moving on I find that I can indeed drop the board and thus access the quicksand room without sinking. I can thus reach the pillar and pick up some powder. Just what I was looking for! Back to Eichmann, the secretary has conveniently vanished while the food tray is still there, and “put powder on food” will work just fine. I take a walk through the game world to pass the time and when I come back, Eichmann is fast asleep in his room. I can unlock his desk drawers with my tiny key and pick up a lead key, and we already know where that goes!

Repeat after us, drinks before powder (Old idioms of Wall Street, p. 742)

Back at the far end of the valley I can now unlock the ancient door and enter another room. I spring a trap but because I never dropped my helmet I survive without a scratch. After a while it occurs to me that the trap is part of a bigger inventory puzzle rather than an actual puzzle in and of itself. The trap is reset every time I leave the room, so I need to keep carrying the helmet if I want to transition between the starting area and the new part of the game. More importantly, if I drop the helmet somewhere in the new part and then die I find myself in a dead man walking scenario. 

Beyond the room with the trap there’s an eerie room. It’s another room with an auditive hint by Abe Lincoln telling me to “DROP IT!!!”. I assume that he’s talking about the helmet, and when I drop it I can feel a breeze from above blowing through my hair. I can then look up and find a passage I can reach by jumping. Interestingly, everything I drop here gets lost right away. If I don’t listen to Abe before dropping the helmet (or anything else) I’m essentially trapped. This is probably a bug or a result of bad implementation, however, it happens to me too many times on later replays of this section. 

The helmet is lava !!!

If I listen first I can recover all of my items (or just the helmet) in the subsequent room reached by jumping. When I look, a dark figure runs south laughing. I haven’t found out yet who that may be or if I can stop them. To the south, there’s a window, a brick wall, and a door. The door leads to a room with more Nazi guards but strangely they are not part of the description of the room – they only come alive (and kill you) when you’re not wearing the uniform, presenting yet another way to reach a dead man walking scenario. You can drop the uniform to the north and pick it up later (which is not true for the helmet) but helmet and uniform still block two of six precious inventory slots for transitioning between the starting area and the second part of the game.

Stuck between a dragon and a giant plant.

Beyond the room (or brick hall, rather) there’s another dark area. There’s a crevice I cannot cross by jumping. That’s right, I need to re-use an item from earlier, pick up the board which is still lying next to the bog, and bring it here. I can then cross the crevice and reach another ancient door but this one requires a different key from the ones I’ve got. This is where I’m stuck for a while. I try a lot of things but to no avail. When I start the game again with a fresh mind I discover that I overlooked an exit to the south here leading to a room with a sleeping dragon (who will kill me right away if I wake him up no matter how) and a dark moist room to the south. The descriptive “dark, moist” reminds me of the soft earth from the beginning, so I try planting my seeds there but that doesn’t work. I then try, out of frustration and just for the sake of it, to plant them in the room with the dragon and suddenly a giant plant grows out of my sight. That was random! Now I have the following problem: if I type “climb” in the room the game assumes “climb dragon” and there’s nothing I can do about it – the dragon will inevitably wake up and eat me. Even if I put in “climb plant” it will assume I want to climb the dragon (I think?), making it impossible for me to get past him. I’m now looking for a way to climb the plant without waking the dragon or to manipulate the dragon so that he’s unable or unwilling to devour me. Also, I have the slight suspicion that the dark, moist room to the south is actually the mouth or stomach of the dragon (both the dragon and the room are from the south making it plausible that the dragon is actually blocking the way and the only possible exit is through his open mouth – the game stresses that he is snoring with his mouth open) but I haven’t found a way to light it up or do anything else with it. I may be entirely on the wrong trail, though, and am looking forward to seeing how Jason is doing!

The previous PISSED ratings for Med Systems games not written by Jyym Pearson were 18 (Deathmaze 5000), 20 (Labyrinth), 20 (Reality Ends), 30 (Microworld), 32 (Asylum), and 33 (Asylum II), averaging at 25.5.

The first six Jyym Pearson games came in at 31 (Curse of Crowley Manor), 13 (Escape from Traam), 27 (Earthquake – San Francisco 1906), 33 (Saigon: The Final Days), 35 (The Institute), and 26 (Lucifer’s Realm), averaging slightly higher at 27.5. The trend appears to be that Pearson has passed his zenith with The Institute but maybe he’s delivered an amazing last two games. Also, Escape from Traam is notably worse than the rest by quite a margin. Keep all of that in mind when making your guess!

Session time: 1.5hrs
Total time: 1.5hrs

Med Systems Marathon Overview:
(a) 1980 Summary
(b) Reality Ends (1980)
(c) Rat’s Revenge / Deathmaze 5000 (1980)
(d) Labyrinth (1980)
(e) Asylum (1981)
(f) Microworld (1981)
(g) The Institute (1981)
(h) 1981 Summary
(i) Asylum II (1982)
(j) Lucifer’s Realm (1982)
(k) The Paradise Threat (1982) [being played]
(l) The Farvar Legacy (1983) [not yet played]

Jyym & Robyn Pearson Mini-Marathon Overview:
(a) Curse of Crowley Manor (1981)
(b) Escape from Traam (1981)
(c) Earthquake - San Francisco 1906 (1981)
(d) Saigon: The Final Days (1981)