♦ Livestream Contents
(2:28) “OIL” by dave2 (2022) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/oil/]
Saving a mermish colony from ecologial disaster!
When a toplander ship drifts off course and begins to break down, oil spills into the ocean below, polluting the waters to a near inhospitable state for the merfolk who live there. You play as Peisinoë, who is tasked by the elders of the village to find the source of the pollution and remove it. A task easier said than done.
dave2's return to ZZT is a mix of action and puzzles built atop the abandoned scaffolding of an incomplete attempt at the project submitted to the Autumn 2003 24 Hours of ZZT contest (https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/24hoz-aut2003/?file=DAVESAST.ZZT) The game does a lot of tweaking to ZZT's systems to change up it's gameplay. Mermish arrows are your primary weapon against pufferfish, sharks, and other more unexpected foes. Rather than hand players ammo, they need to collect starfish off the walls that can be harvested in town. Health is regained from snacking on various undersea plants (which swish about in undersea currents), though potions can be exchanged for starfish in town as well. Fish oil can be harvested from the scales of certain fish by swimming closely to them, before they scurry away. These resources are not finite as in the typical ZZT game, slowly replenishing rather than vanishing. You can stock up as much as you need to, provided you have the time to spend.
And that's the catch that makes the game as compelling as it is. Oil operates on a time limit, with three options selectable at the start of the game as an erzats difficulty option. Spend too much time stocking up or swimming in circles, and the waters become unbearable, with Peisinoë and her village perishing. In order to survive, you need to stop the oil flow entirely, though more time can be gained by blocking off specific leaks as well as rewarded for solving puzzles aboard the sunken ship. As I had played this one once before, I tried my luck at the hardest Poseidon difficulty, which made for a very tense game with the time limit nearly depleting on several occasions.
Your first goal is to find a way into the ship, and once inside dave presents players with hidden rooms that reveal themselves as you open doors. A variety of challenging puzzles can be found inside which reward time as well as keys to the deck where the ship's controls are waiting to be restored. Peisinoë constructs blocks of varying colors to repeat sequences, carts around bombs to blow open sealed doors, and shoves wagons across rooms to transfer power cells to the engines. Oh, and some pinball action of course. The puzzles play well with the time limit, as players have to figure out exactly what the game wants, and how to deliver it, often physically. Every moment spent thinking is one less moment to solve the crisis, and even when you understand what to do, how efficiently you implement your solution also makes for a big impact on your leftover time.
It's a really great game, though we did run into a bug at the end where a certain key was missing (apparently hard mode even tweaks what colored keys are where! A fantastic way to add more replay value) But once that was finally unraveled, it was smooth sailing. Well, until the escape sequence, which was brutally difficult as I had run out of health and had no time to spare heading back to refill. An A+ game that I'd highly recommend any ZZTer try themselves, just maybe not on hard mode.
♦ Play this world in your browser
https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/oil/
♦ Streamed Mar 27th, 2026
