♦ Livestream of the ZZT world "Peter's World 2: The Journey for Your Wife" by Tyler Johnston [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/petersw2/]. ♦
Sequels offer creators the chance to show how much their skills have improved from their previous release. Addressing the flaws and finding new ways to enhance a concept. ...But not everyone takes that opportunity.
Okay, to be fair, we have no clue when these games were made and it's not unheard of for new ZZTers to just immediately turn on the game-hose and create three games over the course of a week.
But Peter's World 2 continues in exactly the same way as the previous. An early hint of a story (your wife has been kidnapped and will be killed if not found quickly enough), followed by an arrival in a town with a lot of buildings and a sudden complete lack of indication of where to go or what to do. The passage errors are everpresent making even the game's more sensible locations challenging to wrap your head around. The key/door situation is somehow worse than before.
The code is... slightly more there. We're spared random key mash music due to objects not restarting properly. Sometimes the touch label is used rather than relying on scrolls or characters speaking the moment a board is entered, but this is very much more of the inscrutable same.
The haunted house is almost something though. There's a great board if you can manage to somehow come across it showing an overview of enemies inside including Dracula (a lion), "Sckeletons" (tigers), "Wearwolves" (bears), and creatures (sharks).
Also to the game's credit, you can indeed find your wife and rescue her. I still have no idea who took her or why, but we did manage to hit a proper YOU WIN screen before having to start breaking down random doors and arbitrarily teleporting to unseen boards. We just had like a third of game still unseen when it happened.
♦ Play this world directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/petersw2/
♦ Originally streamed on December 24th, 2023 ♦
