This final floor is really weird compared to the previous floors. Players still need to fight past an assortment of built-ins before entering the chamber of the final boss (of this cave). However, the board feels almost as if it was made by somebody else entirely. The style is very different from the strong fantasy themes that came before it.
This feels more like a board you'd have seen in Town. Suddenly text is being used heavily on the board, and the creatures are really the focus rather than being incidental foes to deal with only until the player reaches a boss room. The game "regresses" to early ZZT action, which I put in quotes not solely because there's nothing wrong with that sort of design, but also because this is so much more playable than the previous floors have all been. Even entering with just thirteen health and fourteen ammo, the challenge presented here is actually reasonable.
The initial hallway lets players be patient and wait for the lions to funnel in, making the first room a pretty safe bet beyond the initial opening of the door. The next hallway's bears are perhaps less kind, with almost all of them positioned in a way that the player will have to dodge or shoot them from point blank range to get past. the tigers are definitely tougher, though the doorway camping strategy remains valid.
The ruffians appear to be be optional, though it's hard to resist the allure of any supplies in Adventure. The ammo evens out if your shooting is perfect, and you'll probably burn off a torch clearing the room out, so the actual return is pretty limited, but everything you can grab counts in this game. Whether or not it's worth it for the items inside is moot however, as the door to the boss room here only opens when every creature has been destroyed.
Level four isn't the first multi-board level of the cave, though it is the first time the second board is just as substantial as the first. "MiRrOr MaZe" is another phrase that invokes dread, so I opted to enter the SHADOWLAIR first.
Despite the earlier portion of the level, things go back to form here. The four servants of the Shadow Master are not hostile, merely requesting players speak with their lord.
The writing in this game brings me back to Ezanya, which is also a rather difficult game that has the benefit of being significantly older as well as a lot shorter.
Or perhaps the better parallel to draw is to the original Dragon Quest/Warrior where the villain gives the hero the same opportunity to rule the world together. Giving in to the temptation means an instant game over as the Shadow Master immediately betrays David.
Declining means fighting off the servants before dealing with the Shadow Master. This is where the red ring comes into play. Once again, you either have the item and can continue playing, or you don't and are forced to die and reload. Remind me to give my regards to the shopkeep of the item store for having both these rings on sale.
The subjects, as they're named, fight one at a time rather than all at once. They chase after the player, alternating between moving and shooting in their direction. The numerous pillars scattered around here are essential to survive, though without any stars being thrown, these servants are a welcome change of pace to deal with.
What?
I really have no explanation for why this hidden healing item is a slice of pizza. Rivera seems to have a thing for including them though, as one of the hidden treasures you can find on the second level is a golden pizza that can be sold for points back in Tre 'La. It really messes with the tone of the game to suddenly start chowing down on some 'za. It also restores twenty-five health though, so I will allow it.
After taking out the servants, the Shadow Master is distraught, and vanishes. The cave is now vanquished. Almost. There's still that mirror maze to deal with. Ugh.
The final stick of dynamite is collected, with the fourth that was skipped being found in the maze. Time to stop putting it off then.
By the standards of Adventure, the mirror maze, while not looking enjoyable, does manage to look playable. It is indeed a big board-spanning invisible maze something that isn't without its own drawbacks regardless, but at least the enemy count is relatively low. It has a few tricks up its sleeve as well to play into the mirror theme, and one particularly nasty mechanic that hammers in the point of how much this game hates its players.
Not all of the creatures are actually creatures. A few are object look-alikes that only move towards the player. Due to the board being dark and the limited room for true creatures to move, it's pretty difficult to tell which is which. These fakes are reflections of the real thing and can be destroyed by touching them. Like their creature-brethren, if they come in contact with the player they take ten health and disappear. The gimmick is that if you shoot one, before they die they'll throw a star, likely catching players off-guard. Since the player can easily retreat here, the trick isn't all that bad.
Where it gets a little mean, is that the vast majority of the gems on the board are also false. When they're touched they turn into lions. This also wouldn't be so bad if they weren't so common. Barely a third of the gems on the board can actually be collected, so if you're still saving up for that red ring, you won't find much money here.
Where it gets meaner is that the board has "Re-enter when zapped" enabled, so harm that comes to the player by any mean other than directly taking health as the reflects do means being yanked right back to the start of the room.
For another unique item on display, the purple heart object is a healing potion reskin that 100% is worth going for, especially since it's so close to the all important lever on this board.
Pulling the lever destroys an object with a nefarious purpose. This invisible maze doesn't use the popular "flash the whole maze" trick when a wall is bumped, opting to just let the maze be revealed a single tile at a time. ...Until this object gets to act and re-hides all the walls! Players don't even get the luxury of mapping out the maze prior to pulling the lever to get rid of this object. It makes an already tedious board even more of a pain. At least if you're looking at the board's layout outside of ZZT, then the maze isn't really too bad, even with the walls getting erased intermittently.
Still, there's no real defense for what Rivera is doing here. It's just another complaint to add to the pile. I had none of it and once I realized what was going on, cheated to reveal the maze. Things were slow enough already.
The bottom-right corner holds the fourth stick of dynamite and one final potion. I don't think I've ever felt such relief in a ZZT world before as when I had acquired the final stick and knew that after all these years I was finally done with the cave. The first quest of Adventure. How many more were still to come?
Racing one last time to the top level, I decided to check out the detonator one last time before actually putting in dynamite stick number four. Wouldn't you know it, the object only checks that stick number five is placed, which means the entire Mirror Maze board can be skipped over.[1]
Hitting the detonator starts a ten second time to evacuate the cave. Uhhhhh sorry to the shopkeepers who seem to have no idea they should be running. Though the message if you let the timer expire implies that they did evacuate even if the game doesn't show it. Players are instead guided to the passage hidden in the wall that reveals itself, partially.
There's one last potential game over here where players may hit the detonator without having enough ammo to shoot their way to the exit. Look at how close I cut it! The standards to which I have held myself to were just barely good enough for this game. Can you imagine how infuriating it would be to make it to this point and not have enough ammo? I would type "OH MY GOD" in the cheat prompt, take a screenshot and then probably have to get a drink.
What I will say in favor of Adventure, is that never in a ZZT game have I been more relieved to have returned to the surface. No more torches! No more worms! No more counting every bullet! I was finally free!
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
This game is sick.
David triumphantly returns to Tre 'La to collect his reward. I'm not sure why the guild master is trying to hide that nobody's accomplished the task before, if they had, the cave would have already been blown up after all.
For a job well done, David is handsomely reward with a single night's rest at the inn before being given his next quest.
It's not even a half decent room. This reward has a cash value of ten gems.
Even the room is dark! With David lamenting that the lights are out.
The room is filthy too! The window is so dirty that David can't look outside. There's a mouse hole in the wall. The bed is rock hard, and yes...
There's even mouse poop on the floor. Yuck.
Well, that's the first day! It took more than an hour and a half to get this far, a whopping sixteen boards out of fifty-seven have been visited. I knew Adventure was going to be a long and difficult adventure, but to have only seen a fraction of the game after this long made it clear that this article was going to be a two-parter. Night at the inn be damned, I was personally exhausted. This game has been out to get me from the start, and this seemed like a good place to take a break. I figured I'd check out what the next quest was and call it a day.
To a new forest, and probably a new cave. Probably with the same old miserable enemies and economy and inn prices. I was not looking forward to continuing.
As a parting gift, I cheated for the last few gems needed to purchase the long sword now rather than later. I did not need to waste any time backtracking later, and I definitely didn't need to load a save old enough to save a shopping trip and have enough gems now. I put up with Rivera's rules on how to approach Adventure long enough. If I was going to actually finish this monstrosity, I was going to do it my way.
Final Thoughts
Think about what this game puts players through. Every bullet, every gem, every torch, every point of health, it all needs to be gained and lost with such precision, that any potential fun in Adventure is gone almost immediately. There's no reason for the game to play like this. Some of it comes down to quirks of ZZT-OOP allowing bosses to return attacks so easily, something that I don't think is necessarily what Rivera wanted, and can perhaps be forgiven despite the pain it caused. He'll receive no such forgiveness for basically everything else. He did have control of the resources the player could collect. Surely he played this at some point and had to see that even the opening foray through Mystery Woods requires players to lure bears onto breakable walls in order to barely scrape by with enough ammo. Any moves in the caves that aren't in the right direction just mean you've wasted a torch and now have to ascend in darkness to the top floor to purchase more. Players that try the game out, run out of resources in the middle of the cave and decide to start from scratch might make the mistake of buying torches in Tre 'La, wasting their cash on a non-optimal purchase. Everything is a trick being played on the player for not doing exactly what Rivera wants them to.
Players can try to keep the game moving at a reasonable pace by returning their dynamite on a trip to the cave's item store, only to then find out that the game doesn't think they beat a level now so they can't go on to the next one. Players that buy a short sword before killing all the spiders will find themselves now too powerful to attack them. Resting at the inn is effectively a death sentence. Tools like shops and the inn which should be used to make life easier on the player instead reroute the game into a dead-end. Every decision made by players needs to be accompanied with a fresh save file so that bad decisions such as "buying things" can be reverted. Enemies are constantly placed in such a way that players have to picked up gems next to them and not be hit. Rivera offers so little room for error that it ought as well be no room at all. What one lion will you allow to hurt you? What bullet that misses its target will be the sole acceptable loss? The demands may be the highest I've ever seen in all my years of ZZTing.
I have played ZZT games that have been unashamed to to have it out for the player, whether obviously through direct challenge, or more cruelly thorough unknowingly soft-locking. zzo's The Game of XYZABCDE from 2018 makes every shot and health point precious, but even it eventually allows players to amass a small buffer. It's a game that certainly isn't for everybody, scaring off a lot of players that don't see the entire game as a living puzzle. I still found myself enjoying it once I came to terms with what it was doing. Sivion likes to prevent players from continuing with puzzles that amount to blind guessing how NPCs will react to arbitrary prices, blocking critical keys that are hidden in dark rooms, or shooting objects moving randomly at cycle one with perfect accuracy from the opposite side of a room. But Sivion has fun parts. Bespin is a treat to explore. The Silly World of Dan Shootwrong is anything but, with constantly opportunities for players to render the game unwinnable, numerous mazes, and a non-linear world design that turns out to be quite linear, forcing players to abruptly turn around when they lack specific items. Dan Shootwrong also oozes charm, and is one of the most visually appealing ZZT worlds of the era. You'll enter new boards with a smile, even if it quickly turns upsidedown. There are merits to all of these worlds, which can be off-putting. They can be enjoyed without being completed, with players appreciating the intricate details of how to conquer a board (XYZABCDE), the open world filled with characters to interact with (Sivion), or the gorgeous graphical work and animations made entirely with the stock ZZT colors (Shootwrong).
Adventure cannot claim the same. It immediately demands perfection, relying on little more than some cute writing to keep players interested, but it's not nearly enough. There's never a break. Dark boards are challenging to make visually appealing with how little the player can see, and while it can be done, the caves are instead very bland. The writing is the game's strong suit, with a few bits of humor when dealing with friendly NPCs, and some commitment to making ZZT melee combat feel heavier than just displaying "You stab the monster!" in bottom row. While the writing can be enjoyed, that so many message windows are closed only for the player to lose, ten, twenty, even thirty health as they bump into an invisible wall trying to escape a melee attack and multiple stars makes these popups instill a sense of dread. You can look at your health before you close them, and then see just how much damage was done.
Truthfully, Ezanya shares many of these pros and cons, with the community's fondness for that game continuing to this day. Why is Adventure derided instead? I think it comes down to the variety. Adventure doesn't have you fight a monstrous worm and a giant spider. It has you fight three nigh-identical worms, and four nigh-identical spiders. Poorly designed bosses are an unfortunate staple of ZZT with its frequently quite young and quite amateur authors. It's easy to turn up the difficulty to an absurd degree and think that a really difficult boss fight is a mark of a quality game. A one-and-done mistake is a blemish, but Adventure is rotten to the core.
Adventure is one of those games that stings because it certainly didn't have to be like this. Just being generous with supplies would be enough to get this in the realm of playable, and get me to be a bit more confident that the bosses constant counter-attacks were unintended. Alas the rest of the game is so malicious that I can't even be sure if it's actually a bug or not. I would love to have seen this as a prototype of the ZZT dungeon crawler. An early game that relies on navigating caves in darkness with a sword being used more frequently than a gun. There's clearly ambition here! This game enamored me as a child when I was young enough to think the problem was that I wasn't good enough to succeed at it. The wide variety of weapons, the dedicated boards for various rooms at the inn, the aesthetics of Tre 'La and Mystery Woods. The idea of blowing up a cave! It seemed like there was so much players got to do in Adventure that I kept coming back for another beating, thinking that it would all come together once I uncovered its secrets. The game couldn't deprive players of resources like this, I must have been overlooking something.
Well, there really isn't anything to see in this god awful cave. It's ZZT as a punishment. It's a tabletop RPG with a sadistic dungeon master. It doesn't feel good to get through. It just feels like it should stop.
I didn't stop though. I kept playing, fully aware that I wouldn't cover the entire game in a single article, and that whatever horrors lied to the west needed to be seen now before I abandoned the game for good. So instead I write this final sentence smiling because I know what lies in Crescent Forest and beyond. I know what Adventure has in store beyond the eastern cave. I know the truth:
The rest of Adventure Part 1 is actually a lot of fun.
To be continued...
- [1] Don't get too excited and think this means you can skip the majority of the cave. You still need the previous sticks to get past the doors at the entrances to the other levels even if you don't need to put them in the kegs. Only stick #4 is truly skippable.
