Everything Will Kill You
Really, the majority of Pepper Bolette is a pretty straightforward gameplay loop. You find one of the previously covered locations, and hunt down anything you can find. Ideally, what you'll find is a purple key, but without some lucky picks for which area to explore in what order that probably won't be the case. What's more likely is that you'll venture across a few boards and find a piece of equipment or a person that will provide a basic task to perform in order to receive a reward of some equipment.
One constant is that every area of the game is quite dangerous. As soon as you venture anywhere outside of Yllimpse Village you'll be at the mercy of a lot of surprisingly fierce opponents. This difficultly is easily the biggest hurdle to enjoying the game. It's certainly something that I can see pushing away otherwise interested players, but I do think it's worth sticking through it.
Expect to see this screen a good amount. Seeing as a bunch of space was already needed to implement warps for the backpack system, Zephyre adds in a custom game over screen that automatically triggers once the player dies. Again, this is not something you usually see owing once more to the constant duplicator noises. Zephyre's already got the player dealing with those, so why not have a second duplicator ready to bring the player to a dedicated game over screen as well? This isn't the first game to implement such a feature. Bucket's Resident Evil from 2001 predates the idea by a few years, albeit using a system where instead of using duplicators, a player clone is created that's surrounded by passages causing the next attempt to move to change boards instead. Undaunted, Zephyre makes his a little more special with the fact that there are two possible game over messages that can display on the board. It's an impressive feat of engineering with invisible walls.
Don't worry about how daunting the game is in the beginning. Things only get easier as they go along. Initially your only weapon will be your fists with most victories being by the skin of your teeth. Avoiding enemies is almost always the smarter way to go about things, though in dark caves that's more easily said than done. Obtaining a weapon will be your first priority in order to actually survive these fights. Little guidance is offered to the player as to where items can be acquired so this can very easily mean running all across the world and dying repeatedly until you stumble across a weapon.
It's a rough enough process that I think just giving the player a gun right away or at least giving some direct information on where to find one would benefit the game quite a bit. Once you're armed it's far more feasible to shoot foes in places you'll be traversing a lot. The caves should definitely be cleared out while the various forests and other locations are typically open enough that you can still get away with just running.
And run you shall. For most of the game ammo can only be acquired either via purchasing it from the main village or scattered haphazardly in Ricochave. By the time you acquire a gun it should at least be obvious that your ammo shouldn't be taken for granted. Most ammo objects also cap your ammunition at seventeen shots so you can't even grab it all in one trip. Instead you have to consider if it's worth wasting what ammo you currently have to reset it back to seventeen.
Still, "survival horror" this ain't. Most enemies don't have a lot of hit points. The hard part is just landing your shots against lone targets. Seventeen shots is reasonably generous overall if you play conservatively and try to avoid shooting unless you're suddenly ambushed. In a few cases you can of course get away with ZZT not being able to differentiate between who fired a bullet and get some friendly fire to help out. It's not easy, but I got through the game without having to cheat for ammo. While the balance is definitely harder than some might want, I wouldn't call it unfair by any means.
The health situation is a little more favorable. It can be restored by picking up regular ZZT games that double as currency as well as dedicated heart objects that provide a far more substantial twenty-five health. This is uncapped so you can at least snatch it all up right away and try and maintain a surplus for as long as you can. One of the caves also provides a 1up item that gives 200 health which can be a tremendous relief when you come across it. A few treasure chests can contain arbitrary amounts of health as well. The only real trouble is that you can't purchase healing at all from the village's shop.
Truth be told, a good reason that I _did_ actually put up with the ammo and health situation was because I had read Commodore's review of the game and knew that eventually any supply troubles would be over. The player will eventually meet a Myconian named Og who will immediately become their best friend. Rainy Woods has its own village of Myconians with one particular unassuming mushroom standing around outside in the rain being the most important NPC around. Not only do they provide information on where nearly every item and purple key in the game can be discovered, but they can also provide free healing and ammunition! Talking to them, just as with any other Myconian requires having the translator found and equipped with the tedium of going into the backpack and changing your selected item to the translator serving as a soft deterrent from abusing Og's services too badly.
It certainly didn't stop me though. Og can effortlessly reset the player's health to seventy-five, a number you'd be hard pressed to ever reach again once you drop below that amount. In addition Og will provide a seventeen shot clip if the player needs it. His condition there is that the player's ammo has to be less than ten for him to be willing to part with it. Og only giving ammo to a needy player is probably meant to keep the player from getting excessive amounts for free, but his logic can be pretty easily manipulated. Little did Og suspect that I would get an ammo refill from him, shoot until I had nine bullets, and then get another seventeen. Whatever his intentions were, Og is instead a reliable way to have more than the normal maximum amount of ammo, and when you've been struggling to keep your gun loaded going from seventeen to twenty-six feels like a massive upgrade in firepower.
I really enjoyed the combat in Pepper Bolette actually. The enemies feel varied; the player feels a growth in power over the game as they acquire the two weapons, and unlock a source of infinite ammo; and there are little moments of triumph thanks to every enemy activating a random "trash talk" line upon scoring a final blow.
Most of them really aren't one liners or anything, and they repeat quite often (the randomness is designed so that some responses are prioritized over others), but after getting ambushed by a killer frog in the fog, it's very satisfying to beat them to the punch and get a little "Go lick somebody else" out of it. The lines certainly beat the taunts seen in the Flame Frost Blade demo at least. They aren't completely generic, plus they give a little insight into the kind of person the protagonist is supposed to be. Some boards even enhance the effect by changing up the lines based on whether or not the player has a gun equipped when the killing blow is dealt.
Give the sheer number of action focused ZZT games, I'm surprised I haven't come across a system like this before. Zephyre really is a master at putting in these little details that others wouldn't have bothered with and they really make the game stand out from the rest. This is a really simple system to implement, yet most games just stick with basic screams of "Argh!" or simple "You kill the giant rat!" narration. This instead offers a positive feedback loop that will give you reason to want to defeat enemies just to see if you'll get a new line of dialog for it.
For the most part, enemies don't feel identical to one another, which is critical in a game with a bestiary listing seventeen creatures (albeit not all of them are out to kill you). A few foes really go above and beyond the norm for ZZT enemies and really deserve some attention for their uniqueness.
The hyperpedes in the Dead Woods were covered earlier, and their multi-object emulation of ZZT's centipedes definitely makes them one of the more impressive enemies I've had to fight in a ZZT game.
It's the giant frog in the Foggy Forest that impresses most of all. The creature itself stands still, but it has a really unexpected tongue attack. This red object acts as a projectile that rushes as the player as quickly as possible by combining walk-based movements with standard go-based movements effectively allowing two steps in a cycle. The gif here doesn't do it justice but I had a hard time getting a clean capture of the attack which will home in on the player and not just fly out in a straight line as the image above depicts.
Through some more clever trickery with a player clone upon entering this board, the player will actually be inside the frog's mouth and quietly ejected to the right edge of the screen. This is all done to keep the coordinates to return the player to when they're shot. The lashing tongue object then shoots the player when it's at point blank range and voila, a one-way trip to frog tummy.
This is where the special bomb weapon comes into play which can explode the frog as one does.
The smaller frogs in the fog, known as Foggs, do a more simplified version of this where when the player gets too close they attack and push the player away with their tongues, places boulders in a straight line and turning them into a linewall instantly to give them a more tongue-like appearance.
These unconventional attacks that don't just rely on the player losing health for touching, coming in contact with, being shot by, or hit by a star thrown by an enemy are still really uncommon today, so seeing them in a game from 2004 is really quite impressive. Zephyre consistently does things that you'd almost never see for another decade so it's no surprise to see why this game was showing up on z2 threads asking for nominations for Featured Game status.
Whos and Whats
Pepper Bolette has a whole world to captivate its players, and when it comes to the aesthetics it definitely nails it. This world is one that's pretty rigorously populated with a large quantity of NPCs to talk to, learn from, and on occasion help/hinder. So it's a bit of a let down that the characters aren't all that memorable.
There's nothing wrong with any of them. They just never seem to find their footing. By the end of the game I could not tell you a single character's name, and there were plenty on display. The sheer number of characters may rival a Tseng game, but nobody here ever gets a chance to really do anything. It is true that by the game's story you have just woken up in this strange world while everybody else has been living in it for who knows how long. Even with the justification, it feels like you're merely eavesdropping in on conversations rather than taking part in them. I definitely get the sense that there's a ton of lore intended for the game, but dropping the player right in makes it easy to just gloss right over.
I think this is most apparent in the hotel portion of the game where everybody seems to have strong opinions on the band. You'll find ladies that dragged their boyfriends here. You'll find the band's former lead singer moping at a table. You'll run into a hotel guest that forgot something but refuses to go anywhere near the stage, requiring your help to get it back. Meanwhile the player just knows there's a singer named Russell on stage. Everything feels like it amounts to just one big non sequitur as the game suddenly gets very text heavy, with basically nothing learned inside the hotel mattering once you're outside of its walls again.
These conversations aren't bad, they just don't add up to much of anything. It's hard to become endeared to a person if there's no compelling reason to care about them as more than generic filler. For a weird world where the player character shouldn't have the slightest idea what's up, it's surprising how little the story develops, with most development not happening until the ending sequences pulls back the curtain and offers some explanations. Documentation and other releases by Zephyre make it clear there's far more to this world than presented in Pepper Bolette, but with much of the context not being included in the game itself it's a bit overwhelming and hard to appreciate the people and plot.
It's not all bad though. Zephyre includes yet another little touch to the conversations that make them feel different from most in ZZT. The dialog is accompanied by little ASCII smilies, not as in the player character, but the sort of faces drawn via text prior to the widespread adoption of emoji characters. Characters will change expression with each line of dialog as needed, bugging out their eyes in surprise or displaying the iconic ^_^ face after receiving a compliment. A surprising amount of unique facial expression show up over the course of the game. They make perfect sense as a way to convey emotion just as people would in any modern text driven form of communication, and since "code page 437" features quite a number of "special" characters you wouldn't usually see from people typing on AOL Instant Messenger conversations in the past or in emoji-filled Discord messages today, they end up feeling original to the game rather than just being Internet culture that happened to get included into the dialog.
There's also some little bits of humor. Pepper Bolette doesn't take things too seriously which is probably for the best for one of these "weird mushroom trip" games. I wouldn't call it a comedy, but there are enough NPCs who really do lack a purpose other than to fill out the world, and those ones often get the most amusing moments. One of the first people you run into is a small child near the beach that says their parents told them the water is dangerous.
Your two possible responses are both variations on "No", but one delivering the responsible message of listening to one's parents, with the other encouraging them to find out for themselves. Picking the latter will lead to them eagerly approaching the shore and promptly being hit by a wave and lost at sea. Neither option has any effect on the game. No points, no penalties, no flags. It's just a matter of whether or not you want to send a child out to sea. Rip.
Or if an instantaneous demise isn't peak absurd humor, there's also a gentleman in Rainy Woods with a small cabin. Barge in and speak with him and he'll begin ranting about nobody gave you permission to enter, and he's trying to watch anime. Keep talking and he'll just complain about how there's too much talking and not enough fighting. Exhaust his little rant and he goes right back to demanding you leave his house. This guy was the most memorable character for me, and I really don't think he was intended to steal the show.
One of the only other characters that really stuck with me was Hiru'yaro, a red dragon that lives in Molten Degree. He stands out for a few reasons. For one, his little expressions are significantly taller showing off his horns, snout, and most importantly he is wearing cool sunglasses. As a guardian of one of the purple consciousness keys, he has to protect it from anybody that isn't worthy.
Luckily, the player is worthy, and always will be. There's no action the player can take to not have the respect of Hiru'yaro, and so the fake-out of what is very clearly a board designed to be an arena makes for a fun subversion of expectations, combined with a bit of relief that you don't have to do some mandatory fighting.
...unless you really want those shades.
In which case, you can go from complimenting the dragon's cool fashion sense to abruptly asking if you can have them, to telling him that he doesn't have a choice to say no which does indeed initiate a fight against him. Survive, and you'll catch the glasses out of the air as they go flying. It's a brutal way to obtain the Heat Specs item, and one that's probably not worth it, even if you have no apprehensions about killing somebody for sunglasses.
Basically, the story probably won't win any awards, but it's clear that there is supposed to be a fleshed out world here. How much of it is lacking due what's been written or what's not being written is hard to say. Action is favored most of all in Pepper Bolette, and it's very easy to disregard the story-line entirely, but it's clear to me that Zephyre has far more of this world kept in his head, with Pepper Bolette not being the best delivery mechanism for it.
Final Thoughts
Don't let the lack of an intense story keep you from missing out here. Pepper Bolette is a highly creative ZZT world that experiments heavily with expected ZZT design principles that ultimately results is a very unique experience you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere else. The game's text file and some remnant of early development such as the game over screen being dated 2002 make it apparent that this game had a rough development cycle. As a 2004 release, it's definitely one of the best action titles around, fully deserving of its Featured Game award. Had this been finished back in 2002 where it would have been received by a more healthy ZZT community as a must play and likely have left a noticeable impact on action adventures released afterwards, whereas in late 04' ZZT was well within a considerable decline in the number of releases.
The many unique ideas shown in Pepper Bolette are what keep it memorable today. Some of these experiments are strong successes. The background animations are some of the best I've seen, and easily meet the standards of a well-polished ZZT game made today. Falling leaves, rustling branches, raindrops, and coastal walls all make the game's environments worth stopping for a moment to appreciate. The inclusion of emoticons for conveying character expression without explicit narration is elegant in how simple of a technique can have such a strong impact on how the player treats the text. What Zephyre does here is the sort of thing not seen more than a decade and a half later that leaves me wondering how we all overlooked the ideas demonstrated in what was a notable enough release in its time to be awarded a Featured Game award (plus a MadTom's Pick for the original version, though no review was written). This is a game with a plenty to be emulated.
Other experiments are more of a mixed bag. The backpack system along with the unique take on having a held item takes the more common inventory menus seen typically in adventure games and transforms a ZZT solution into one you'd see in console games. The increased game speed mitigates the delay a little, and the general lack of a need to switch items too often leads to the backpack being a shiny new toy that dulls over the course of the adventure. Once that inventory filled up, the time spent cycling through items had me questioning how worthwhile it was. At the very least though, Zephyre committing to seeing them through provides some important feedback as to what such systems are actually like in practice rather than hypotheticals that still need to be tested. In the end the backpack feels needlessly complex for what the game actually does with it, much as so many ZZT adventures that demand opening the cheat prompt to access a list of items could just as easily have presented those options when an object was touched.
The uh, perpetual duplicator noise is pretty miserable though. Good sound effects are not worth hearing the noise of a blocked duplicator in your sleep for a week.
For those using Weave, the SoftWeave build makes it rather easy to shut up the duplicators. Create a file named BOLETTE.CFG with the contents: dupeblocked.snd = "". Weave is still a little volatile, but this is is all it takes on Soft Weave 2.5n and likely will continue to work for later releases.
Some aspects of the game are likely to have a mixed response today as well. Challenging ZZT worlds like this with limited forms of offense, agile opponents, and harsh consequences for missteps in combat are a tougher sell these days. Undoubtedly, some will enjoy this style of game more than others, and if you're really into it there's the hyper mode "second quest" available after beating the game to up the challenge further (or you could listen to Zephyre's text file and try to beat the game without saving). If you don't mind a real fight for survival, Pepper Bolette: Special Edition comes highly recommended. Among the endless supply of purple-key-styled action games for ZZT, this one truly does stand out as one of the finest around. Even if the intensity of the action is too much for some, it's definitely something you should at least try out.
Ah. I'm not the only one who recognized how rad Hiru'yaro is.
