Two-Week Contest Review #9
Return to Zorkda by dcsyxx
This quest plays similarly to tLoZ: You start in an overworld and you battle your way through dungeons to save Zelda in the end. However, there is an interesting gimmick that runs throughout the quest that you will discover very soon! 
Gameplay
This quest starts you off in the overworld, in this screen to be exact:
Beautiful screen, no?
The overworld in this quest is nicely made and also rather large, which is good. In this quest, there is a decent number of exploration that you have to do to get items required or even find second entrances to dungeons, which I thought was really creative and cool! The overworld can somewhat be divided into some sections: a town, and then a forest; that's all I could think of for the majority of the areas. Anyways, you only have access to the town at first until you are able to escape by going through some dungeons. Before we get to that, let's talk about how the gameplay is with the gimmick that I noted earlier.
Here it is (and you can figure it out from the description of the quest): There are more than 20 ways to die in the game! Literally! The first one I found was going of the edge of the screen by going left on the first screen. That was rather unexpected. You can die from anything by drowning, getting killed by certain animals or bugs, and killing the town villagers. It's actually a really neat and creative concept that I'm sure that no other quest has featured until now. Very creative, I can give you that! Here's a screenshot of one of the possible deaths:
I didn't know, gosh!
However, there is a little problem with it: When you die, you get transported to the first screen, so backtracking became a very annoying problem in the game. The only thing that improves this is that in the dungeons there are switches that can open shortcuts to get to places quicker if you die. But at the point in the game where you reach the overworld part that is rather far, it is actually really annoying to walk all the way back there, only to be surprised by another death once you move on. An easy way (I think) you could've used to fix this is to make checkpoints where you respawn to if you die. I don't think it would be hard to implement as it was used in Vault of Souls.
Anyway, now on to the dungeons: they are GIGANTIC mazes! But well talk more about that in the design attention part of the review. The dungeons were fun to play through since you had to use different entrances to get to certain places to press switches, and go back to the regular entrance and get the item that you need. It was really creative to do this, in my opinion. Very nice!
Anyways, on to the difficulty: This quest isn't really that difficult, but it isn't that easy either, so it's balanced, which I really liked. There was clearly good attention to making sure the game wasn't too hard or too easy, so that's the good thing! Since that's all that I need to say here about the difficulty, let's move on.
Last section: Puzzles! Yay! Again, like almost all of the quests in the contest, there are no puzzles! I don't if it is just me, but I think they are good to have in quests in order to slow down the player without shutters, even though this quest didn't have any (yay! ). So I'll leave it at that.
Story
This quest doesn't have a story; just beat Ganon and find Zelda.
Design Attention
The screen design of this quest is very decent, and I really liked it. Congrats on that. The tileset is EZGBZ 2.5, and I think it is used nicely! Also, there are no screen design bugs that I could see, so that is very good! 
Now for the screenshots that you have all been waiting for:
Nice screen design. Good job!
Now on to the dungeon design. Like I said earlier, the dungeons are like pure mazes! Find secret entrances to be able to turn on switches to be able to move on. I really liked it! Good thing he let the map be able to be used in the dungeons or else I'd have a hard time remembering where everything is! Very happy about the dungeon design, and very impressed. Great job!
Music
This quest has some really nice music, and they are enjoyable. However, especially in the Village Cave, the sound is SO LOUD! Turn it down, please! I could barely hear the sound of my sword (or bean?) swinging! The other dungeons were better in terms of loudness, so that's good. Again, the music is good and fits the themes really nicely, I think.
Concluding Thoughts/Summary
This quest is very nicely made and designed, and has a really interesting death gimmick, that while can get annoying due to backtracking, is really creative.
Strengths
- Nicely made and design overworld
- Large overworld for given time (2 weeks)
- Really interesting and creative death gimmick
- Creatively designed maze dungeons with more than 1 entrance
- Average and fair difficulty
- Nice screen design
- Great music choices
Weaknesses
- Backtracking due to death gimmick that gets really annoying
- No puzzles
- Music can get VERY loud and dies out the SFXs
Rating: 7.8/10 (Good)
Database Rating: 4/5 (Good)
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