♦ Livestream Contents
(2:25) “Walter's Quest 1: The curse unleashed” by Caspar (2005) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/walter/]
Cheating my way through the rest of Walter's Quest!
When we last left off, nigh-unkillable vampires ground the game to the halt so excessively that I opted to go into the game's code and just... disable the ability to miss your melee attacks. This improved the experience significantly, and still kept things challenging!
Walter's search for his friend who wouldn't answer the phone is discovered to have been due to the dumbest man alive reading a spell from the Necronomicon to see what would happen. This whole vampire crisis was entirely unnecessary and unrelated to the cult trying to bring Anubis back to Earth! Difficulty aside though, it makes for a very cool level, turning a present-day mansion into as much of a dungeon as an ancient trap-laden tomb.
Not long after, Walter discovers that someone in his group is actually working for the cult, forcing a final confrontation at the Great Pyramid to interrupt the ritual and cast the banishing spell before it's too late. The final stage focuses much more on puzzles than action, and so the difficulty steps down to much more fair levels, even if you can miss your attacks. There are riddles, and button mashing, and a fun surprise in the "Have Faith" room to restore your health if you're willing to survive a spinning gun gauntlet...
The finale itself is impressive too! Lots of animations both via #char and #change with a multi-stage boss battle to cap it all off. Though through sheer luck, rather than spend 5 minutes trying to find a final invisible opponent, I unintentionally bump into them and save the world without trying.
After this revisit Walter's Quest, I'm still convinced it's a rather impressive ZZT game! There are a number of unique settings for its levels and it does much more than throw you inside a yellow pyramid and locking the door behind you. There's a sense of pursuit as you're always just one step behind the villains until the very end. It's just hampered quite a bit by the sheer difficulty of it all. A few more spots to heal (perhaps a reset of health and ammo between levels?) and ideally cutting loose the experiment of striking enemies and missing would make this one an all-timer. In its current, brutally difficult state, you really have to just let yourself cheat to be able to appreciate it to its fullest.
♦ Play this world in your browser
https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/walter/
♦ Streamed Apr 24th, 2026
