Closer Look: Pop

All in all, while providing more information on your quest, the cafeteria offers nothing to the player to help them actually complete it. Though, by entering the tower the player did pick up that bottle of oil which can be put to use immediately.

Running all the way back to the guava groves, coating the branch with oil, and then attempting to pick the mushroom again causes the hûdû to slip and crash on the ground.

This time the player gets to keep the mushroom, and with the hûdû incapacitated, the player can climb to the top of the tree for a stick.

With the branch you can fill one of the two notches on the ya'yono vekka, though what this does isn't made apparent to the player right away. Being able to do this to begin with is hinted at in one of jenner's diary entries where they mention getting their walking stick stuck in one of the globes.

Back inside the tower, the effects of filling a globe are made apparent as one of the doors blocking further passage disappears.

The path winds a bit, without a whole lot to interact with. The sign by the blue passage is written in izanuoylrak'ian, only saying "uroos maluroos". If you go all the way back to the diary pages found in the library, you'll be told that this translates to "the murderers". Naturally, the player should go inside.

On entering the murder room, a group of people are seated around a dining table and polite request you to bring the soup and enjoy a meal with them.

The player can't actually take the soup until it's been properly flavored. The puzzle is kind of arbitrary since it explicitly tells you to add a mushroom to the soup, and in order to be able to access this room to begin with the player has to have already gotten the branch from the guava groves, and if the player can get the branch, they can get the mushroom as well.

Murder count: 4

With the murdered dead, it's time to figure out why they died.

Unsurprisingly, it's because of the random mushroom you decided to add to their soup. Don't add random wild mushrooms to soup! Though, it paid off in this case what with the room being full of murderers who intended to poison the player's centipede dinner. Inspecting one of the murderers does net you a knife, which will pretty logically allow the player to cut them a mango and get their dictionary finally.

It's impossible to be killed by the murderers since you aren't allowed to pick up the soup without putting the mushroom into it. Also if you have the dictionary you can use it on the sign to reveal that it's full of murderers, but since you need to solve this room's puzzle before being able to get the dictionary it's a bit moot by that point.

Next up on the path is a bouncing booger.

Here the tower opens up, offering three new paths to take in the second checkerboard room. This room has a large fountain of water in the center of it.

Conveniently, bathrooms for numerous species from several dimensions can all be boiled down into male/female. I opt to explore the men's room first.

Inside the restroom are various urinals intended for the different creatures residing in the lavender tower. The stall contains a roll of toilet paper, and er...

A white cabbage that is named toilet, but will never have its name shown in the game itself since its messages are one-liners and don't require a big text box.

Oh, there's also a dead guy who died while brushing his teeth.

You can also pick up a bar of soap here. You'll need it for the women's room, but there's no particular reason why it's not possible to do what you do there in here.

Moving to the women's bathroom, it's pretty similar, though lacking a corpse and it only has one urinal. Examining the women's room urinal results in the player wondering what strange creature could possibly need a urinal while also being a girl. ZZT games in 1998 created by early teenagers were not the most progressive in terms of gender representation.

There's also a whole mess of floss you can take.

Our puzzle here is to dissolve the soap in the water and obtain the glyph that was trapped inside. Think back to jenner's diary again, where they mentioned that they lost the glyph required to enter the lab while in the soap factory. See, it all makes sense. At least more sense than not being able to interact with the sink in the men's room at all. It would've been easy enough to put everything in one bathroom, and either make it unisex (which is probably a good idea when dealing with creatures from several dimensions) or just have the player character refuse to enter one of them. Though, I suppose the player is never gendered in this game! Who's to say which bathroom they should to using?

Bathrooms aside, the balconies takes us to the lower area seen early on in the game where the only thing to interact with is a post.

This sort of marks the moment where a lot of the game's puzzles and solutions are right next to each other.

Talking to this individual gives you some information on the area up ahead having a reazle infestation, and reminds you about their love of shiny things, which can also be found by reading one of the books in the library

Sure enough, the next room is full of reazles. Tucan was nice enough to stop the player from getting themselves killed, and you're blocked by an invisible object until you find something to deal with the reazles. This is a good a time as any to do some cleanup on the boards which have bene visited before.

Heading back to the main path, it's possible to cut down the shrubbery with the assassin's knife and pick up a gold coin.

Unsurprisingly, it can also be used to cut the mango from the tree. The obvious thing to do is give it to the librarian right away, but it also serves a second purpose here.

Investigating the area near the arrow lets you interact with the frog. You can then lure it over and skin it for its poisonous hide.

This puzzle isn't the best. If you try to turn in the mango before getting the frog skin the game won't let you. The books in the library mention the frogs loving mangoes, but it would work just as well if the frog didn't need to be lured since you still need the knife to begin with to get its skin. If the player doesn't remember the connection between frogs and mangoes, they can easily find themselves arbitrarily unable to solve the dictionary puzzle.

Once the player has the frog skin, they're free to give away the mango and get their dictionary. I like how the dark cyan book actually vanishes when you take the dictionary off the shelf.

Now's also the time to move the stick and explore the other passageway in the tower.

After a several boards long trip, the right side passage in the tower takes the player to this green room.

There's not a whole lot to do here. The tubular object can be adjusted, but doesn't do anything. The guard prevents the player from going to the clearly marked exit, and then there's the guy that says fifty things.

Remember those 8 gems for the secret ending? Here's one of them. Just talk to this guy until he runs out of things to say! It's tedious! One of his lines mentions being worried about hitting the 32 KB limit. Since this game predates external editors, there's no way to find out how large your board is unless you export it to its own file. To make matters worse, though ZZT's file format will support a 32 KB board, in practice ZZT has issues with boards at around 20 KB. There's no real exact size threshold to avoid crossing, but 20 KB became the mark to keep things under. If you go beyond this limit, you'll increase the chances of your board being corrupted when saving, or objects having their code randomly deleted. Lots of work has been lost this way.

With that, the player's seen everything they can prior to passing through the reazle caves. It's time to head back there.