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TheAnimalHybrid

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A member registered Jul 14, 2024

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Lovely game. Fitting plesant music, mostly beautiful backgrounds (the secret tower level could use some extra decorations - windows, torches paintings maybe?) and easy to learn controls.

I do also like there being a different ending for those that like a bit of challenge in going through the "secret" level. 
The tower was also nice that it had a different gameplay feeling than the other levels (from my perspective ofcourse) in that it felt more of a puzzle game than platformer, having to carefully plan when and when not to jump, which platforms to avoid as a basically death traps etc. Took me a few hours before I managed to beat it (partly some of it was my fault like forgetting to not jump in a section where jumping basically puts you into losing position).

Still, I pesonally enjoyed it and wish you luck in your future projects.

I don't know if anyone will read this but here are some thoughts after playing this game.

Gameplay is a nice mixture of action and puzzle solving. Puzzles are mostly straightforward. You don't have to worry about ammunition an health when you move to next sector as those replenish. And you can save whenever (and you should as there aren't any automatic checkpoints).

Graphically, main part of the game is simple but quite easy to understand text graphics. Images in the cutscene parts are quite well done but not really anythinx extra memorable.

The controls are simple and easy to understand, there are two instances that could use improvement. First one is running. While most of the time starting to run after a little pause is ok, there are a few places where you would benefit from a key combination to start running instantly (a few times you have to run past bouncing bullets and the boss in beta sector comes to mind).

Now the second issue with controls is in the menu of the game. I guess it's a limitation of the used engine but the way you have to firt press P to start the game and then use your game avatar to move on the menu spot to start the actual game is rather counterintuitive. I'm not familiar with other games in ZZT but trying to figure this the first time made me a bit confused.

******** POSSIBLE STORY SPOLERS BELOW ********

Now the story is ok but nothing groundbreaking. You only have a brief chats with the characters you rescue so there isn't much to expand on them. The main character doesn't have any personaly connection to any of this, they're here on a mission. But through conversations we get background story on the main villain. A person that is unable to change his shape when its completly normal for others to do so and others don't see him as interesting enough to care about him. Who then gets their wanted attention from a hateful group from which they adopt the hateful views (I played it with the content filter off so I don't know how much changes when it's on)

Now from my personal opinion, when you have a task to figure out the identity of an unknown attacker, I would expect either a list of several people that would eventually shrink down just to one or some plot twist where everything points to this one person but then you find out someone was actually just acting as him to not raise suspicion to himself. The way it was done in the game where just about everyone pointed only to this one person just about from the beginning of the game to the end and revealing that it was this person... I found that a little bit dissapointing. But on the other hand I personally liked that you could see from the conversations with other characters how they ended up the way they did and left you thinking if things were just a bit different for them, this would never happen. However the way they were portrayed felt like they were trying so hard to be as evil as they can, I'm almost surprised they didn't speak in a german-english kind of "Guten tag, hacker! What a good dungeon I build for you, ja?"

Now for the worldbuilding... In secret areas in the game we have journals with description of utopistic society with magical fix-it-all in the form of "mutagia". Nothing wrong with that if you want to focus on a story in a specific setting and this is just simple explanation how the setting came to be. But I still have a few things to be nitpicky about.

First are the time scales. They seem rather large. YEAR 5000PH. PH being the year of the transformation of last human, which was apparently sometime in 25th century so it would set it around 75th century. And just then are brain scanning virtual reaily helmets starting to be a thing. Some groups are still captured by the idea of what once was humanity. And still after this time there are followers of by then old hateful ideology. Just for comparision, that would be as if some groups of todays people would want to return to using bronze tools and live according to the way the first egyptians did. There are just so many generations for things to change to something else or completly fade to obscurity.

Second I found it a bit strange that you have a time where all people changed and then suddently centuries after you suddently have people that are more or less immune to changes by mutagia? Kinda strikes me as incosistent as to why they weren't any before.

And thirdly I'm curious about the ability for everyone to change their form. It's only mentioned as its nothing cruicial for the story of this game. It's taken as a natural thing when they can change to one form for their work and to another in their free time. I'm curious about certain workings. Mainly how do you identify a certain person correctly? When the limit is just by mass one could change into one form, do some crime, then change to completly different one to avoid being identified. Another thing related to that would be impresionation of someone. Say someone is envious about another one of their life/position/etc., so they train to shape to look like that person, get rid of them and take their place to live their life. And simmilar to that I would expect a nuber of people looking very much alike when they try to imitate whatever character is currently trending in media of that time (there kinda was avatar of Poseidon in this game that could be a person that would fall under this category).


Overally its was a fun little game I don't regret spending my time on.

As the author stated that they plan to revisit this setting I can only wish them the best of success in the future and be curious if they take anything from my comment.

Sorry if this kinda ends up being wall of text. I had things I wanted to get off my mind and I'm not the best of writers. I can only hope even with all the text I've written, people will understand as I intended it to be understood.