12 replies to this topic

[Moosh]

Oh snap, Moosh made a Hookshot quest again!
 
Link's Quest for the Hookshot Zero is a sequel quest to Link's Quest for the Hookshot 2, but it is not Link's Quest for the Hookshot 3. Are we confused yet? It's a sort of tribute to the first two quests with a few ideas from the oldest drafts of Hookshot 3 sprinkled in. Nothing too ambitious or to be taken seriously and mostly just a fun romp with bits of connective tissue tacking it onto LQftH2. I've made what's essentially a fanfic of my own quest after the original set of plans got so mangled and convoluted that even I couldn't keep track of them. I call it Hookshot Zero because it's a smaller scale quest; It's lesser than the first two quests. Hopefully you'll enjoy it nonetheless.
 
I can complete a full 100% playthrough in about two hours so I'd estimate the quest to be a 3-4 hour experience on a blind playthrough.
 


 
Get the download link here.
(Requires 3.0, prerelease 183 2026-05-09 or later)

Pour one out for Zarath who will yet again not be making an appearance. Man exists only to farm cameos.

[Haylee]

Played 2 dungeons tonight, only to realize it was 1 AM, and I had played so much other stuff today, oops.

 

This is a very familiar quest vibe, coupled with some insanely cool visuals, and mechanics and whatnot. It's honestly a bit on the brutal end, but it's otherwise a very fun quest so far. Looking forward to more!

[Haylee]

Completed! I enjoyed most of it. There's a lot of really cool technical stuff here, and some neat gameplay concept ideas at play here, and a number of bits gave me a moderate chuckle.

 

On the gameplay end, I really wish I didn't ultimately kind of nearly bounce off of the final hour or so. Apologies for the negativity, but I think trying to rationalize why this did not super land with me probably needs to like, be expressed.

 

Spoiler

So I did the crossover dungeon last, and as an unfortunate consequence of that, I fought airman last, and that boss was probably responsible for about 50% of my deaths, as after the initial bit of "haha can't beat airman" wore off, it becomes a puzzle boss with a solution that is both kind of rough to figure out, as well as hard to actually execute without immediately getting killed, since without the tunic from the shop (which I did not buy because money is actually kinda tight here), it became brutal enough that I ended up using the skip button.

 

IDK if my exhaustion from the airman fight just psyched me out for the rest of the playthrough, but the final dungeon unfortunately got really exhausting for me. Maybe I'm just really bad at fighting scripted enemies, but it did really start to wear on me by the end. The abundance of dark rooms also really did not help matters either. The final boss was fine though. and there was a bombable wall in the dungeon that actually did make me feel smart. It's also, unsurprisingly an incredibly visually striking dungeon that looks really good.

 

I really enjoyed the other 80% of the quest, though. The rest of the main dungeons were really cool, and even level 2, I felt rewarded trying to figure out, even if I kinda got filtered by missing a door at some point....

 

I'd still give this one a recommend for anybody looking for something on the harder side. It's a good quest, with some really excellent showcases of scripting and 3.0 stuff.

[Moosh]

Spoiler

Airman is one of those bosses that needed more time in the oven for his second phase but I cut development short because of contest stress. More than the difficulty though, I'm  bothered that he has a rogue bug that makes him actively kill himself without any input from the player. Like this boss hears the call of the void and immediately answers.

 

I'd be open to any suggestions for how to improve the fight but I think the easiest solution is probably just more waitframe. Similarly with Pentachoron, this was my second favorite dungeon in the quest and seems to be getting pretty universal negative reception despite a few nerf passes already. So something's gotta give there and I'd be open to any suggestions and feedback.

 

The final boss going over fairly well is not something I anticipated though. I expected players to hate her and even included the skip boss button pretty much just for her.

 

Overall sorry for using everyone as a public beta test here. I've got plenty of impressions of how people responded to some of my design intents and while a lot of it is rather unexpected it's still very helpful information.

[chocobothief12]

There is so much to say about this quest for me but I can't quite put it all into legible words at the moment.

for something done in such a short amount of time, there is plenty to do and see here. for me personally, it had a fine difficulty curve and most of the exploration, while tricky at times, felt fluid enough, with one exception being one of the major items being extremely hard to work with and not as consistent as i would have liked.

 

Dungeons were a bit difficult to find and get the quest up and running, and definitely required a bit of thought for the puzzles within, but the puzzles themselves were creative, even if a bit frustrating at times for me because of my overall lack of critical thinking skills. due to the music used for the bosses, I almost wish they would have lasted a bit longer, but the aggressiveness of each and the layouts of the rooms often lead to a frantic scramble to finish as quickly as possible, almost a dps race instead of an engaging fight. This is not a complaint about the bosses. I enjoyed them all. Especially the boss of the 6th dungeon, which overall ended up being the most surprising and wowing to me of them all as far as overall presentation goes. 

 

The music was nice. Secrets were full of ah ha moments with lots of thinking outside the box, and the overworld as a whole felt good to explore.

 

The quest isn't perfect by any means, but if given another week, it possibly could have been.

Thank you for the experience!

[Haylee]

I sat on this a little more when I wasn't completely drowsy, and I think I have much more constructive, cohesive thoughts on the final dungeon that I wanted to bring up!

 

Spoiler

Thinking about the structure itself from the inside in, I actually really like the way its formatted as a dungeon. The search for the 4 torches is a compelling gameplay loop, ostensibly acting as a key gauntlet where you're told in advance the exact amount of keys you need, which is generally what I feel makes a good key gauntlet. I appreciate that there's new and interesting challenges in each of the 4 possible directions to go in, and I think a lot of my pain playing last night came from a combination of exhaustion (It was about 1 am and I was quite tired.) and a lack of preparation.

 

The enemies act in a very off beat manner, in a way that pushes the envelope a bit with enemy design, though I was definitely not mentally prepared to face them. You've got the diamond enemies that split randomly. The mini wind robes with projectiles that are easy enough to avoid, but due to how small they are, are very hard to see, making them a lot harder to telegraph. What I really didn't expect to mess me up as hard as they did as well are the armos that push you around as well. Those in tandem with the wind robes are definitely a killer at times.

 

The central room with the invisible ice is at first kinda scary, but it actually did grow on me after a while because traversing the room becomes a breeze once you understand the interaction between the roc's cape and the ice, especially if you can memorize the ice before it disappears. Thankfully, they're actually in pretty simple places and easy to remember. There's a number of small tricks in the dungeon as well that make it very rewarding to figure out, such as an incredibly cleverly placed bombable wall (bless spacebar map), or a puzzle where you need to push a bunch of buttons, and the solution is to cane of somaria one of the buttons so it's pressed instantly. There's some very clever stuff here!

 

I think most of the frustration kinda comes from jank stuff more than the difficulty. It's the final dungeon, so it being hard is to be expected, though I think it's mostly small stuff like platforming being kind of jank at times (The one with the moving blocks can be particularly brutal), but also there's a couple segments where you need to make a cane platform, and the box for landing on the platform is just slightly bigger than the platform, but too short to perfectly walk on it sometimes, making those segments kind of awkward to traverse sometimes. That coupled with the damage numbers if you're unprepared can definitely make this a bit more frustrating than it could be.

 

It really is a dungeon that with some slight nudging of dials can be propelled into something really sick as hell. I'm realizing upon reflection this is actually a very cool dungeon.

 

So yeah, just a fun little writeup I wanted to do on the final dungeon, because I'm realizing I did kind of treat it a bit poorly.

[Mani Kanina]

I liked it, outside of some misc things here and there. More thoughts to come with the judging.

[Twilight Knight]

I played and enjoyed this mini-quest a lot. Unfortunately I'm stuck in a particular dungeon, but I think I played through like 75% of this quest (after 5-6 hours playtime). The puzzles are the strongest part of this quest, I'm amazed how you managed to do that in such a short time.

 

I will submit a full review to Mani Kanina once I've played every entry, but I did record my playthrough for YT: https://www.youtube....UHyZEiZbOlumPQB

[Deedee]

I played and enjoyed this mini-quest a lot. Unfortunately I'm stuck in a particular dungeon, but I think I played through like 75% of this quest (after 5-6 hours playtime). The puzzles are the strongest part of this quest, I'm amazed how you managed to do that in such a short time.

 

I will submit a full review to Mani Kanina once I've played every entry, but I did record my playthrough for YT: https://www.youtube....UHyZEiZbOlumPQB

The cape controls are a bit of a learning curve; it is biased towards whichever of the 8 directions you started the jump with, and then allows a bit of leniency in whatever direction you're holding. For the jumps you were struggling with, try jumping straight forward (straight up or straight down) and the holding left or right after you've pulled out the cape. There are safer rooms to practice the movement in to get the hang of it.

I'll give my own thoughts on this later (sorry to Moosh if you saw a new reply from Deedee and thought it was me giving my thoughts), I played the quest in testing and I need to stop messing around doing speedrunning stuff and give it a full replay in it's finished state to get my thoughts.

[Russ]

I know I shared a lot of thoughts already, but here's some attempt at organizing them on the page.

 

I like the quest overall, but it's some what of a mixed bag in some places. In a lot of ways, I feel like it's the kind of quest that is better in hindsight than in the midst of things.

 

The overworld is cool but definitely very cryptic. Has kind of a Zelda 1 feel to it even though it leans on entirely different mechanics for hiding secrets than Z1 does. I'm generally okay with it, but I wish it were slightly less cryptic in one or two spots. Not sure how to tone down the difficulty a little without making it too obvious though. 

 

Dungeons were neat for the most part. Level 1 was kinda just there, but it works. Level 6 (what is game progression?) was simple but a blast with the mechanic. Level 2 was fun, though had one or two annoyances. Level 3 was perfect, no notes. I especially love how bringing in Level 4's item lets you explore it differently but also doesn't completely trivialize it. Level 4... man. I want to like this dungeon, but I ended up coming away very negative on it. I think most of that boils down to the jumping in sideview just feeling kinda awful. Probably fixable, but man does it bring down the experience.

 

Then special shoutouts to Level 5. 10/10 dungeon. My only real gripe was with that one switch in that one room, but even then it's skippable. I know most players seemed to bounce off it, but it was legitimately the high point of the entire quest for me.

 

I do wish the final boss had a second phase, but given the timeframe the quest was built in, I'm kind of amazed we got as much contest as we did. Lack of a second phase was literally the only thing that felt "incomplete", and even then, that's only because I know you well enough to know you wanted one.

 

The inventory was fun to play around with, even if a certain ability walks the line between awkward and busted. You made magic stream fun, and that alone is pretty impressive.

 

Story... man. I'm impressed you somehow revived all those ideas from 13 years ago and mostly made them work. 

 

All in all, it was pretty fun. I have some gripes, but it was my favorite entry of the contest despite them.

[Lejes]

Huh? No, retro quests are like Isle of the Winds and Hero of Dreams, right? Link's Quest for the Hookshot 2 is still pretty new...

I can't believe this quest was finished in three weeks. I refuse to believe it. Every Pure contest is understandably filled with demos and purposefully downsized scopes, but Moosh said no, I'm getting in the hyperbolic time chamber and training to defeat Cell. A supposedly four hour but really more like eight hour experience, this feels like a full, not half, sequel to Hookshot 2. The overworld exploration flows well, the secrets are fun to look for, but I don't really want to focus on functionality. This quest is actually just...beautiful? The music selection is on point, but I want to ramble about the visuals. The tilework, screen design, and palettes have an elevated-NES feel that still leave me dumbfounded at how much you can do with these old Zelda 1 tiles. And the backgrounds? Absurd. Dynamic rain, bramble patches that go on forever, parallax stormcloud layers. Even details like boss healthbars and spell animations get the full treatment. I also loved the gameplay twist introduced in level 6 (of this 5 dungeon quest). Something new and cool, and not just more of what people like about previous quests. I got the feeling this quest also had a lot of Hookshot 1 energy, but that's something I can only speculate about since I've never personally played that one. The dungeon design in this quest is very dungeon-item-centric like later Zelda games tended to be, but the puzzles had room to be more engaging and difficult since Moosh, unlike Nintendo, has no obligation to ensure literal 8 year olds can still finish the game. And so, my slander against the intelligence of children feels like the perfect segue to admitting that I probably wouldn't have finished this quest without some not-so-gentle nudging. After praising the item-centric puzzle design, I have to say I was considerably cooler on the other half of the quest's design philosophy: classic NES guess navigation, i.e. bomb walls. A big part of the issue is how far the quest goes to obscure it. Lavish, large room designs, complete with Z3 scrolling, instead of the classic, predictable, blocky Z1 grids. And what subtle room designs figuratively obscure, darkness literally does. This quest has a lot of it. An entire darkness themed dungeon, and several of the others use it extensively as well. Being asked to search for hidden clues in rooms I could not see felt like a mean joke? The quest does have a lantern but it doesn't but-thou-must force it on the player like LttP does. I don't want to say it negatively impacted my experience with the quest, with how extremely impressed I was by everything else, but...it kind of did. It feels strange to get this far into a review of a Moosh quest without saying anything about the bosses, but here it is: they're good. Moosh is really good at making short boss fights that are nonetheless engaging and intense. Not everything needs to be a five minute, 100 hit battle of wills that doesn't allow you to blink, you know?

 

If I had to give this quest a rating, I would say it's 0/1 lanterns (I did not find the lantern).

 

[Moosh]

I've said this a couple times but back during the 6th quest contest I ended up in an arms race with Russ to cook up the most foul bomb wall placements possible and somehow never got myself out of that headspace. Whoops.

[Erased Memory]

This is the only quest I didn't get through completely or crash on, given its sheer scope which is impressive.I enjoyed the first boss however and can tell Im going to have a lot of fun playing through it in the future. It definitely hands down was the best use of contest time, as a quest of this size is overkill for a contest like this. I got a few of the items, explored a bit. Looking forward to completing it one day.