A style of ZZT world that I've only recently starting to realize is an extant thing is the unknowable mystery world. These games put the player character in an unfamiliar place whose purpose is unknown. Your primary way of interacting with the world is by exploring it, trying to piece together some combination of who you are, where you are, why you're there, and what's going on here. I've found myself to be a big fan of these worlds, easily getting suckered in by the allure of possibilities that I can only concoct in my mind, despite how often the big reveal at the end of the game is nothing more than one the big three of "it was a dream", "it was drugs", or the most unknowable of all: "it was gonna be explained in the sequel that never got made".
Today's subject, Serenade toes the line of this category of games. It starts out in the expected manner. A man awakens in an empty field next to a lake with no memory of who he is or how he got there. Searching for clues he discovers a piece of paper with a name written on it. He then sets off to find this person, entering unusual and deadly structures full of surprises as they search for answers.
That aura of mystery is quickly set aside as friendly (if a little odd) people are met, a completely normal town is uncovered, and suddenly the author Dark FLR decides that it would be great if other ZZTers would make their own cameo boards that could be used as floors in a large tower. Serenade's brief flirtation with the surreal is quickly discarded, replaced with a more typical amnesiac game. One where the author is really just free-styling random ideas rather than creating a cohesive narrative in your quest for identity.
The game's inability to move in a straight line is a strength in its own way. It may lack the creepy atmosphere of a rotting world, or the blatant impossibilities of a woman occupying two spaces at once, but at the very least, you won't know what to expect from Dark FLR, allowing for the game to surprise players in a different way.
Serenade is by Dark FLR, a French ZZTer who starting releasing ZZT games in 1998 and was done releasing them by the end of 1999. His more traditional games never quite stood out at the time, although Sombrero, got some later recognition with a Classic Game of the Month award in 2001. Despite this, his contributions to the ZZT scene are undeniable.
Some of those contributions are musical. There were a few releases of Tab Converter, a world with information on how one could convert guitar tablatures to #PLAY commands. Later, a dedicated MS-DOS program Tab2zzt would expedite the process.
And we can't forget ZZT Piano, a graphical program for Windows that presented a keyboard and allowed users to click the keys and transcribe the notes to #PLAY commands as well, allowing songs to be exported directly to a ZZT board where an object with the music would be ready to use. Dig around a bit in worlds of 1999/2000 or so and you'll occasional run into these boards.
That's a track record to be proud of sure, but the name Dark FLR is synonymous with something more impressive than any single utility. He's the man responsible for ZZTV, an (originally TV themed) community collaboration where authors would submit channels with whatever they wanted, effectively a ZZT magazine with no connection to any specific company.
The first release featured just Dark FLR's own channel, but his calls for more submissions were answered by Zenith Nadir and Viovis, and the project expanded from there, lasting all the way until 2016! Dozens of channels were created over the years, totaling over 1,000 boards, and hosted by five different authors in order to keep the series alive.
So yeah, this Dark FLR guy at the very least had some good ideas. I hoped to see some in Serenade
Agh. More Universes.
The more famous ZZTers Knightt and Tseng weren't the only people out there that liked the idea of a "gaming universe". The game's menu has a section labeled "Naeroth", the world where Serenade as well as other Dark FLR games Sombrero and the unreleased Black Metal were planned to take place. While Knightt and Tseng opted to use a tight group of characters that were constantly sharing screentime, Dark FLR seems to only be interested in linking his games together so that he can cameo his previous characters more so than bring them into the latest adventure.
The good news is that unlike jumping into a Tseng game without knowing who Tyrone or Aric are, in Serenade all the recurring characters are minor, requiring no previous knowledge of their own adventures in order to understand what they're saying now. Some of the ones with more normal sounding names I didn't even remember being on the provided list when I finally ran into them.
Others, like "Mr. Wipe" tend to stick in your head a bit more.
It's a relatively minor aspect of the game, that's not too noteworthy for the sake of Serenade but more for showcasing how other ZZTers were clearly influencing Dark FLR. Creating your own little universe to set everything you create in was a bit trendy in this era, assuming you were capable of releasing enough games for some semblance of a universe to form in the first place. Dark FLR's universe here is definitely on the smaller side, small enough that without this blurb before the game began, I'd have had no idea this game was intended to have any connections to any other.
Who is John Serenade?
The game begins properly with the player waking up by a lake with no clue of who they are. The only thing they do remember, is that breakfast this morning was bacon without any eggs. It's certainly not much to go by, yet the repetition Dark FLR uses in the writing makes it sound more meaningful. It is a tad odd to imagine eating bacon and nothing else, and so from the very first moment the game primes the player to consider that things are going to be a little strange.
Visually, we can see Dark FLR making some uncommon choices. A sunrise gives players a clear view of the sky, however with the only exit from here being to the south there can't be any sky on top of the next board. Nothing suggests any direction to wander as being superior to another either, so I can definitely see trying to walk off the sides first, assuming that this perspective would persist across to the next screen.
Then there's the texturing of the water. For as much as ZZTers hate using fake walls to hide secret passages when they could be using them to serve as a floor (as done with the grass here), there's far more willingness to use water for water, even when players will never actually be shooting bullets over it. Using the usual solid-water fades here makes it look very shiny, perhaps even frozen. This will be the case with all the water in the game (more than you'd expect). It really stands out in a way I don't care for, though the decision is ultimately a harmless one.
The note with the name provides an immediate goal, though whether that will be the first thing to accomplish, or the final payoff is up in the air. I also couldn't help but find the player's reaction here to be a little off. A name on a piece of paper strikes me as more likely to be the player's identity rather than someone who might know what's up. It's Dark FLR's game though, so if he wants us to find Mr. Serenade, well, that's what we're gonna do.
The identity of yourself and this unknown John Serenade take a backseat pretty quickly. The next two boards consist of a winding path through some trees with some fallen logs (I think?) blocking the road. The grass is all walkable as well so it's no trouble at all to go around.
For some actual trouble, our hero finds himself besieged by an army of angry bears who want him dead. Don't be worried by the lack of any ammo, as these aren't built-ins that can only be shot. Most of the game's foes are defeated by touching them, with a gun not entering the equation until the last maybe ten minutes of the game.
The bears are instead objects that attack players on contact, and are defeated instantly when touched. They're well-coded as a basic adversary, idling in place for awhile to make it free to attack them, before rushing at the player for a few steps and only checking if they can attack once at the end of their loop.
This method provides players with a clear strategy of keeping a safe distance, waiting for a bear to run at them only to stop short, and then giving the player the opportunity to run in and bop them on the head. It's satisfying to fight them, although visually it doesn't look great seeing all the bears move in tandem with one another.
Dark FLR uses #BIND to share the code with every bear saving memory, but he has plenty to spare here and it might have been a little more aesthetically pleasing to move the hit check and idles around between enemies so that their movements look less robotic when taking in the whole screen at once.
They're also remarkably weak bears! Unlike ZZT's built-ins, they only deal five damage. This is made up for somewhat by not destroying themselves after attacking. Players can also kill them in a single touch. No questions are asked about why this guy with no known powers can paste them into red fakes without breaking a sweat.
The path forward is definitely repetitive. It takes until this third board for there to be anything other than bear and dirt path. With so much space to move around, you can pretty effortlessly avoid the enemies and just move along. This is something Dark FLR won't stand for.
You'll note the locked door on the building. The key is dropped by one of the bears on the previous board. There's nothing to suggest that this bear is in any way different from the rest. It really feels like Dark FLR is trying to punish players for not fighting every enemy. If one of them can drop a key, how many more will?
Zero. But you wouldn't know that and so you'd definitely go Bear Hunting.
And for those that miss the key, and think they'll head back to this building later, the next screen tries to deter your advances by having new enemies that are unkillable without an item found inside. You will learn how this game operates, and you will learn right now.
The "House of Pain" as it's called internally, is where the game seems its most mysterious. After being guided from board to board, here you're suddenly loaded up with nearly a dozen rooms to explore with only the most vague idea of what each room may contain. It's a sudden explosion of choice.
It's not as overwhelming as it may seem though. A few doors are locked, narrowing the directions you can head. The bedrooms are built entirely without objects, making it reasonable to assume players will enter the unlocked bedroom that has something visibly different inside and then understand that they don't need to go into any of the other empty rooms as you can't examine the furniture at all.
It plays with your expectations a bit in a fun way. Not a creature is stirring, so it seems peaceful enough, only for some of the unique objects to be rat enemies that begin to attack when touched.
The toilet is obvious enough what it is, if not what purpose it might serve (...in the game). Dark FLR opts for the ZZTer's tried and true design of making the player reach in to take an item out. Often this requires doing some work to convince the protagonist to do such a thing, finding gloves, tongs, or wrapping their hand in a comical amount of toilet paper. Our bear-punching protagonist is immediately on board with just going for it. Nasty.
The payoff for your unsanitary efforts is a bomb!
The cramped space made me think to try blowing up the toilet, or maybe the wall into the adjacent bedroom. Doing so wastes the bomb whose disappearance without blowing up the real target is helpfully detected to end the player's now dead game.
The puzzle (generously) is to blow up the door to the locked room that players can tell for certain has something inside. The gem inside is a box with a key in it that can open up the remaining doors.
Three of the upper rooms are little more than filler. The room with a large table contains nothing. The room with some counters contains a can of food for a large health boost. The room with the boxes...
Contains a nasty trap! Load your save or accept that most of the health given by the canned goods is immediately taken away.
The library, unsurprisingly, is the most important place. This weird place with its traps, garbage on the floor, rats, and spaces for several people to sleep had me wondering what useful information might be learned here. Is this one of those games set in an alternate reality? Is it Eldritch? Fantasy? A ruined future?
There are no answers to be had. The books are made from text (:zzthink:) and they too can't be investigated. The purpose of this place is to give the player a new location explore. Its purpose in universe forever remains a mystery.
The last object disappears when touched and then suddenly like the rats, a man pops out and begins to attack! Yikes!
His name is Leon according to the object itself. He says nothing. He is as strong as six bears. He wants to kill you.
All your troubles here were in order to get a strange man to assault you in silence and then give you a knife once defeated.
The mysterious rot of the north it ain't.
After that strange digression, it's back to familiar territory. The new enemy is "dog". Dogs, unlike bears, cannot be killed in unarmed combat. If you have the knife, they're defeated in one hit. Compared to the bears, they're much more aggressive, having only single idles at a time to give players their moment to strike. You're far more likely to be harmed by them, though the damage remains low.
Gonna bring back my complaint about the water that looks too solid to me. This is meant to be a lake. I see a large circular building.
It's also the player's first time getting to chat with somebody that's willing to have a conversation. This guy has a boat for crossing the lake, but is currently contemplating taking some very drastic measures over the fact that he lost his ring. This gives a very short term goal of finding the ring.
A bit of the lake that doesn't quite match up with the neighboring textures is where you need to go. I was pretty oblivious at first though, and started backtracking across a few boards looking for anything I may have missed, or any bears I forgot to kill that might have dropped a ring. I don't think this is a particularly interesting puzzle, but my own failure at least feels like it was my own fault and not Dark FLR making the ring too difficult to find.
After two hours of rowing, you arrive in the town of Magdalena (as seen in Sombrero), and the game cements itself as being a far more normal ZZT adventure rather than dealing with anything supernatural. Suddenly there are lots of people to ask about John Serenade, and no more angry fauna to deal with.
Most folks on the docks can't help. One suggests checking the charmingly named "Zen Zebra Tower". Real kind of Dark FLR to have the portion of the game where other ZZTers make the boards be described as the place where the "greatest artists" do their work. It's something I could only appreciate after playing.
This area is also where the Naeroth setting of previous games seems to be relevant. Some of those characters listed earlier will finally appear, and we get a taste of the people's national pastime of Sombrero fighting, where a sombrero is thrown back and forth at dizzying speeds to see who drops it first.
At first I thought it was a bit Windjammers. Then I figured it was likely just a coincidence. But I do know that game has its biggest scene in France where Dark FLR is from which has me really wondering...
The city is pretty tiny. Everything in it save for the Zen Zebra Tower is contained on this single board. There's still plenty to do despite the small size, even if very little of it has any direct benefit to your Serenade search.
The vibes of this place are pretty great. I dig the trees lining the streets. Thinking about it, most ZZT streets are devoid of anything green really. It makes for a much cozier vibe, or perhaps that's just recalibrating from the idea that this game might be a little creepy.
The unlabeled building is the "X-Perts" building, a detective agency that seems like it would be exactly what an amnesiac is looking for. Its owner, Kopells, offers no help. The player gets annoyed, and is left with no other options but to leave.
At no point does the player character bring up that they have amnesia to anyone.
The open-air structure is another trap. You're invited in and then attacked by some thugs. All of them can be quickly dealt with, though until you talk to the leader a second time, it's not as obvious that the people inside are enemies. You can lose some health here before discovering something is amiss.
Defeating the leader lets you loot the corpse and take his watch. Score.
The watch ends up being necessary to play some three card monte with Medahus on the opposite side of the street.
This is where Dark FLR does something unexpected. Observe:
Instead of doing what most games would do and making gambling a coin toss as to whether you win or lose, he instead depicts the game state in a text message, with Medahus pulling out a card, sliding the others around, and then re-inserting the removed card. This is way cooler than what I was expecting! You actually do have to pay attention to which card starts where, and how they're moved around, making it a genuine test of skill instead!
Three card monte lends itself well to the single line of text, though it could just as easily be done on the board with objects in the table toggling visibility as they're shuffled around. I can't recall anyone else doing something this obvious whether in text or otherwise, and it's surprising given how nice it all looks in motion.
For the purpose of Serenade, the game has no randomization, though it could easily be added if desired for a replayable version. Since the goal here is to convert the watch into some money, players have to win the first game as it's the only item available to wager. If you make a mistake, Medahus recognizes the wagered watch as belonging to a friend, leading to a game over.
The bar provides no clues either. All the patrons have canned responses save for a very drunk Somby, the protagonist of Sombrero who sadly took to drinking after becoming a champion.
The bartender will be useful later. For now, the most important person is the one who invites you to play a ZZT representation of that ever-popular bar game: ...Ball game.
Ball game puts Dark FLR's stylish version of three card monte to shame. It's an incredibly out of place multi-stage challenge that is required to complete the game and has nothing to do with anything.
Despite this, it's a pretty cool idea, albeit one whose implementation could use a little more work.
In Ball game, there's a ball that constantly follows the player character. Your goal is to launch the ball and get it to land in a cup, the white #. In this first stage, there are no obstacles save for the green arrow that represents a line the player cannot cross or they will immediately game over, limiting how close your approach can be.
Touching the ball launches it, using the trick where by combining #WALK with #GO, an object can move twice in a single cycle, creating the illusion of diagonal movement. (Manually editing an object's X/Y-step values used for walking can create true diagonal movement, but that's not the case here.)
Once you launch the ball, it zips off, deflecting at forty-five degree angles when it hits a wall and will continue to bounce until it hits a fatal obstacle or lands in the cup.
Even in this first level there are no other obstacles, you can still lose as there is a time limit which begins as soon as you enter the board. Finding a spot to launch from, as well as the course the ball ends up taking both matter significantly towards your success.
The second stage introduces red gems which trigger a game over if the ball touches them.
And the final stage adds a moving object that can block your shot, adding an element of timing, or possibly luck should bouncing off it actually send the ball in a helpful direction.
This is so close to being really good. As you may have guessed from its description, there are a number of problems that hold it back. One of which is that when the ball tries to follow the player, it can only #GO SEEK. Every step then can move the ball to two possible positions, and this is a game where precision matters! Having to wiggle around the room to position the ball where you want to is an unwanted difficulty that neither Dark FLR has no real way of solving.
The time limit isn't too bad on its own, but the board sizes make it much more of a problem. Any attempt at guesstimating the angle is best done as close to the cup as possible. The left half of every board essentially becomes dead space that if the ball winds up bouncing back into turns into needing to reload as so much time is wasted before it bounces back. Assuming it ever bounces back that way at all!
The instant death spots also feel like that's not the best way to handle this mini-game, but there's nothing else an obstacle can do. Either you bounce towards the goal, or away from it.
Even in its current state, Ball game is actually kind of fun. The number of bounces necessary turns it into something akin to an artillery game were you pick a spot, shoot, and then try to adjust from there. Expect to have thoughts like "What if I took three steps back?" or "Maybe if I stand a little higher..." as you play.
With a little bit of work there might be something here that could work as more than just a mini-game in a random bar. It's reminiscent of Ping Ball, a puzzler where there isn't all that much to solve, yet somehow still compelling none the less.
All of this is so you can win a teddy bear. An item that anyone exploring the town before heading north is going to have no idea what purpose it might serve.
