Escape From Zyla Island

My favorite thing in ZZT is mathematics.

At least it's pretty straightforward. You touch a scroll, it says the room is "1024" or "7" or whatever and if you walk inside you die.

Never trust a teenager to make a math puzzle.

All it takes is one incorrect number and you'll begin to worry that every room might just kill you regardless of what number is says on the outside. The puzzle changes from "is this number prime" to "does Raichu believe this number is prime" and that's a lot tougher to be confident on.

A few more fractional numbers can pop up and get you killed. There's also a room labeled "575" which will kill you despite obviously being a multiple of 5.

With the key collected, it was time to turn around and try Akak with some ammo this time. They're not so tough to defeat, but there's one huge flaw with this fight.

If you defeat them in a narrow hall, you're stuck.

Touching them again will restart the fight as they jump back to their combat loop, but the :shot label is zapped after they die, resulting in the revitalized Akak being completely invincible with no such label to jump to when hit.

After once more fighting Akak, and making sure to stay in the more open portion of the board, I was rewarded with nothing at all. This isn't "optional" in the sense that you can pick up some extra health or even points. This entire room is a waste of the player's time and resources. Awesome.

Instead, the other keys needed to exit the level are just found on this ZZT maze board.

This ends up being one of the better mazes I've seen in ZZT since the drawing of the player is made of fake walls which offers a big gap that can be crossed freely, but also because it uses an object to constantly flip the walls and floors. If you really want you can just hold down a direction and eventually reach the border.

Some might say that a maze that can be solved in this way isn't much of a maze at all and is merely just a way to slow the player down without providing any sense of accomplishment or potential for failure. To such folks I would say: "Yes. That is what mazes are in the first place. This one just speeds it up a little by letting you cut across walls."

Things get a little ominous on this next board. There's this large door and just a glowing green passage. At first I thought this might be a way for the game to change things up a little, connect some levels together and have the player return here once they find a way to open up the door.

Alas the door is just a decoration and never can be opened, nor can the player return here. Well, for the demo at least.

A courtyard isn't exactly freedom, but I didn't expect to actually get to run around outside in this game.

I can only assume the brown foul-smelling "goo" is meant to be feces, but it seems very strange that Raichu wouldn't just call it that. This game certainly hasn't had high standards for its writing up to this point.

By the next board, the goo stops merely being gross and starts being a threat. It moves completely randomly and always shoots towards the player. Surprise, that means there's a ton of friendly fire and the player can get away with just moving around this wide open space and not bother shooting back.

There's a path to the west that's blocked off currently. The sign warns that it's dangerous (and purposely has a lot of spelling errors). You can actually just shoot away the debris to get inside, and while I don't think it's entirely obvious given the character used to depict the breakable region, the nature of these tiles will come up again.

In the southwest corner we have the exit behind two doors this time.

Despite there being a board to the right that's a part of the courtyard, it's not actually connected. You can go from the southeast to the southwest so I assume it's just a bug since you need to link up both exits manually with ZZT's default editor.

And in that corner we have a brown square root symbol that turns out to be none other than Raichu himself!

Raichu doesn't really provide a lot of insights here.

On the eastern side there's more of the same debris blocking the path, but the goo managed to shoot some for me, revealing its weakness to bullets.

There's a short cave, some copy/pasted (non-sentient) goo that keeps the grassy background, and one of the bosses.

I like the large white door on the wall. It's obviously not a door for the player to move through, but it makes this cave feel like it's actually an intended part of the complex.

Yucka is the next boss, and is obviously meant to be defeated second of the two bosses in the courtyard. The dialog probably shouldn't be written that way since the player can easily make it here first if they head east instead of south from the entrance without even worrying about which side they'll figure out has breakable debris first.

So actually Yucka stands out a little bit. They still do the usual strategy of just "shoot towards player, move toward player, repeat", but they also leave behind a trail of forest. For this fight, it hardly matters, but I could see this being an interesting mechanic with enemies creating these temporary barriers that would sort of segment the board.

I'm probably giving Raichu too much credit here, since with Yucka it's just a trail of gross, there's only one enemy, and Yucka's own movements mean that they're unlikely to have themselves of the player have to deal with the forest tiles.

Instead you just shoot Yucka ten times and get one of the keys.

On the other side of the courtyard is the first cave. It's pretty similar to Yucka's, but it does at least provide some items. Thank goodness for that since I'm almost out of ammo again. The red items are also healing items that restore 5 health each. The green one is... poison and takes away 20 health. Awesome.

Hey, free boss concept idea: Fight a boss in an arena that's littered with these mushrooms that are bad to touch, so that you don't just reload your save the second you touch one and realize it hurt you.

Grossa is pretty similar to Yucka as far as just moving and shooting at the player goes. The key difference though is that a second object exists to change bullets into tigers on a fixed timer. This might combine well with a forest trail. There's actually a reference in Yucka's code to send a message to the bullet-to-tiger object as well, but such an object doesn't exist, making each fight feel like it's missing its other half.

Raichu loves these giant walls of laughter.

They drop the other key, and with that it's on to the exit.

It's never that easy though. First there's a quiz! Luckily it's a nice one where wrong guesses just reset you to the start instead of hurting out killing the player outright.

The object name and player's comment on "the AK thing" is reference to the "AKWare Impromptu Quiz", a recurring pop quiz in various AKWare titles. Asking the player some trivia questions is nothing new, and I doubt AKWare pioneered it, but theirs was particularly well known thanks to its cool theme music. If you were playing a game and that tune started playing, you knew.

At first the trivia looks like it's going to be one of those awful ones where it's just picking random answers to nonsense questions(, like in Dragon Woods). It's not that bad though since the real puzzle is just to recognize that the answers are in fact the ones Raichu gives to the player before they can even finish asking the questions. It subverts the bad trivia trope which I will admit is clever. I can't be too excited though, since much like the maze of flickering walls from earlier Raichu isn't turning a bad mechanic into a good here, but merely finding a way to make a bad mechanic go by faster than it otherwise might have. It's not fun guessing blindly, but it's not fun having all the answers either.

And that's trivia night.

As an aside, this game was released in 1999 and Raichu uses the word "anthropomorphic". I'm like 99% sure they were involved with the furry fandom solely based on this information alone.

Oh right.

Yeah whoops I messed up and played the demo rather than the full original version of the game. Don't worry though, I immediately corrected my mistake and loaded up the full game where this one left off. How embarrassing!

(Actually if I was smart I would've stopped with the demo.)