♦ Livestream of 2 ZZT worlds. ♦
♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (2:48) "Dreamz Demo" by DPLobster (2000) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/dreamdem/]
• (57:02) "Daymare" by DPLobster (2000) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/daymare/]
Not one, but two worlds by DPLObester, of which one is actually pretty cool.
The first one, Dreamz, despite the z in the name instead of an s, is not the cool one. It's not awful per se, just very much a typical attempt at creating something vaguely trippy that doesn't really deliver. After a mugging goes wrong, you are stabbed and fall to the ground. When you wake up, you're in a world of your imaginination "Limbo XIV" and need to find the piecs of Prozac to wake up.
It wants to be funny with things like Gopher Burger and I guess Prozac pieces, but is rather dated today, and even for a demo seems pretty sparse for back then. Most worlds have just a single board with nothing programmed on it save for the gardens which is a nice looking nature-heavy space. You don't really do a whole lot other than meet a girl named Taya who makes it apparent that the game has some real parallels to Tseng's Da Hood games at least as far as its cast goes. There's an RPG battle that uses an engine akin to the one seen in Tseng's November Eve, but with awkward controls where the player has to run around to touch arrows rather than be re-centered after moving in a direction, combined with great difficulty in actually hurting the giant gopher you fight.
It felt a little short and was a bit of a letdown, so afterwards we checked out another one of the author's releases, "Daymare", which had some reasonable reviews attached, and the improvement is considerable. It begins similarly, with the protagonist not really knowing where they are or what's going on, leading them into a dungeon with terrifying creatures and a strange voice that motivates them to stop hiding and start fighting. The voice is later revealed to be your warrior's instinct, which is being honed until it is an innate part of yourself. As a ZZT dungeon crawler it has a lot of competition, but the game's bespoke dungeons broken up with outdoor areas with friend and foe alike help it avoid direct comparison's to Testa's many games of deep single dungeon dives.
Combined with very tight resource management, and some tough but beatable enemies, this is actually a real solid dungeon crawler that I think is worth a play for fans of the genre. The story is still a bit vague with promises to be explained later (hah), and at least board had me scouring for the path forward that blended in with unwalkable scenery, but it was definitely fun and made the blandness of Dreamz worth putting up with. Not bad at all!
♦ Play these worlds directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/dreamdem/
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/daymare/
♦ Originally streamed on December 20th, 2024 ♦
