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This game's title is not messing around

  • Silviera
  • 04/01/2010 10:12 AM
  • 731 views
Zero's Impossible Fortress is a platformer that uses a few unusual mechanics. The game begins with a wonderfully intentional engrish intro where you are informed that you have to rescue a princess from some evil guy. Apparently he's getting sick of getting beaten senseless by the hero every few weeks so he decides that his next evil fortress will be completely impossible to navigate. Fortunately the hero manages to pick up a handy platform creation tool and is on his way to rescue the damsel in distress.

Basic gameplay is that you walk around and jump using the keyboard and draw platforms using your mouse. The first thing you need to do in each stage is pick up some ink and a pile of platforms, both of which come in limited supply. The platforms you pick up determine how many you can draw in the stage, while the supply of ink determines how big your platforms will be. Generally you have to be extremely conservative about how many platforms you draw, but you get a lot more freedom when it comes to the ink. You can draw platforms as small as two pixels or as large as your entire ink supply. If you're confident you can make an easy jump you can make a tiny platform and conserve your ink so that you can make much bigger platforms for the harder jumps in the level, or you can go with a balanced approach and generally make everything the same size.

On the left you see the first level as it originally appears. To the right you can see I've drawn several platforms that make it possible to clear.



As the title suggests this is a very difficult game. The first few stages serve as a tutorial of sorts, giving you a chance to practice drawing platforms without having to deal with overly complicated jumps or enemies, but it isn't long before things start to pick up. The first obstacle you'll run into are floating spikes that slide back and forth endlessly. Naturally they kill you in one hit. Game zones are divided into 8 stages, and you only begin with 4 lives to clear the entire zone. You can pick up extra lives along the way but generally they're in extremely risky areas and since getting hit by anything or falling in a pit is instant death for the most part you won't bother with them unless you're particularly used to clearing a specific stage. You can skip to any zone you've seen the first stage of from the title screen, but as far as stages go there are no checkpoints and if your lives hit zero it's back to stage 1. Each zone does have a secret stage hidden somewhere in it that is usually a lot harder than average but will instantly warp you to the next zone if you complete it, and for the most part this is the best way to unlock new areas.

The difficulty wastes no time in picking up.



Gameplay slowly evolves the further along you go. Aside from the jumps getting more complicated and obstacles becoming more numerous, you'll gain access to a variety of different platforms. Your basic platform is just stationary and naturally this is the easiest to use. Aside from that you can acquire platforms that will float left to right or up and down endlessly after you draw them. There are also falling platforms, which will begin dropping the instant you step on them until they fall off the stage. The final variant are bouncing platforms, which send you flying up into the air after you land on one. Generally a new platform type is introduced at the beginning of each zone and you'll be restricted entirely to that type for the majority of the zone. You will occasionally find other platform types and you can quickly switch before your stock with a simple right click of the mouse.

This level forces you to jump headfirst into a pit to pick up your platforms. You're expected to quickly draw one below yourself before you fall into the pit below.



Aside from the fact that each new platform type is usually harder to use than the last, the stages themselves slowly become more complicated. Frequently you start out without ink and platforms and will have to do a bit of jumping before you can even start working towards the exit. On top of that stages begin to throw weird twists such as the screen fading to black every few seconds making it harder to hit your target. Stages become progressively longer but within zones you'll occasionally encounter a mercifully short level though these tend to be fairly vicious as well. The worst stage I encountered involved platforms that vanish and reappear every few seconds, even starting you on one of these death traps.

Immediately after taking this screenshot the ground beneath my feet vanished and I plummeted to a horrible death.



I'm sad to say my adventure ended on this stage. I was unable to complete the game. From what I can gather I had made it about 3/4 through the game before this stage stopped me dead. It is the longest stage I encountered and it gives you absolutely no time to rest between jumps. Since the platforms are constantly vanishing and the platforms available to draw are of the moving and falling variety, you basically have to make a beeline from one side to the next drawing platforms under yourself with each jump without missing a beat. You'll run into walls that phase in and out of existence and even have to be careful about the timing of when you draw your platforms, and as the stage progresses you'll have to dodge quite a bit of spiky death while dealing with all of the above. I made it exceedingly far into this stage but never managed to get a glimpse of the exit. I will note that this was a secret stage and completing it would have sent me to the final world. I could have tried avoiding this path entirely and attempted to finish zone 3 normally, but after investing so much time trying to clear this one stage the game had made it personal. I'll probably get back to this in a month or so but for now I hang my hat up in shame.

My personal failings aside, this game basically only had two noticeable flaws. The first is that your jumping height is kind of inconsistent at times. You seem to have some sort of base jumping height but at times you'll jump far higher than normal and despite playing this for a good 6 hours or so I was never able to pinpoint just exactly what it was that increased my jump height. Usually making a running jump seemed to result in a higher jump than normal, but this was not always consistent. Sometimes hopping between platforms I drew also caused my to leap much higher than normal, but again this was not completely consistent. Since the game contains a few jumps that you just barely miss at your base height combined with the fact that smacking your head on a ceiling or a spiky ball of death can mess things up for you, if you don't manage to pin it down it will be a source of a lot of deaths. The second issue is a far more specific annoyance involving the platforms that move from left to right. For everything else in the game your character will basically lock down on to a platform as long as you have some part of the sprite connected to its edge. When it comes to the moving platforms though hitting the edge will cause you to land briefly before being thrown off to your death. Since those platforms are always the hardest to land on this issue tends to cause a lot of unexpected deaths.

I also kind of felt this game didn't really need to have a lives system, but this is a bit more subjective. The zones are quite long and it's really annoying to have to repeat the same few stages over and over just to get to the one you're stuck on. This is especially frustrating since getting hit by anything at all is instant death so missing some minor jump early on will come back to bite you when you're just getting into a routine to solve the new obstacle to your progress and you're sent hurtling back to stage 1. After a while I ended up just throwing myself into a gorge until I ran out of lives if I made some mistake in the early stages of a zone.

In summary, despite the high difficulty curve this is a game well worth checking out. It's a bit more inventive than your average platformer and the gameplay mechanics are extremely solid. Although the difficulty curve is very high it's also very steady, after a few hours of practice you'll tear through areas that gave you trouble with no problems at all. Even if you don't manage to make it to the end you'll probably have a lot of fun in just the early areas.