The Most Broken ZZT Game I've Ever Seen
I'm trying to think if that heading is an exaggeration, and I'm really not coming up with much. There are games like LandLand where the worlds themselves were corrupted, causing the games to just stop abruptly. There have been games that do not understand that players need health and ammo to get through them, like OakTown or Gem Hunter 2 for example. There are games that seem well-constructed at first, until you start playing and discover that you've rendered the game unwinnable in four unique ways a la Sivion or Dan Shootwrong.
But I think Darkseekr somehow has them beat.
Now, it's not as miserable an experience as Dan Shootwrong, but this game deserves so much better. Testa has shown himself to be capable of making solid, well-received ZZT worlds, even before a game as early as this one. Dungeon Master's Gallery would eventually find its final release decreed a Featured Game on z2 where Commodore described it the "benchmark for dungeon crawl games in ZZT". Compound, released ...four days prior to Darkseekr received a Classic Game of the Month award, as well as impressing me enough when I played it back in 2020 that I did treat myself to a second playthrough on stream a few years later. The man has proved again and again to be one to remember in the late 90s.
So Darkseekr being so broken is weird. And it's weird even if Testa didn't have such a strong legacy both before and after this game. This game is incredibly structured. Each floor gets the same four boards: dungeon, merchant, treasure, and demons. If you wanted to make your own level, you could easily export these four boards and draw a new map, replace a few enemies behind duplicators, and update the traps/rewards/goods for sale in the treasure and merchant screens. Once the basic structure was defined, hammering out new floors should have been a cinch. A teenager in the 90s with a 2 liter of Mountain Dew and some cold pizza could have cranked out Darkseekr in one sitting for a 24 Hours of ZZT contest.
Mistakes can be made, and in a game heavily focused on randomization, you can predict a number of potential problems. Maybe on floor three, the text gets updated to "Found 20 gems!" but the object still only #gives ten like it did on the previous floor. Perhaps a landmark describing a fountain filled with blood accidentally appears on two floors in a row. Maybe a typo means the torches a merchant has for sale can't actually be bought. It's game where each floor of the dungeon just tweaks the numbers and updates the text accordingly. With so many encounters to update, and having to be at the mercy of RNG to confirm they're working, Testa could be forgiven for missing something here or there.
But those aren't the mistakes the game makes. At no point did I notice any of the previous examples actually manifesting. The errors are instead so blatant, and so baffling that I suspect Testa didn't play the game at all.
And yet, despite Testa being a household name for ZZTers of the era, Darkseekr's many problems seem to have gone unmentioned. Hercules and Hydra gave the game scores in the mid 80s. Ando's 2006 review of the game gives it a 4.5 out of 5, admitting to only playing a little bit of the game, but liking what was there quite a bit, and using the editor to peek at the game's ending. "Definitely worth other people's time" he says.
And again, going into Darkseekr, I would have agreed. I have fond memories of playing this one, finding it to be a bit too hard to get very far, but falling in love with both the game's presentation as well as its implementation, creating a game where while the map layouts may be static, the randomness of what you find as you explore made for a game that was never the same. Every failed attempt to reach the lowest level of the temple felt unique. Would I wander the labyrinth in circles only to succumb to a lack of torches? Would I go down fighting, being slain by its many demonic creatures? Would I run out of ammo in the middle of a fight and have no recourse but to cower in the corner and accept my demise?
What I've learned, is that this is the kind of game that nobody has ever beaten before, because if they did, they would warn everyone else, or at least say "Hey Testa, fix your shit". Yes, Sivion and Dan Shootwrong are definitely the same category of game as this. A wonderful demonstration of the kinds of games people can make with ZZT that falls to pieces the moment you start to look beyond the surface. No amount of randomness will change the truth. Everybody who has played this game has made it maybe to the second floor, died from a lack of resources they had no control over, and then chalked it up to them needing to play better next time.
You can't play Darkseekr "better". You can only be consumed by the occult horrors.
Like so many ZZT games, the main problem comes down to a simple lack of ammo. Enemies in Darkseekr take a significant number of shots to kill, and while they all move towards the player with such ferocity that hitting 100% of your shots doesn't take much effort all, your ammo count will slowly dwindle. The merchants will charge too much for too little, serving only to slow down the inevitable. And that's if you're lucky enough to find one selling what you need.
With barely a quarter of the first floor explored, I ran out of ammo to be able to win an encounter even with perfect aim.
Mind you, this was after finding a merchant that sold ammo, and purchasing 78 extra shots for a whopping 104 gems! I hit the buy button twenty-six times to do this. It was still not enough!
I knew this was going to be the case going in, going so far as to add in a debug object to dispense extra supplies while also logging them to paint a clearly picture of either how little extra would be enough, or how dire the game's supply situation really was. Cheating in some excessive amounts of ammo is an unfortunate reality sometimes when you play games made by young game developers that don't have a good grasp on how to give players what they need to succeed.
I took 100 ammo, suspecting that it wouldn't be enough, but hoping that it would get me through the rest of the floor.
Of course, only a minute later I'd run into the merchant I needed moments ago and buy another eighty. Perhaps all you really needed to get through Darkseekr would be a few timely rolls when it mattered. This was a foolish thought.
It's definitely more than one good roll. I kept an eye on my ammo to see whenever I'd hit 100 or less, and know that it would normally have been a game over state had I not cheated.
But getting enough ammo happened eventually. Saving up and holding out for a merchant with good prices meant I could leave the encounter with my cool cargo shorts weighed down by 400 bullets.
Later floors even include ammo as a reward for defeating demons. This lets Testa increase the hit points of stronger enemies without actually causing a drain on player supplies. You still leave combat down just as much as you do in the early game. It works out. An extra 100 starting ammo would have been enough for players to reliably get through the game. Probably. It's hard to say for sure. We'll get to why soon.
Torches, meanwhile, aren't really that big of a deal. Like ammo, it's tight early on, but it drains at a fixed rate, unlike ammo where half your encounters will require spending at least a double digits-worth. Torches are the most balanced resource in the game, something you can safely run a net positive amount of, up until you strike the jackpot of a merchant with cheap prices for large quantities while carrying enough money to really stock up on them. The game starts you with 200, and my screenshots of the game never show below 170, with the number exceeding 400 on occasion.
Health is trickier. There are three ways to increase health in this game:
- Drink from a fountain on the first floor +50
- Drink from a pool on the second floor +45
- Purchase healing from a wandering healer +10 -10
The first two are single-use and require players to discover them in their exploration, which is hardly guaranteed though very helpful if you manage to do so.
Aside from that, all health restoration comes from merchant encounters with a steep cost for how little health is replenished. It's a price you'll have to pay though, since there's nothing else you can do otherwise. Whenever I'd find myself low on health, I'd start being stingy with any other purchases, knowing I'd need a ton of money to return to baseline. Given that the healer merchant is only a 1-in-7 chance (not considering the implementation of the game's randomness). Saving up is critical because of how unreliable being able to heal is. If you're hurt and can only buy twenty or thirty health, you're still going to be in need of healing afterwards.
The combat is interesting. Enemies are grouped as slow and strong, or fast and weak. Unlike the other games of Testa's that I've revisited, the enemy variety is extremely limited. Every demon. Every single enemy, runs the same basic loop:
:loop
?seek
#if contact ow
#loop
A few earlier enemies include a single idle to slow them down further. Beyond that loop, enemies are only different in the cycle they run at, the damage the deal, and the number of shots it takes to kill them. This leads to some weird ups and downs. Because the enemies always try to run directly at you, by backing away and waiting for them to line up, you can then shoot with complete confidence that your bullet will hit. It's weird, but it works surprisingly well. Players can get through encounters unscathed consistently as long as they prioritize getting some distance between the enemies. The enemies work really well with the limited ammo provided. There's little variety to be noticed, but the encounters work well.
...Until they start moving at cycle one.
This happens starting on the second floor, where the bottom row of enemies, newts, are able to move too fast for the player to be able to increase the distance between them. If a newt gets in your face, it is almost a guarantee that you'll get a game over on the spot. The empty arena means the only thing you can "catch" an enemy on to slow it down is the other enemy in the encounter, or the passage used to drop players on the board.
When it's just the newts, their position at the bottom of the board offers a slim chance for players to rush up from the start and alternate shooting left and right until both enemies are dead before they can close in. On later floors, multiple enemies will run at cycle one and start from positions where the only real tactic is to try to use the entrance passage to your advantage. If you can step on it, the game will pause from the board reloading, and then you'll be able to move a single tile away. On a good encounter, you'll only lose 60 or so health depending on your current floor.
Pray your next encounter is a merchant and that the merchant you get is the healer. You will be in need of their services.
On floor five, three of the four possible enemies move this fast. On the final floor, it's every possible encounter. As if this somehow wasn't enough of a problem, demons on later floors do even more damage. The "weak" demons will still deal twenty damage per hit, and be ready to strike again and again and again once they're in range. This won't actually matter though. We'll get to why soon.
One final thing to mention with regards to how Darkseekr struggles to balance resources are the awful trapped chests you can get when encountering treasure. Each floor contains not one, but two possible treasure encounters that hurt you instead. You've got a 28% chance of losing health instead of being rewarded, which in contrast to how uncommon healer encounters are, makes trapped chests incredible annoying as there's nothing you can do about them unless you savescum. It's incredibly demoralizing to hit two of these in a row!
These chests are split into high damage and low damage traps. On the first floor, the low damage trap is merely an empty chest while the high damage one reduces health by ten. Each floor afterwards increases the amount of health lost by five. On the final floor that means losing 25 or 35 health which can then only be restored by finding the right merchant and having enough cash on hand.
Why Soon
All of those previous problems are a matter of balance. Numbers that get too high, or too low, and completely ruin the experience. Yet many of them don't actually get a chance to do that because once you reach the third floor, the game begins to break in more meaningful ways.
Take this loot found on the third floor. The rewards scale up just as the demon strength and trapped chests do. Thirty torches feels like a godsend compared to the paltry rewards of the first floor. Everything is coming up Milhouse. There may be hope yet for survival.
Except the passage to return players to the dungeon view didn't get updated for floor three. It still leads you back to floor two.
You now have to explore the third floor of the game, with a 25% chance of being dumped unceremoniously to the previous level where you must then leave to the level select screen and return to the correct floor. It was tedious enough just walking from the encounter exit back to the controls, but now a significantly larger delay awaits.
Pretty cool how Testa found a way to make the game's beneficial encounters into a moment of dread.
It only gets worse from here.
The game's fourth floor flew by thanks to some good luck when it came to navigation. It took no time at all to find the sigil to the next level.
...But the object that handles all the special messages do display on each floor didn't get its flag updated. Beating level four tells the game that the player is now free to enter level four.
The game really doesn't want you to play its fifth level. Manually setting the correct flag gets the door to open, only for the passage to have the wrong destination set, sending players instead to the "About" section of the menu.
In 1998, a passage error like this is one of the worst bugs a game can have. There's no way for players to warp to a board via cheats. Instead, they're stuck renaming their saved game's extension to .ZZT, using +DEBUG to get ZZT to open a file that has the save byte set, and making the fix. It feels like work because it is.
And with the way things have been going, the entire time you're going to be wondering how long until you have to do it all again.
It won't be long at all. To make sure that an encounter is always ready to go, Testa keeps the duplicators unblocked, and uses doors that move out of the way for a moment to give enemies the chance to move into play. The enemies in turn are coded to first move inward a few steps before beginning their combat loops. This pre-loop has them check if they're free to start moving, and if not, simply restarting.
When the enemies were updated for this floor, a few enemies from the left side were copied to the right unchanged. "Move inward" means east for the left side and west for the right. Some enemies then are constantly checking to see if they can move away from the arena, leading to fights against a single enemy.
The game of course, refuses to end the encounter until two enemies have been killed, trapping players in an unwinnable fight.
Rather than breaking down the door with ?ZAP, I tried to manually resolve the encounter with ?+RESOLVED instead, hoping things would get back on track. (I assumed it was just bad timing with the doors that might work fine next encounter.) This isn't enough either, since the controller object for combat could no longer be started preventing any additional fights from starting in the first place.
In order to play the fifth floor, I had to resolve every combat encounter myself, doing so from the dungeon map screen, not even bothering to go into the demon board. This leads to a knock-on effect where your ammo count for the floor will never go down without enemies to fight. Players don't need to worry about ammo at this point, and other than trapped chests, they can't lose health either. At this point, it's impossible to say if the resources become more balanced later on because they're no longer draining properly.
Because it was clear that the more time spent on floor five, the worse the experience would be, I peeked at the game's map and ran directly to the exit.
Only to discover the exit didn't function!
This time the culprit is a stray newline, accidentally added into the message object that causes its name to not be on its first line of code. ZZT then thinks the object has no name, and thus all the special messages on this floor are inaccessible!
The final floor is also a bust. The same issue with starting encounters persists, and so you're out of luck if you want to try and play the game properly.
As a final poetic statement on the game, the trigger to rescue Gina fails to open the door to the game's ending.
100 ammo and a single beta tester, even just Testa himself would have been enough to spare the game from this indignity. I genuinely found Darkseekr to be one of the coolest ideas for a ZZT game back in the day, and now I know that it's just unplayable.
At least when Sivion revealed itself to be a buggy mess, you could still appreciate the rest of the game. In Darkseekr, there's nothing that isn't spared from being broken. Opening another chest with a bunch of torches inside or spending money to buy ammo is all you're left with once encounters and special dungeon events (like exiting) stop working properly. There's no game left to play. The only motivation to keep players venturing forward is to see how the game ends, and you're better off doing what Ando did in his review, just looking in the editor.
Final Thoughts
The first two floors play so well, that my initial impression even now was just as it was back in my more naive youth. Darkseekr is a few ammo drops short of a masterpiece. The gameplay loop of Darkseekr is refined enough that even with the wild swings of randomization, you'll be hooked on exploring, trying to beat the odds and the demons in search of the exit to the next level. Every system the game implements ties into one another, acquiring resources, exchanging them for what you need, the thrill of finding a treasure trove of goodies, and it's all interspersed with combat that revolves around player positioning rather than overwhelming firepower.
The way the game is presented, with even the menus being part of a "laptop" interface gives every screen the sense that it's its own little window running on a machine. A computer portal to a grim alternate world where danger lurks around every corner. Your every step is filled with tension. A depleting torch counter counting down to your inevitable death and failure to rescue your friend. Each missed shot in battle makes the need for finding more ever greater. The sense of relief when you can finally buy some healing, even when it's not enough. All the non-essentials have been discarded, with nothing but pure gameplay remaining. Darkseekr is a game about survival in an environment hostile to human life.
The problem obviously, is that eventually it becomes hostile to your human life. Never have I seen a ball dropped so hard in ZZT. Normally, you cheat in stupid amount of extra health to deal with bosses throwing too many stars, and then you can still get the rest of the experience the game offers. A botched board or broken passage is the equivalent of driving over a pothole. It should be fixed, and it's not great to deal with, but once you're past it, it's behind you. In Darkseekr once the encounters break, the entire experience is spoiled along with it. I can't tell you if 100 extra ammo is actually enough because eventually I can't actually play the board where ammo is necessary.
So like, here we are with a game that feels like an immense accomplishment for the 90s, a 3D dungeon crawl with random encounters, treasures, and merchants. The only thing stopping you from playing it over and over again are the static maps, but as long as you can forget where the exits are, the game lends itself to replayability. You never know what you'll encounter on each trip into this dark world where moments of abundance on one playthrough may be moments of scarcity the next. It's unpredictable, but whatever challenge the game gives you, it feels like it should be something you can handle if you play smart.
The resource issues quickly prove that this isn't the case, forcing runs to die before they can truly begin. Had the trouble with Darkseekr amounted to some mismanaged numbers, it would still be a must-play, just one with the disclaimer of needing to be prepared to cheat a little in order to actually make it through. Plenty of other ZZT games have had this problem. Testa is no outlier here.
Instead, the game becomes unsalvageable. A two floor demo that will probably kill you a dozen times before you can get the early game rolls to provide enough supplies that it's possible to reach the third floor. For believing in this game's promise of a bona fide first-person dungeon crawler in ZZT, you are punished for your faith with a game made so wrong, it's practically on purpose.
What were the testers doing is a question I've asked myself in a number of games with blatant bugs that even the least curious player should have ran into. Testa's credits list no one but himself on the project, so it's clear that there's only person who failed to test the game properly. For a man named Testa, he sure didn't.
The end result is that Darkseekr can't be recommend for anything more than cursory glance. You shouldn't invest your time into it, because you will not be rewarded with anything you haven't seen on the first floor. This is a game you can study to see how basic ZZT-OOP can radically transform gameplay into something that feels unique and memorable. Darkseekr should be one of the greats of its time, and a foundational work that Testa and others could learn from and go beyond. It doesn't get much cooler than this, and it doesn't get much worse than this either.
