Zyll

When I wrote guides at GameFAQs, I had this silly goal of writing one guide for each letter. Z was always going to be a toughie. I'd seen other Z games I liked (Hi, Zork,) but they had guides. But there was another four-letter game starting with Z that gradually pulled me over. But its map was huge! I got killed a lot! And the controls? Weird! I was used to parser games when everything was text. Zyll uses the F-keys, maybe being written in DOS. It all takes a bit of getting used to. Between that and the pauses as you walk between each room, I wound up putting Zyll off for a while. There were other Infocom text adventures to look through, and so forth.

Zyll's both very basic and very odd to me. It 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 may 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, the timed wait between rooms, and also for being on an IBM PC. Some of the ground wasn't worth breaking--to move, you push F1, then F2-8 for compass directions, F1 for up, and F7 for down. F10 works through minor commands like throwing or reading things. Fortunately all this is in a menu with ten items, and once you gain the spatial recognition to say, okay, F5 and F6 are in the third row and so forth, the awkwardness dissolves. It took me a few playthroughs, and it does take fewer keystrokes than typing. Zyll isn't as big on room or item descriptions as your average Infocom game, so you don't need to EXAMINE or whatever, and the only NPCs out there are for combat. Or fleeing. It's very mechanical.

And it's built so two people can share the keyboard to play competitively or cooperatively. Player 2 uses the numpad. This has its own traps, as 7 maps to F1, 8 to F2, and so forth. The rows don't quite line up. It feels like it should work somehow, but it doesn't. Zyll does its darndest to, though, highlighting commands you can use in green text. Maybe if there were more Zyll-likes, it would be more intuitive.

However, it's big enough so that walking around is intuitive well before the first time you get through. I spent quite a while writing out rough maps, wandering around as a Thief, whose main virtue was being able to flee. It turns out thieves are best by far for getting through Zyll, because combat is complex. I always meant to play as a warrior or wizard later, but I never did. Wizards have all sorts of neat spells which seem cool in theory, but being lazy, I didn't want one more command to remember. I was just glad to be able to bring the Orb of Zyll back to the Orb Room which, when you find three of the five big treasures, wins you the game. The Orb is super-heavy, so you can't carry any other items.

And that sort of makes thieves the dominant class--you can flee from anything, and if you're careful, you can pick off one item at a time. Slowly you tick off rooms that don't have them. But how many rooms are there? A lot! It took several play-throughs for me to discover ... yes, THAT room links THERE. Oh, I see how these rooms connect. It was a great a-ha moment for me when two big areas connected, something one wouldn't see in Infocom games, which tried to be economical with rooms and disk spaces. Zyll certainly isn't as vivid as a Zork. But it has all the elements of a fantasy adventure, without having to create a character party or deal with combats. There are boats for navigating underground caverns and random teleports, too, which play a certain role in two-player games. I had fun rolling the dice with them when still mapping out the full world.

Nonetheless the big drag for me was how you couldn't switch off the delay walking between rooms. In such a big game as Zyll, it added up, even when I cranked the DosBox speed up. (The timer is set to the system time.) It seems like there should be a secret code once you solve things, at least for single-player mode. After a few tries, I honed my strategy enough that I was able to win fairly quickly, maybe not getting all the treasures as a thief but enough to win. Zyll really only tracks points, but after a while, I didn't worry about maximizing that.

Zyll is an odd game, and I haven't found another like it, which is a shame, even if it's technical and dry. It develops a big expansive world, but by the time you're comfortable in it, and you know the rooms where the potions may randomly start, the delays are a bit tiring. It doesn't necessarily deserve immortality, but the process of discovery for me was quite fun. Just seeing a different layout of keys, from an age when one-key commands were random (remember Z for ZTATS in Ultima?) has a certain amount of appeal, and guess-the-verb is not a thing. However, the challenge and reward-for-time topped out quickly once I figured how to win as a thief. Warriors or Wizards just seemed too finicky. Nevertheless, I'm glad I pushed through to write a guide for it years ago, even if there is a better one now at CASA.