♦ Livestream Contents
(1:59) “Walter's Quest 1: The curse unleashed” by Caspar (2005) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/walter/]
A flawed action-adventure that's loaded with good ideas and struggles to execute them.
Walter is working at a dig site in Egypt searching for ancient artifacts when he's caught up in an adventure for the fate of the world. The treasures of Anubis, separated by ancient peoples to prevent a tragedy from occurring, are being collected by a mysterious group who wish to use them to take over the world. Walter travels from various dig sites around the world to claim these items before they fall into the wrong hands. It's a classic ZZT adventure filled with dark tombs and trap-laden corridors, but with 2000s era ZZT combat rather than something like James Holub's "The Lost Pyramid" (1992). It's filled with surprises not just in the main levels, but with story twists and unexpected bits of fighting in bars, surprise ninja ambushes, and motorcycle chases!
On the one hand, Walter's Quest takes concepts that have been seen countless times in ZZT and makes them feel rather fresh. Running around its temple-esque levels filled with levers and tiny combination guessing puzzles give the game a unique flavor in how you move around the boards. Dark rooms get players searching for closed off exits and levers, hoping the two are tied to one another. Combat can by sped up by using your gun more than your sword, with a delicate balance being required as there's not enough ammo to rely exclusively on safer ranged attacks.
On the other hand, oh my god why is this melee combat so needlessly brutal??? The difficulty of bumping into objects to attack them in ZZT stems from objects moving erratically or aggressively. Getting into a position where you can inflict damage without taking any in response requires patience and being ready to strike at precisely the right moment. Walter's Quest says that's not good enough, and then requires an arbitrary roll of RNG (isn't there someone you forgot to ask?) when you touch your opponent to determine if it actually hits or not. The method used for this roll causes it to stick until the object hits a point in its code where it becomes vulnerable again. If you keep attacking after a miss, you'll consistently keep missing. Combat becomes either extremely slow as you back off and wait and hope you luck into hitting next time, or very volatile as you try to minimize downtime and likely get hurt yourself while trying to just hit the stupid mummy already.
When I first played the game in 2023 (https://museumofzzt.com/article/view/947/closer-look-walters-quest-1-the-curse-unleashed/) I needed to "lightly" cheat in the first file, and excessively in the 2nd thanks to the vampires enemies that are perhaps one of the most annoying enemies I've seen in ZZT that aren't just spamming bullets/stars all day. Wanting to move faster here, I found that I really really needed to give myself more health and ammo to make progress at more than a glacial pace.
♦ Play this world in your browser
https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/walter/
♦ Streamed Apr 17th, 2026
