♦ Livestream of the ZZT world "Svynar's 2nd Quest" by Lincoln Sayger, Tony Sayger (1999) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/tmcq2v10/]. ♦
Finishing the rest of Svynar's 2nd Quest, a sequel that went from not being as enjoyable as the previous game in the first half, to getting even worse in the second.
For ZZT games as a whole, this still isn't all that bad. There's the nasty bug with the door to get into the boss's lair of course, but the real issue is the late game tedium. The authors adore putting a dozen doors before any exits, and often collecting the keys to those doors requires collecting other keys to open a door to reach them! It gets pretty nasty, with many boards having all their enemies cleared by the time only a third of the keys necessary have been picked up. This is made worse by the keys being the same color requiring a dedicated trip each time.
Plenty of boards also suffer from finding fake walls or dealing with invisible ones. It's a shame, as at the same time, a lot of this stuff would be pretty good were it not being dragged down by the incredibly slow pace the game maintains until the end. There are a lot of cool visuals, and numerous boards where if the time spent on them was halved, I'd be praising them instead.
Then when you finally defeat the final boss, you get a very weird long walk across several boards to the start of the game with scrolls taunting you to stray from the path to find gems, torches, and other things you don't even need by this point. Doing so puts you on a board with no exits, forcing you to quit.
My hopes for the game were dashed, but you could definitely still have fun with it if you pace yourself rather than try to beat it in one or two play sessions. The ending suggests that a third game was in the works, but currently no copy has been found, nor evidence to even confirm that it was actually completed. After the first game had a few rough edges, I was looking forward to the sequel, expecting the quality to only go up. Now, after this second one, I still hope the third game can be found (if it exists), but I'd definitely want a break before picking up another one of these anytime soon.
♦ Stream Contents ♦
• (1:23:34) End of Ad Break 1
♦ Play this world directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/tmcq2v10/
♦ Originally streamed on August 6th, 2023 ♦
