The Catacombs of Alexandria
Walter's Quest is full of impressive level design from start to finish (with a certain considerable dip at one point), but I think it's the catacombs that wowed me the most.
After sneaking into a private dig site, Walter begins his descent, this time after a missing page from the book of the dead. Appropriately, this dungeon is one filled with undead foes to deal with. Everywhere you turn it seems there's another mummy ready to mumm all over the place. Some of the game's most fiendish traps appear here as well with spinning maces and some nasty layouts with spinning guns and spears that shoot from the walls.
The catacombs are notable as the only level that has some extensive backtracking. This is often a personal sticking point for me, as I hate long walks with nothing to do, but Caspar had me covered. On Walter's initial descent, his goal is to find a ruby and bring it back to the mysterious old woman he met earlier in an Alexandrian market. She warns the player to not go beyond the red door, and it's advice worth heeding, as the spirits that lay beyond that point cannot be harmed by normal means.
Luckily for players and decidedly unlucky for Walter, taking the ruby has the unintended side effect of causing the many skeletons within the catacombs to rise from the dead. Previously peaceful rooms which Walter had cleared out already are returned to their initial dangerous states. The backtracking retains that critical element of danger necessary to make me not demand a shortcut to the surface.
Even more impressive, the ruby itself is merely a component of the ritual to bless Walter's sword for spiritual warfare. As he attempts to escape with his life, the skeletons can be struck down, but they will rise again soon after. Even on the third trip through players are still guaranteed to have foes to face off against.
All of this builds up to an impressive boss fight with a fire mummy, a battle with several phases, beginning with an onslaught of spirits that surround the being, with players in for quite the surprise when one of the pillars that line the room burst open, setting loose several quick-moving and quite hungry scarabs. Everything about this level feels carefully laid out and expertly balanced, making it the pinnacle of what the game's dungeon crawling has to offer in a game that had already been one of the better examples of one of ZZT's staple styles of gameplay.
Pros: I couldn't even get to this part before gushing. The catacombs showcase pretty much everything Walter's Quest has to offer, and does so wonderfully. For all its surprises though, a bit of environmental storytelling here made me realize just how impressive of a game I was dealing with.
Fairly deep inside players can pass a locked room with a small grate in the wall. Inside are a few of the dig site's workers that have found a safe place to hide. Upon hearing your passing footsteps they begin to panic, fearing that the undead creatures have found them before one of them demands they be quiet.
This alone is a great inclusion that adds so much to the setting that simple ancient pottery or instances of Egyptian iconography can't begin to compare to, but Caspar goes one step further.
Players can also notice that the interior of this refuge also contains a skeleton.
A skeleton that will also animate once the ruby is taken. (Which, to be fair to Walter, he is very much unaware will happen.)
On the player's second pass through the room, the workers are replaced with red fakes, the door gone, and the skeleton will be wandering the catacombs just like the rest. It's genuinely one of the best instances of ~environmental storytelling~ I've ever come across in a ZZT game and it's a brief aside that can be missed entirely if players aren't paying attention.
I was also fond of one of the traps that takes a page out of Sweeney's own Caves of ZZT. A small room lined with spinning guns also has a few individual objects that pace rapidly back and forth. These on their own are too narrow to be effective shielding, but a lever can be used to temporarily freeze them in place and have them expand some sliders outwards turning it into a little timing puzzle.
You'll never be completely protected, but you can be a lot more comfortable running through.
Cons: The puzzles seen here are a bit weaker than average. Mostly just lacking in excitement. A bit too much lever pulling, and what I believe is the only time in the game where merely pulling a lever is all it takes to be killed instantly by what appears to be a fire trap.
Another puzzle is optional, providing players with a safe route instead of having to run headlong into some (gentle) spinning guns, provided they step on a series of colored fakes in the right order. I have no idea how you're supposed to find this order, nor can I find any logic to the pattern for doing so when I looked up the solution in code. It's a very tiny shortcut and hardly matters. It just seems odd to have gone through all that trouble on coding something that seems to be a guessing game.
A later dungeon will re-implement this mechanic as a trap, albeit one where players are given a pretty sensible hint to determine the proper order.
Okay. I can't put it off any longer. I have to talk about the game's combat before covering the next level.
Combat Miss-givings
Start to finish, I was enthusiastic to keep playing Walter's Quest. This game won me over fast and keep me engaged both via its story and its well-crafted dungeon layouts. For a large portion of the game, I thought that I had discovered an overlooked gem from an era when ZZTers weren't doing a whole lot of ZZTing.
This game has one glaring issue that really makes the difference between it being a must play and instead turning in into a flawed, if otherwise fantastic experience. The combat.
I've said plenty of times before that doing action well in ZZT is an uphill battle. Objects that shoot each other instead of the player, enemies that swarm the player and drain their health before they can defend themselves, or too little health and/or ammo (or rarely, too much) are just a few of the more common ways to sour the experience.
Walter's Quest is fortunate that the rest of the game was so compelling that I couldn't help but press onward regardless. Its issues are two-fold.
Firstly, the melee combat system is poorly implemented. The traditional high-effort approach to handling melee combat is to either have the object toggle characters to indicate whether the player or the enemy will be hurt on touch, or the rougher low-effort technique is to just having touching enemies hurt them, while having enemies linger in contact with the player harm the player. Ideally, with some idles in the code to let players get in, attack, and get out during a brief moment of predictable behavior (standing still).
Caspar does something quite different. Thanks to the game being so linear, and its locks and keys always being on the same board, the game has little use for flags. Instead, Caspar has individual enemies set and clear flags that when set, cause melee attacks to miss. This is taking the low-effort approach, making it high-effort for Caspar, and making it significantly worse for the player.
Bullets fortunately do not have this limitation. The hit/miss mechanic there is solely whether or not your bullet actually hits the object. While guns can solve the problem, ammunition is limited enough, especially early on, that you can't reasonably play through the entire game using only Walter's gun.
At first, this issue isn't too bad. Enemies are few in number and can be ran from more often than not. It becomes prudent to flee whenever possible and focus on shooting whenever the game requires enemies to be defeated to proceed. You can also be patient after a miss, running off and waiting for another moment to attack instead of continuing to go in hoping the dice roll in your favor this time.
But there are no dice, no element of randomization here. When you strike an enemy and miss, you can continue to wail on them to no effect. Once that flag is set, until code runs to clear it, that enemy is immune to sword strikes.
As a minor condolence, missing an enemy will cause it to pause for a cycle before restarting its combat loop, so you can at least attack defensively, knowing that you won't immediately be bit, clawed, or gored for your attempt.
As the game progresses, the enemies get more difficult to deal with. Slow moving rats and bats may be tedious to melee, but you probably won't lose a noticeable amount of health in doing so. Once the bigger brutes begin to show up, this stops being the case making swordplay a very unfair trade on your health to save a bullet or two.
Where the game truly falls apart is during what would otherwise have been the most impressive level concept of the game in Winston's château. Walter enters this oddly quiet home, finds a dead body, and soon after finds a vampire responsible for the killing.
The vampire is so difficult to land a hit on, that I assumed they were intended to be a boss battle. As an undead creature, they're immune to bullets. Players need to break a piece of furniture with a bullet in order to use one of the wooden shards as a stake to be able to deal damage at all.
After defeating the vampire, the exit opens and another vampire makes an appearance, taking an awful boss battle and going to further extremes.
Ah but then you continue deeper into the château only to realize that was no boss fight. These guys are in fact the basic enemy of the "dungeon". Soon Caspar challenges players to fight multiples vampire simultaneously in small rooms with no chance to restore their health for the majority of the level.
In this instance, it got so miserable to even try and play along, that I began actively cheating with ?ZAP to deal with them. This also required manually clearing away miss flags to ensure the game didn't run out of flags, and a bigger gut punch upon realizing that killing certain vampires unlocked certain doors, so I had to follow along in the code to figure out which door I was supposed to go through next.
It's really bad. I don't think I've ever zapped enemies before unless I was trapped in a corner and unable to move. This is a tremendous low for a game that had done so much to impress up to this point.
While the vampires are by far the worst of them. Some other enemies can also be unpleasant to fight, and a few more are immune to bullets as well, yet those come off as rough edges compared to the vampires. Were it not for the vampires, combat would be flawed, and still the game's clear weak point, yet not anywhere close to as painful as it actually gets.
...I did say combat had two issues though.
Really though, it's the vampires. The other trouble the game has is that health in general is hard to come by. Caspar has a hard time giving the player supplies in general, and while the combat is tedious due to a lack of enough ammo to kill everything from a distance, it makes sense that a game with melee combat shouldn't give the player bullets by the gross.
Health however, is a different issue. As with ammo, it's hard to find ways to make the number go up. Medkits sometimes can be found in dig sites, lost by workers that were overwhelmed by the creatures lurking in the dark. These restore a decent chunk of health, and just don't show up as often as I'd have liked.
Sometimes Walter will find bottles of wine and happily drink the tomb juice, for a bullet or two's worth of healing which is better than nothing.
In the rarest of instances, Caspar says to heck with justifying anything and just has magical healing hearts that will increase your health to one hundred when touched indefinitely. These are always a welcome sight, all two times they actually show up. One of which is cheekily behind a leap of faith through a gauntlet of spinning guns which will make it quite difficult for those who need the heart most to reach it. That is, unless the heed the nearby text saying to "Have Faith". As the hallway is in fact bordered by some invisible transporters and the guns are no danger at all for anyone that tries to get past them.
If the combat was better balanced, the health issue would be less of a problem as well. As it is though, I found myself cheating for extra health a few times in the front half of the game, excessively in vampire town, but then not needing to at all for the rest of the game, finishing up the château with a sizable amount of health for players to have normally elsewhere in the adventure. It may have skewed the endgame a little bit, though I don't feel like that part of the game was excessive in terms of damage taken.
Bump the numbers up for supplies a decent amount and the game would be much better off for it, going from a challenge that gets out of hand in France (as things often do) to something much easier to recommend overall. More ammo would mean less melee, and losing less health. More health would at least mean fewer instances of reloading, attacking, dying, and repeating for a minute until the stars align and you survive an encounter in no worse shape than you began it.
Regardless, even with these pretty hefty shortcomings, I still couldn't help but keep going. Caspar did such an excellent job playing to his strengths that even when the negatives are so severe, at no point did I have any regrets about choosing to play the game. There's so much to love here that it's hard to tell prospective players to stay away.
Tomb Rating Resumed
Le château de Winston
This is undoubtedly the most fascinating level. As amazing as the catacombs were, the château could have surpassed it. The château, as the name would suggest, is hardly ancient. It's simply Winston's home in France. What should be a peaceful dwelling is anything but, as Winston made the incredibly shortsighted decision to try casting a spell from the other missing page of the book of the dead to see what would happen.
Ya done goofed Winston.
Thanks to the spell, the place is now dealing with a nightmarish situation of the basement being enveloped in mist from which vampires have emerged and chewed their way through most of the security team, transforming them into vampires as well.
Walter gets to navigate what would otherwise be a fairly typical large ZZT home, and he really has to go through Hell to defeat the head vampire and find his friends.
Pros: I wasn't too surprised that the château was dangerous. After all, the first screen has a clearly visible dead body that Walter will discover himself shortly after entering. What did surprise me was that quite frankly, I didn't think there were going to be vampires in this game. I had fully expected this to be a case of the cult trying to bring back Anubis sending in some people and attempting to take down their enemies while snagging the missing page for themselves.
Instead, treating the château like any other level made it one of the most surprising pivots imaginable. Anyone playing ZZT games has certainly fought their way through homes filled with enemies before, but the juxtaposition between temple and catacombs and "house" really makes this level feel special.
Due to the panic of the attack, doors are locked, and some survivors are barricaded in rooms, not willing to leave for any reason, and as such working your way through the manor requires finding keys, shooting locks, and even cutting across the courtyard where some vampires are enjoying the sun.
Cons: And yet, the château, for all its brilliance, is unequivocally the worst part of the entire game, and nothing else even comes close. The section discussing the game's combat pretty much covered it. Turns out it's actually really really really really hard to kill one vampire, let alone a dozen.
The vampires compound other issues with the level, turning minor annoyances into real frustrations as well. The doors in the château are very picky about how they need to be opened, and there's never any good indication of which method works for one, or why any others don't. Some doors can only be opened from one side. Others are regular ZZT doors that need keys. Sometimes Walter must defeat all the enemies in a room. Others can be opened by shooting the lock off.
It's annoying, and made worse due to the fact that the level sprawls across a few boards so you can never really be sure where you should be headed next. It's easy to run in circles only to realize you didn't shoot a door or kill the right enemy. The worst of it is a door that can only be opened with a bomb. The bomb can only be found by digging through a pile of refuse in the corner of a room where it looks like a regular wall like all the other junk that can't be interacted with.
The level shook my faith in the game like nothing else. It's a testament to how well put together the rest of it is that I'm still so enamored by it rather than this ruining it entirely for me. Had the château been better executed, I would have little hesitation in calling Walter's Quest one of the best ZZT games I've ever played.
The Pyramid
For the finale, Walter, Winston, and Mortimer travel to the pyramid where the ritual to either immortalize or banish Anubis must be performed. As a final level, it's brief, more on getting to the story's resolution and final confrontation rather than introducing a bunch of new material.
It's short and competent, not particularly memorable outside of the finale, but a welcome respite after the château.
Pros: A little bit of refinement. This level has a puzzle similar to the one in Karnak with the switches that cause object to fire and some breakables to clear out with them. This time the objects move in a small circular pattern while some spinning guns fire at them. When shot, they fire in a specific direction. The levers now being used to open up walls that block the breakables that need to be destroyed.
It's still a tad slow, and there isn't any danger while you're operating the levers, so there's still room for improvement. This time though, you can absolutely get past it in a reasonable amount of time.
Cons: Some of the other puzzles don't quite sit right with me. The pyramid's entrance has two guardians that do the "One tells the truth. One tells lies." thing seen in all kinds of media before. In a ZZT game from 2005, this feels quite low effort to even bother including. (The previously covered Castle of Zandia has the same puzzle, and was originally made in 1994.)
The implementation of it is also poor. As ZZT can't do any free-form text parsing, players have to pick choices from a menu of "Is your switch the right one?", "Which switch is the right one?", "Think about it". The last of which causes Walter to ask the appropriate "What would the other one say if I asked them which switch is correct". Players still have to correctly relate the given answer at least.
A less annoying trap comes in the form of a dark maze with levers to pull to free key. At one point the walls change from solid to breakable which would seem like something players are intended to notice and shoot in order to actually proceed. Instead it's another gotcha where shooting any bullets causes a nearby object to throw a star in retaliation. You're supposed to just keep going, though you can tunnel through if you like, saving perhaps a dozen steps. It just seems like a mean-spirited inclusion.
But it's not as mean as the split path leading to the Sanctuary of Anubis. One of these paths has an invisible passage that has the player fall into a room with no escape, only some text that reads "Have a nice death!!" as the walls close in on Walter. Caspar was generally smart about not bothering with instant kills. Not one of the times he allows players to die instantly adds anything of value to the experience.
The Final Showdown
Many ZZT games fall apart towards the end with fatigued authors struggling to wrap things up nicely, either dragging things out or abruptly bringing things to a close. Caspar, meanwhile, is still ready to go.
His team may have the pages to banish Anubis forever, but to do so requires it be safe for them to be in the chamber and for the sceptre and staff of Anubis to be on the altar. The crew hides in a nearby room planning to let Walter deal with Omar, but plans rare go off without a hitch.
The sanctuary is guarded as well, with two large smiley statues giving way to reveal Anubial warriors first, and then another smiley statue letting loose a few asps. The asps are poisonous, and with no antidote on the board being bit is instead made instantly fatal, which is less than ideal, but this is a high stakes all-or-nothing finale after all.
Soon after they're defeated Omar arrives and begins the ritual, which surprises Walter as he believed the ritual required the pages. I guess he hadn't been paying that close attention to plot as it's been established already that the pages are needed to make Anubis impossible to banish, while merely summoning him back to this world can be done with just the artifacts.
Of course, Anubis needs a body to take as his own, but Omar is more than willing.
Rather than fighting Omar, the final boss is Anubis himself, with some wonderful special effects as Omar's body is taken from him. He becomes surrounded by a blue flame and little yellow sparks of energy crackle in the air around him until the transformation is complete.
The Anubis fight is pleasantly easy enough, with a flash of light when he's defeated by Walter and the dig team rushing in to perform the sealing.
To ensure this never happens again, the team use some explosives in this ancient cultural heritage point. (I swore it was specifically named as The Great Pyramid at one point, but that text doesn't seem to be anywhere.) A final cinematic plays out of them walking away from the pyramid, discussing how they're going to explain what they just did, realizing nobody would believe the truth.
Oh that Walter.
Final Thoughts
It's such a shame about the combat. Had Caspar stuck to the tried-and-true alternating character approach, or ditched melee combat entirely even, Walter's Quest could have easily been the best non-newly released ZZT game I played this year. Even with the rough combat, there's still so much praise to be given. Caspar has loaded the game up with a variety of enemies, once again avoiding the constant recycling of the obvious foes of mummies, bats, and rats. There are a good twenty or more enemies in the game, with quite a few standing out from the rest.
The ninjas were the first to amaze me, as when a bullet is detected on screen they all take action to shift out of the way of any bullets, and are frequently found on boards that restrict the number of shots on screen. This makes them quite difficult to land a hit on, but they go down quickly if you can use walls to your advantage to keep them from dodging.
Other special foes include knights that raise and lower their shields to toggle vulnerability to bullets. Scorpions have their poison. The skeletons require the enchanted sword. Scarabs move erratically, but ditch the melee hit/miss system with Walter squashing them on the spot every time.
It's some incredible work that I've only seen surpassed in Evilstania. If only fighting these creatures was as fun as figuring them out.
Despite the flaws, later on Walter will have sufficient ammo to shoot most enemies, and in those moments you can see the game at its best, and it's really something else. I'm saddened by the fact this game sat unnoticed for so long. A 2005 release is right around the cusp of the ZZT community beginning it's slumber before its more modern day revival. Caspar's earlier Rotten Robots was able to get a MadTom's Pick award, receiving accolades with an asterisk as it was just one of three games eligible for the award. (And one of those other two was also by Caspar!) This game is his glow-up, a great example of what ZZT still had to offer at a time when running the program was becoming a real challenge.
The combat, vampire and otherwise, keeps me from recommending this to beginners, yet for those well aware of how to use the cheat prompt and in the habit of saving regularly, Walter's Quest is an absolute must play. It's a roller coaster of excitement from start to finish, that exemplifies the very best of what traditional run-and-gun gameplay in ZZT can do. Just don't be surprised if you need to break out the health cheat along the way.
