This time around, I found myself in the mood for a more traditional dungeon crawler. I hadn't played any since last year with The Guardian, which was very different from most, with its menu driven combat where you had to properly react to your enemy's actions in order to exploit opportunities and avoid taking damage. It was cool, but it was very limited and not the kind of gameplay I usually want from such games. The last time I played something more along those lines was back in 2023 with Snorb's Dungeon Crawl which focused on taking ZZT's native bestiary and using Weave to create stronger variants to fill out a roster of foes that would become more and more difficult to handle. That one was fun. The itch for something more along those lines once again needed scratching and I went looking for someting that would hopefully do the trick.
I was looking (as always) at the many releases of Testa, whose body of work in ZZT features seemingly endless numbers of dungeon crawlers, but changed my approach. Lately a number of worlds I'd enjoyed were by authors I was unfamiliar with, and it's always more fun to find a gem by getting lucky rather than going down to the jewelry store. A Testa dungeon crawl is unlikely to really surprise me that much, as I played them all at one point or another when they were still fairly new. So Instead I opened the genre tag and went searching for something that would be new to me.
What I found was Possessed, a game by jojoisjo, a ZZTer whose name shows up in plenty of these articles thanks to his creation of 4, the mouse-controlled first-person point-and-click adventure. Possessed doesn't opt for any groundbreaking new gameplay. It sticks mostly to things that will be familiar to any ZZT dungeoneer, dark rooms, bloodstained walls, and piles of bones littering the floors. Yet he still manages to take the game in a unique direction thanks to the game's more open levels rather than the winding narrow corridors typical of the genre. And of course there's the game's title, which serves as the real hook for the game. Your character is a posessor, a race of beings capable of performing a magic ritual to assume the form of another being. Throughout the game you assuming the form of various creatures in order to infiltrate their territory on your quest to save your people, as well as an unsuspecting humanity from an evil immortal spirit who plans to conquer the world.
An Immortal Sprit Vs. One Dragony Dude
The game begins pre-conflict, letting players get their bearings in an underground world. Jojo immediately finds something unique to include with his game in the opening cutscene being portrayed on a single board with four discrete scenes while they player transports around the board as each segment ends. I think this is a new record. When November Eve did a cutsene with three different locations on a single screen, I thought it was a great way to reduce board transitions while still being able to show players everything they need to see. (Now if only the rest of the game collect follow that example.) Jojoisjo goes for one more, though admittedly the framing is less appealing than November Eve, simply dividing the board up into quadrants. Jojo also has players wrap around the board, making a box for the player to wait in during each segment of the scene as would be done if he had made four boards in the first place.
Players are introduced here to the game's world, a novel mixture of reality as we know it and classic fantasy. In Possessed, Earth is our own, but little do we know that far beneath the surface, below the ocean floor even, is an underground system of caverns where all kinds of fantasy humanoids make their homes. These include the traditional orcs, trolls, and dwarves, along with jojo's unique addition to the Monster Manual with "possessors".
The Possessors are the stars of the game. They're a chunky, somewhat draconic looking beings with the abilty to perform a possession ritual which transforms their bodies into a perfect replica of their targets. Despite what the above page from a book has to say about them being hated, everyone I've shared this image with loves them.
You play as Arkin, a possessor who works on a fungus farm. The first of the four introductory scenes depicts your developing romantic interest in a female possessor named Panse. She shows Arkin a magic ring her father gave her stressing that it's a very special ring and that she must never lose it. Arkin admires the ring's beauty before he has to leave and the first scene ends.
Love blossoms between them in the second scene, but it appears that their love will have to come to an end. The colony they live on is getting too large to be sustainable and a new colony is being settled. Panse's family is leaving, with Arkin's staying behind. The young lovers are soon separated with Arkin professing his love and promising to see her again someday.
It's already a bummer of a summer for Arkin, and it's about to get much worse. The third scene shows an evil and more importantly immortal spirit named Ganin arriving at Arkin's colony. His powers make short work of the posesssors, draining their life energy away and absorbing it into his own. There's some small visual effects of alternating smiley faces and bits of white light that flicker above them to try and instill some weight to the events players are watching unfold.
Arkin, for better or for worse, was out of town during the attack. He returns to the colony finding that everyone has been killed off by Ganin, leaving him as the sole survivor. Ganin is still nearby, giving him the chance to overhere a conversation with one of his commanders and learns just how dire things are. Ganin has already attacked the other colony, and is now searching for some undisclosed artifact which will allow him to achieve his unknown goal.
Arkin does what any lovestruck teenager would do in such a situation. He heads to the village armory for supplies and a weapon, and sets off to avenge his people. His hope that Panse may have somehow survived is the only thing keeping him going. He enters the caves and begins his quest.
From here, new information on the story is delivered almost entirely through interstitials that appear between each of the game's levels. One of the items Arkin grabs at the start of the journey is a guide to the denizens of the underground. At the start of each level, players get to view an illustration and overview of one of the races below, almost like a loading screen tip, but without the loading and also the information is all worldbuilding.
When Arkin is actually running around shooting things, there's rarely any story to pick up on. Arkin doesn't so much find leads as he finds entrances to deeper parts of the caverns, each being the home of a different fantasy race.
These little pages mean there are a handful of adorable species overviews to enjoy. Jojo's art is a really strange beast. The characters clearly read as what they're supposed to be, and some definite effort was put into their designs, yet they're just a little bit off, making them appear rather goofy-looking, in contrast with the game's more serious (though not so macabre as many ZZT dungeon crawlers are) tone.
Also included are some short cutscenes to set up each new level. The game relies on players using their possessor abilities to take on the form of other creatures, blending in with them to make them friendly to Arkin entering their territory, and then fighting your way to the next level, dealing with the enemy of your newfound pals. These other races are having their own troubles with Ganin, and react to his demands differently. The orcs find themselves at war with the trolls who are working with Ganin. The elves find themselves threatened to be the target of Ganin's next attack if they don't abide by his demands to find the posessor among them and turn him in.
These scenes hardly feature the most complex animations or tell the most interesting stories. They get the job done giving players an identity to associate the next threats with rather than just sending stronger and stronger monsters their way. They make for a nice moment to rest between levels, and help keep the game from feeling like it's just a race to the end of some generic caves. There are entire societies down here, with these boards making them feel like more than just fodder for Arkin to do battle with.
You can also learn a little bit about what kind of person Arkin is through these scens. When he arrives in an orcish mess hall where the orcs are (uncharacteristically IMO) worried about a war that has just started with the neighboring troll tribe, Arkin, rather than play it cool and try to pass through their territory and focus on his search for Panse and Ganin immediately speaks up and suggests a bold plan: what if we killed their leader?
The orcs are worried if they could pull off such a feat, as the troll king is no joke. But Arkin, either brave or foolish, volunteers to be the one-man army needed, before shoved out the door and sent off to the next level to deal with an army by himself.
The way the story does actually intersect with the gameplay is a nice change of pace for the genre. It's not just hacking and slashing your way to the exit. You're given unique goals depending on where you are which again help make the underground world feel like it could be the setting for a number of stories. Players get to believe that there's more things happening down here than only Arkin's adventure. The only downside is that these arcs within the journey never get fully resolved. Arkin does indeed find and kill the troll he's after, but he never returns to the orcs to deliver the good news, nor is there ever any followup on what happens with the orc/troll war afterwards.
The only time the story really advances mid-level is during this war, where Arkin will stumbles his way to a prison and discovers that in one of the cells is none other than Panse. Arkin explains that he believes they may be the last of their kind. Arkin's survival was simply good fortune, being away during the attack to avoid falling victim to Ganin. With Panse, the reason for her being spared is a mystery that the two cannot figure out. She gives him her ring as a symbol of her love for him, an item which will become pivotal if Arkin is to succeed, though the abilities of the ring are unknown to both parties.
Once Arkin discovers Panse, his plan shifts gears momentarily on finding a way to free her from her cell. Fortunately the keys are being held by the leader of the trolls and both goals become one and the same. Alas, by the time Arkin acquires the keys, Panse has already been taken away as Ganin's personal prisoner, separating the lovers once more.
One thing you won't find in Posessed is any kind of answer to the greater plot. If (forgive me) you're wondering what Ganin is up to, what he's after, or what he'll do after he gets it, don't expect any information to be revealed before the finale. Storywise, this is where the game is at its weakest, saving everything for the end, and not with a big reveal. The many reasonable questions to ask only get very vague answers at best. Ganin serves as the game's bad guy, and there's really nothing more to discover about it than that Panse being spared, the abilities of the ring she has, and even what Ganin hopes to get out of destroying the possessors.
What is made clear is that the ring is important. When Arkin finally makes it to the the troll leader's lair, players don't get a boss battle. Either Arkin has already acquired Panse's ring, in which case it radiates a mysterious power, defeating the troll in an instant, or Arkin fights without the ring and the troll mops the floor with him automatically ending the game on the spot.
It certainly solves the problem of how to make an interesting boss battle albeit not in the most exciting way. It's a safe solution that prevents the game from ruining its high marks with a pushover or more likely falling apart via something too difficult. I don't want to say it's a good thing that jojo didn't try to come up with an engaging fight, but it keeps the game as it's been so far: running smoothly. Though the gameplay will hold pretty stable throughout Possessed it is in fact moments away from issues beginning to spring up. Enough to show up in their own section.
But as far as the story goes, it's simply time to to finish up the dungeon and head to the next chapter of the game where dwarves are the race du jour.
The cutscene here reveals grim news. Ganin's troops are aware that the possessor he is after is currently in the form of a dwarf and will send his troops to kill the dwarves indiscriminately if they don't do the dirty work themselves to find and catch Arkin. This time, your enemies are the same race Arkin has taken the form of, and there's a catch. Unlike orcs and trolls that get categorized as "evil" (though the game doesn't say as such), it would be rude to kill a bunch of dwarves who want no part of Ganin's ambitions. So for the final chapter of the game, Arkin needs to stay in the shadows, avoiding dwarves that he's unwilling to harm.
They're not entirely on Ganin's side at least, one of the last bits of story you get before the final battle with Ganin is to learn of some dwarves that attacked the army's captain, and were nearly successful in defeating him. This works out nicely for Arkin who is able to overpower the captain and assume his form to gain access to Ganin himself.
Arkin shows no fear, this is exactly what he set out to do at the start of the game.
Ganin meanwhile finally reveals his plan, providing long awaited answers to some pretty basic questions that would have been better off being discovered earlier to establish some stakes. Ganin's plan is to shatter the protective layer of rock that keeps the ocean water out, kill the girl, steal her powers, and then rise to the surface to conquer humanity!
Everyone is well aware of the surface, and in concrete enough terms to have a rough understanding of humankind's nukes and space travel.
As for Panse, it's never explained what is special about her. She had that cool magic ring earlier, but not now, and it's not like Arkin wouldn't fight Ganin if she was already dead. After all, he set off on this quest under the assumption she too was killed in the attack on his people.
While some parts don't add up, the plan seems viable. As an immortal spirit, Ganin can't actually be killed, only sealed away with magic, which humanity has long since lost its abilities in. They'd be powerless to stop him, and it would be a much larger area to rule than the comparitively miniscule caverns beneath the ocean.
Also he denies space travel is possible which is a funny little thing for him to be wrong about.
Arkin's task is certainly hinted at here between Ganin himself saying humans wouldn't know how to seal him, and the ring glowing again. This time at least, it's not an automatic victory. Or it's not supposed to be. (Bad news, this is where another bug comes into play.)
In the end, everything works out I suppose. Ganin is defeated, and it turns out there are many more survivors of his attack than expected. They just don't dwell on the dead. Instead, embracing their newfound success at capitalism. Really, the "top of the trade market" is mentioned earlier with the dwarves being on top. It's a very funny thing to emphasize like this. Oh, and of course Panse and Arkin are made the new leaders of the surviving colony thanks to their heroic deeds.
