Zyll

"Between Zork and ZZT in genre-ville, the dictionary, and real life!"

With all those Infocom games to get one-tenth through before I had to save up for the InvisiClues magic marker hint book, I missed Zyll along the way, many years ago. Zyll combines simple RPG and text adventure elements and does its own thing well without going breaking ground into either genre it flirts with. Modern players who pull this game down will find the most memorable feature to be the way the game makes them wait unnecessarily, but if there's someone else to play it with, whether cooperatively or in competition, it can be very entertaining. It's decidedly as ancient as its environs now, although at the time it was groundbreaking for its controls(those mysterious F1 through F10 keys,) timing, and also for being on an IBM PC. In fact you can even play with two players! Sadly this advance in text based work didn't quite have the same follow-up as when the Greeks decided to put more than one person in a play but it has enough not to lapse into a(clash of bronze cymbals, hollow boom of animal skin drum) Greek tragedy.

Yet despite being text based, the game requires no text input from the user. One player uses the F1-F10 keys to navigate through menus, and the other uses 0-9 on the number pad. They both can act in parallel in the world although there's no such thing as a turn; different actions take different times, which are all added into the game's big formula. There's a definite learning curve to figure out the most standard moves as leaving a room requires F1+another F-key but the big things(take, drop, attack) require one stroke. Some miscellaneous commands are lumped under 'other' and F10 is your ubiquitous 'more' key but the designers did give the thought to add color in this all text game; possible commands are marked in green text and not the plain white. You start out with a choice of character classes, items to take along, and the sort of game(one- or two-player, cooperative, or even the saved games which can start you pretty far along.)

While Infocom text adventure games had one basic engine behind them that was focused on complex language and a few important NPC's, Zyll pulled out the standard sort of items you generally find in a fantasy world without the complexity of plot or detailed interaction of an Infocom game, which often contained part of a puzzle or two in the box notes for good measure and because you could only fit so much on a 140K disk. With Zyll you just enter the caverns in your home land by your castle and rescue the four treasures of Zyll by bringing them back to the royal chamber. You can get bonus points and a different ending for bringing the Orb of Zyll back up, but it's so heavy to carry around(i.e. no other item with it) that this is no trivial task.

Generally as a single player you'll have to fight off monsters(rats, skeletons, a giant lizard and crazed dwarves) as you search for scrolls and valuable items(i.e. an urn, a painting, a brooch, a scepter) and slowly tick off rooms that don't have them.. Now many of the very valuable items stay in place from game to game; scrolls, however, move around. Most are unreadable but some will let you pick locks and so forth. There are also boats for navigating some underground caverns.

The randomization is particularly important in two-player games. You'll need to remember where the possible scroll locations are and hope that, in competitive mode, you find the right ones before your opponent does or, in cooperative mode, that you can each find the good spells quickly. In any case you can try different approaches to see what works best.

The one big problem with all this is the timing; yes, it's clever to have people take time to walk between locations. But it gets tiresome. Monsters can appear while people are waiting around and kill them--i.e. if you want to take a break, you can lose one of your two lives. Yet at the same time it's tough to run around and get back to where you were in a previous quest. There are corridors to walk down and dots to watch appear: ''you are walking down a corridor. . . .'' This is sometimes followed by the notification that there is a locked/closed door at the end of the corridor. Combat is similarly painstaking although in this case you also have little of how badly you're hurting the enemy. Unfortunately once you get past the basics, the game seems to be taking a considerable effort to make sure you're staying awake.

But much of the game is well planned out. It's split into nine definable room areas(well, the winding underground river cavern branching to hidden islands isn't much for rooms but it's a quality AREA) and has enough of the sort of non-reciprocal moves(i.e. go east and west and not return where you started) that the mapping is a fun challenge; there's even a crypt where I needed to drop items to track where I was and where I had to go. The areas are also cyclical; they may have dead ends, but no one is a dead end to itself, and this works well for the two-player methods, especially when you throw in the power of being able to lock doors to stop a competitor--there can be races to critical areas. The descriptions aren't really up to Infocom's, but often several similar rooms in a row force you to be very careful in your mapping efforts. I had to tear up a few sheets of paper in my efforts.

The game also has a scoring system based on how many places you've visited, vermin you've killed, and items you've returned to the royal chambers or are holding. The treasures are pretty obvious and you'll need to make several trips in, which can slow down the game a bit. But very few games even today give a running holistic score-tracking, which I'd really like to see more of.

So Zyll is a nice piece of work, but unfortunately without a map you wind up getting a bit confused, and with a map it is the computer equivalent of driving through rush hour traffic. You know where you need to go, but it can take a long while. It certainly has a lot of options and places to explore. Back in the 1 MHz days there was no problem with a lack of speed toggle but now once the expectation and wonder are gone, the slowdown is frustrating even with the impressive and revolutionary two-player option.

Exzyllerating
--2 player is fun even to imagine
--lots of places to explore
--plenty of tricks thrown at you

Zylly Z(w)yll
--interface not totally logical or smooth
--locations a bit stereotyped
--long delays

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 05/20/03, Updated 05/20/03