♦ Livestream of the ZZT world "The Lost Pyramid" by James Holub (1992) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/pyramid/]. ♦
A case study in ZZT worlds being different from how you remember them.
An early ZZT adventure where an unlucky tourist is forced to recover the lost idol of Hussafuss in order to live. This plays like a more linear version of early adventures like Town or Smiley Guy, pitting the player in a number of challenging rooms that focus on different ZZT elements. All of this with a basic "ancient Egypt" theme to justify its many traps and perils.
It is a fun game, but playing it on stream made all the little failures sting that much more as it wasn't just my time on the line. There are a handful of questionable decisions such as having to notice ways to shoot breakable walls that are seemingly part of the board's background in order to find mandatory paths forward. The resource management is rather tight as well, a single bad run at one of the boards will put you in critical health for the rest of the game. By the very end, ammo gets dangerously low as well.
If your luck fares a little better, the game has its share of novel boards and puzzles, with some ideas that feel ahead of their time like the inclusion of transporters around a large slider puzzle to fast-travel around it. Other boards, like the arm strainer which consist of fighting against conveyors to grab keys are rough no matter what.
The game also offers some replayability by offering two roads to take through the game which meet up at the end, though the first path seems to have gotten more love. The alternate path has a puzzle that can't actually be solved, with the game's ability to be completed only spared thanks to an alternate "answer some random trivia" to get the same key. (Though answering a question wrong even once prevents this.) There's also a puzzle involving stepping on tiles with certain letters that ends with multiple instances of the correct letter being available, with one allowing players to proceed and the others to kill them despite following the rules of the puzzle.
It's a journey for sure. Perhaps not the "lost classic" I referred to it as a few years ago, but still a very admirable ZZT game for 1992. Quite the surprising ending as well!
♦ Play this world directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/pyramid/
♦ Originally streamed on March 29th, 2024 ♦
