♦ Livestream of the ZZT world "Caves of ZZT" by Tim Sweeney (1991) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/zzt/]. ♦
Celebrating ZZT's 33rd birthday with a playthrough of one of the game's original worlds. This year, the winner was Caves which actually managed to tie with Dungeons. Caves has the benefit of not having that dreadful long distance shooting gallery board that makes its trivial to soft-lock the game so I opted to just go for Caves instead of doing a tie breaker.
Caves is fun! Viewers noted that the game is quite musical, with a ton of sound effects and short jingles compared to the other worlds in the series. It also a number of memorable moments in its writing, from the legendary hot dog stand outside the gates of hell to the fight with the devil himself. The world is open-ended like the rest, with a snag in the form of a red key needing to be found before accessing one of the paths.
This key can be grabbed by just stumbling across it in the caves, but if you're me, it can take some time to do the requisite stumbling, leading to some awkward moments trying to figure out if I accidentally missed a board exit somewhere.
The action is reasonable enough, with a gauntlet of bears in a strange rainbow hallway standing out for its weirdness. However the main cave system also has a rather challenging sequence that combines tigers and ricochets and makes it quite easy to lose a lot of health. So much so, that it's one of the only times in the original series where health items are distributed, blaring Town's victory jingle every time one is touched. There are a few other good combat sequences such as the Devil's Quarters, where a mechanism slowly causes hordes of enemies to trickle into the rest of the board, acting a bit like a finite duplicator, as well as the northern forest that requires criss-crossing between two paths to grab keys to open up the way forward.
Its puzzles are fair and some of the series's most creative. You get a few basic combination locks including the incredible ZZT Sucker which are far tamer than Town's Rube Board for sure. "Oh No, Another Weird Puzzle!" introduces key management puzzles to players for the first time, and "Engineer Required" asks players to really stop and think about how they move boulders (and perhaps other items) around a board to block off some deadly spinning guns.
Caves is a bit of a mix of some of the most impressive boards in the original saga as well as quite a few screens that feel a bit like filler, but it's worth spelunking through them at least once for sure.
♦ Play this world directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/zzt/
♦ Originally streamed on January 14th, 2024 ♦
