Tut's Tomb:SE

I normally don't write reviews on ZZT worlds, let alone older ones, but this one did something so egregious I had to speak up to warn any others who stumble upon this like I did.

The original Tut's tomb (packaged here) is a bog-standard ZZT adventure with pre-builts, keys, and the occasional (completely unbalanced) shooting.

The remake, and it's not marked anywhere, is an RPG. I already detest ZZT RPGs because turn-based combat typically boils down to "miss 90% of the time, die, reload, do the exact same thing, except win this time". This, however, does something I've not seen anywhere else, and it is jaw-droppingly atrocious.

The stronger attacks you unlock, naturally, have a higher chance to miss. And when you miss, and you will miss a lot, you -deal damage to yourself-. And it's not a small amount either. You also don't get any self-healing, at least not up to the point where I quit.

"So just use the basic attack." Problem is, monsters in this game infinitely spawn and respawn. And the giant spiders, an enemy you meet three rooms in, takes three hits to die, but the spawn rate is WAY too high for you to "properly" fight them and still get out of the room. The game wants you to wait for them to stop moving, then attack, and repeat (though sometimes even after they've stopped moving they'll attack regardless). So throwing yourself at them like a blitzkrieg is the only way through them. ...Which also means taking a lot of damage in the process.

Yeah, you could ?+Health and ?+Zap through everything, but what's even the point of playing this thing, then? This isn't exactly an art showcase. There's barely any plot. Music is taken from Jansen's worlds so it's nothing nobody's heard before. There's the occasional Egyptology trivia question. This game is really -only- offering the combat, and the combat is utterly horrific. That's the one thing this game built itself on and it's just plain bad.

Avoid.