Where can I get Yapok-Sundria?

Yapok-Sundria is available on z2 as well as playable in browser via Archive.org.
You can also explore the world yourself on the Museum of ZZT Public Beta.

Yapok-Sundria

Yapok-Sundria Starring Louis the Hispid Cotton Rat is one of those ZZT worlds where I had heard the name countless times, but not once actually played it myself. It's the only title released by Yapok Jr and had to have had some impact or legacy, or maybe it's just a fun name to say.

The game was released in 1995, which seems to be right in the middle of a turning point for ZZT. Alexis Janson had released Super Tool Kit, giving ZZTers reasonable access to special colors, and so Sundria (let's just call the game Sundria and the author Yapok to prevent confusion) benefits from nicer graphics than early ZZT worlds. At the same time, ZZT's full graphical potential hadn't really been realized, so you'll find trees with brown trunks, but no complex shading.

Gameplay is at a crossroads as well. The early days of Town knockoffs and generic fantasy being phased out for a more surreal and whimsical world with oddball humor. Shooting lions and solving slider puzzles are giving way for a game which tells a story with characters who are more than props to guide the player through puzzles. Sundria is an adventure game about exploring the world and seeing what strange creatures live in it.

The title screen is just some blocky colors and flashing color line walls covering the screen's edges. There's no insight as to what the game is about, just a title and who you'll be taking the role of while playing.

Sundria begins with Louis's alarm clock in his tree home going off and getting ready to start his day with some coffee. The player is immediately presented with a choice of which mug to drink from.

Choosing wrong results in an additional message about drinking grease instead, but with no penalty suffered as the other correct cup is drank immediately afterwards.

With the message window closed, the player gets a look at Louis's tree house home. The game benefits from its access to browns and dark reds, but still comes off as a very primitive looking home. A table made out of normal walls, and a slider to represent a chair come off as very crude representations.

There's a bathroom to the right, but that's really only established by being the smallest room in the house and being mostly white. The front-most room has a yellow solid surrounded by some purple breakables which I can give no definitive meaning to. Perhaps it's a carpet that the player is unable to walk on?

I of course head straight for the bathroom, and confirm the upper object as a toilet.

The toilet of course has an eject button which leads to a secret passageway. Sundria likes its slapstick.

A more modern ZZT game might have had an object push the player into the secret passage to represent being launched, but Sundria just has the toilet object disappear and lets the player walk into the fake wall or not at their leisure.

Following the secret path gives the player some equipment including torches which will become essential later on.

Washing your hands scores the player a towel. Whether or not picking up a towel counts as a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference is an exercise left up to the reader.

That's all there is to see in Louis's home, so it's time to head outside. There's something about mid 90s ZZT games where they love to not give the player any motivation from the onset. Anywhere the player goes is solely because the person behind the keyboard picked that direction. Louis himself has no goals yet.

Sundria also likes text labels. In later years this sort of thing would be frowned upon for breaking "show, don't tell". Of course, I don't know how one would indicate that this tree is a "bee fly ptarmigan" tree. The signs for the rubbish heap and possum gardens do have little stumps to make them appear less as text written on a board and more as signs within the world itself so there is some attempt to keep things within the world itself.

The first place I opted to explore was the Pocket Gopher's Burrow. It was a dark room and torches were lit.

The red object in the corner is a grub.

Don't eat the grub.

The other options are safe. Actually, so is eating the grub due to an accidental space in the #endgame command causing the game keep going. The grub exists solely as something for the player to interact with.

The gopher is trying to find the meaning of life, and if you request that they stop, you'll be killed instantly. There are quite a lot of instant game overs in Sundria, but generally they're all mitigated by saving before touching objects. It's not exactly good design, but it's easy to avoid losing progress by being proactive.

That's all there is to the Pocket Gopher's Burrow. Upon returning to the surface I headed west towards the rubbish heap.

There's a hovel along the way. I'm not quite sure what's going on with the front facing wall, but the rest of the building is very well made for how few elements are used to construct it. The sky seems to have gone missing here as well with a solid black background instead. Perhaps the cyan roof would have blended in too much with the blue sky seen earlier.

The hag's hovel is again very abstract with furniture made out of angular walls. She has a lot of advice to offer Louis, some of which is completely meaningless, and some of which is crucial information. There's no easy way to tell.

The fireplace contains some meatloaf. Rotten meatloaf which gives the player a single unit of ammo. Don't waste it!

With the hovel explored, it's back to the western path towards the rubbish heap.

Or perhaps not. We'll come back here later and instead head to the eastern possum gardens.

The possum gardens consist of vicious doilies, and a smattering of green plantlife to serve as obstacles for the player to get around.

Opening the gate causes them to spring to life and begin trying to move towards the player. With some clever juking it's possible to get past them safely. Of course, what I didn't realize is that this is supposed to be where you use the meatloaf acquired from the hag's hovel.

Shooting one of them causes them all to disappear allowing safe travel. I just made my life difficult for no reason.

Across the winding river is the Possum Garden, which is of course populated by some possums. It's really difficult to tell what anything here is supposed to be.

The correct choice is to tuck them into your armpits. This will be useful in the rubbish heap according to the hag's advice from earlier.

Singing with the possums results in some fun times until your mother finds out about all the awful things you've been singing.

And if you share your meatloaf...

Another game over!

Again, the correct choice is the armpits, and with those possums tucked safely within it's time to head all the way back the rubbish heap.

Crossing back past the doilies that haven't been defeated is a lot harder than making the first trip. I of course immediately recognized the swearing as being from a Calvin and Hobbes strip.

Back in the rubbish heap, armed with possums this time, its possible to get past the tentacle and make your way to Ptarmigan Bluffs.

The walls on this board are blinking between bright and dark green, and my initial assumption was that this was deliberate. Blinking colors were never used too much in ZZT games, but as a way of signifying radiation was probably one of a few uses you would see, so I didn't think anything was too out of the ordinary here.

Once past the tentacle, there's no other danger to be found, and it's a walk directly to the mountains.

The player has to make a _very_ long climb up the mountain. They wrap around four sides before returning to the first side at a higher level. It is incredibly tedious.

Eventually the player will reach the third level with something blocking the path.

You have to pay the toll troll.

The billy goat gruff options all result in the player being killed. This troll doesn't care about the size of goats.

If you say you're the third goat, you get your imaginary goat horns cut off before being devoured.

Tell him that you're Barney the dinosaur and you won't be killed, but you won't make progress either.

That classic IRS humor. I was surprised with the way this board was designed that him jumping to his demise didn't play any animation, he just #dies in place and the player can proceed.

With the peak of the mountain in sight the player's long climb is almost at an end. At the top of the mountain lives Bee Fly Ptarmigan, who is basically the player's goal for the game's first act.

"Then get some!"

And with that, after the first third of the game has been completed, the player finally has a goal to accomplish of finding some knickerbockers for the ptarmigan.

Unfortunately the player still has to climb all the way back down the mountain again...

It's not readily apparent where the player needs to go at this point, but pretty straightforward to go left to right searching. Sundria also includes a text file containing a basic walkthrough for the game, so the player has no reason to get stuck for long. Here, the next place to go is a second trip to the pocket gopher's burrow.

The gopher burrows a tunnel to the center of the earth, which is obviously Louis's next location.

This board caught me off guard. I didn't recognize it as a cutscene, instead thinking the object was supposed to be the gofer at first. I think this is the first cutscene board I've ever seen in ZZT where the player gets to it by moving from one board to the next rather than taking a passage. Similarly, the player not being in one of the board's corners for the cutscene is also a bit unusual, though not completely unheard of. The cutscene doesn't begin until the player touch the boulder object blocking the passage, adding to the confusion.

If the player didn't pick up the wet towel in Louis's house they'll be killed here due to the heat.

A scroll welcomes Louis to the center of the earth, the hub for the rest of the game. Here things get a bit more traditionally ZZT with a quest to travel to four areas, obtain a key, and unlock some central doors, which in this case lead to the castle of the aardvarks.

The gems that make up the text flash different colors, and the walks in the center of the board use blinking colors. The blinking walls in the rubbish heap could be explained as toxic waste, and I suppose the walls here could be claimed to be magma, but I was beginning to get pretty suspicious about these blinking walls and whether or not they were intended to be blinking.

Like Town, the player is given free reign of which path they'd like to take first. The passage I happened to reach first led to Yamane Desert. Each area has a sort of introduction board like this one, with pushers to push the player towards the next board whether they want to move on or not.

Pushers can't actually push a player off screen, so there's still some manual input required. Later ZZT games that wanted to have a sort of intermission screen without player input being needed would duplicate a passage on top of a player clone to automatically make the warp.

Yamane begins in an oil rig which I wouldn't have identified as such without the text label. There's a blinkwall as a simple obstacle, and a room full of gems and some strange looking objects.

Touching the break in the line wall reveals that it's a pipe leaking hot oil and that the player can't proceed. There's code to get past the pipe by plugging it up with a wad of phlegm given to the player by another character, but that requires doing these four areas in a different order than the one I chose.

The objects are all various foodstuffs which give and take health depending on Louis's tastes. From left to right there's trail mix (good), a Bunsen burner with burnt stuff stuck to it (good), a kettle of fish (good), a bowl of cold oatmeal (bad), a lutefisk sandwich (bad), and a lamburger with relish (good).

Outside the oil rig is an ad for a... pickle vat?

And a scroll with additional information on that.

Again with this board, the normal walls that make up the animal on the billboard are blinking. It very much feels like a mistake, and by now I was sure that the blinking walls were not supposed to be such. So let's get into how such a thing could happen (since it's just going to keep on happening throughout the rest of the game).

ZZT's text mode uses blinking characters rather than high intensity backgrounds (much to the dismay of everybody trying to squeeze out better graphics). That some characters are flashing on and off like this should be obvious when working on the game, but for some reason Sundria manages to not notice this. Blame Windows! If you happen to run ZZT on an older Windows machine with native MS-DOS support, it'll run in a window rather than fullscreen by default. When running in a window, the blinking is replaced with high intensity backgrounds. So what happened here is almost certainly that the game was made on a Windows machine and either Yapok was unaware about the discrepancy in graphics or intended the game to be ran in a window on Windows.

So technically the presentation of these screenshots isn't representative of how the game is meant to look. In Dosbox, the easiest way around this is with the utility BlinkX which forces high intensity backgrounds. It's not a huge deal as far as gameplay goes, but the blinking definitely makes some boards feel odd.

Moving along to the next screen, there's a large section of the room locked away and filled with walls that are immediately transformed into tigers. ZZT can only support so many elements with stats like these tigers on the screen at once so the rest simply become empty spaces. The stat limit being hit has a fun effect of meaning the tigers are unable to shoot since their projectiles require a stat to be available.

Yamane/Yamone (if you want to look at the object's name) gives Louis the first key to the castle of the aardvarks and reveals that there's no need to fight the tigers.

Key acquired, there are still three more passages to go through.

The leftmost passage leads to Yapok Isles. The player is pushed upwards, but has to walk this twisty passage on their own.

They'll arrive on a dark screen and promptly acquires a flashlight which gives 300 torches. After Aceland I'm glad to see I won't have to worry about running out of light.

The path leads them to an island with a (dark) cave. There are two hidden chambers here, but the light from a torch is enough to reveal that they're there.

Some of the walls near these secret pockets are hidden doors which will disappear when touched.

The exploration proves necessary with the rewards being a shovel and key to a submarine!

The cave is just that one board, with an exit out the back to the rest of the island which is just a short path to the "submarine".

Hell yes. This is gonna be awesome.

The submarine objects break after a single step.

This submarine is the "power armor" available on one of the miscellaneous boards in Super Tool Kit. You'll find it in several ZZT games, though it just makes the player more bulky and slow.

The submarine immediately breaks because when it turns the water into fake walls to let the player "swim", the arms are on top of water still which isn't affected by the #change command. Once the arms move into place, the water beneath them shows up, and water blocks objects cause the whole submarine to desync and break. Whoops.

The shovel is necessary to dig up some buried treasure on the other smaller island.

Upon reaching the top of the board, the submarine breaks canonically.

The player proceeds to a board with them underwater with only so much time to finish the board. I do like the portrayal of the wrecked sub.

The time limit is pretty tight, but there's a necessary stop at the red dugong to learn the secret word of the day.

The next screen is dark and has even tighter timing necessary. I may have died taking the time to hit my screenshot key.

But at least it taught me that ZZT will set the time remaining to a negative number when the player is dead since there's no need to keep the timer running. I believe this is the only way through normal game mechanics to have a counter reach a negative value.

The dugong's password is needed to get out of the ocean and into Yapok's lair. Self-insertion!

Louis gets to meet his creator who gives him the second key to the castle.

Back in the center of the earth it's two keys down, two to go.

Next up, the Land of the Yak, with more blinking walls that shouldn't be blinking. This opening screen has some danger to it with it being possible to not pay attention and miss the passage making the player unable to proceed.

The snowy yak mountains continue the trend with an avalanche of pushers which try to trap the player. A pair of yellow objects make up a chair lift, and the red object operates the controls for them.

The chairlift is a weird contraption that comes with a warning to save your game before using it.

And that's because it's powered by player clones! Their behavior can feel very strange to people who don't know how they work, but the chair lift can be operated multiple times so there's no real danger of breaking things here.

Let's get technical for a moment and explain how this works!

In ZZT's editor, placing a player will always just move the player on the board to the cursor's location, explicitly preventing you from making more than one. Of course, you can still copy the player to the pattern buffer and place clones that way. You can also just straight up #put <dir> player with an object.

So for this chair lift, touching the lower part tells the upper part to put a player to the south, wait a little bit, then shoot south to destroy the clone. Once the clone appears, the player needs to move in a direction that the clone isn't blocked in. ZZT updates elements with stats in the order they were added to the board. The first stat is always the player (unless you go so far as to hex edit a ZZT file), so the actual player presses down and moves down. ZZT keeps processing the stats and eventually reaches the player clone and runs the same player update code on it. It sees that the down key was pressed and moves the REAL player below the clone. The clone stands still.

The reason the actual player moves rather than the clone is because there should only be one player on the screen, and it's the first stat, so rather than search out the stat that needs to have its coordinates changed, ZZT can just be lazy and assume that it wants to update the coordinates of the first stat, setting the actual player's coordinates to the new location!

It's all a wonderful coincidence in ZZT's coding that this works out the way it does. It could've been a situation where the player clone would move itself south instead, or the "move south from here" vector using the first stat's coordinates as the origin point rather than the clone's.

Another coincidence is that the player clone can be destroyed just by shooting it and without losing any health. This happens because when the clone is shot, ZZT only checks if it was the first stat element that got shot when determining if health needs to be reduced.

All of these weird behaviors have done wonders for ZZT's capabilities and if clones had been handled differently, it would have had a tremendous impact on later ZZT games which player clones' unique properties become essential engine features.

And of course all of this here has to happen because there's no way to move the player to an arbitrary location on a board via ZZT-OOP.

The next room consists of something buried in the ice and a pick with limited uses. Lucky me, I still had my meatloaf ammo so I got an extra shot.

Buried in the ice was a St. Bernard. Louis has several options once again as for what to do.

He can eat the dog.

Ask them some math problems.

Drink the booze, and get killed for it. (Because you knew one of the choices would result in death.)

Or do a lousy job of training them.

The player will next encounter an angry yeti. A very tall yeti.

The yeti ate the dog so Louis can pass. If Louis eats the dog, the yeti smells it on him and calls the player a sicko for eating a dog. It's very hypocritical.

If the player does neither, the yeti will ask if it would be plausible for them to eat Louis. Louis can just say no and live, or say yes and get killed.

The yeti's igloo also has a hang glider which Louis can snag.

The last board of the mountain is this scenic view of the setting sun.

Yak is here and preparing to jump off the cliff to learn to fly.

If you just let him do it, he dies, and Louis follows out of guilt.

If you give him the hang glider...

He still plummets! This really caught me off guard and I admit to laughing at the absurdity of it.

Thinking happy thoughts turns out to be the correct. In addition to the next key, Louis also gets the phlegm needed to plug the leaking oil pipe from earlier.

Back in the center of the earth, there's just one path remaining.

Yut-Yut, with its blinking linewalls.

Unlike the other areas, Yut-Yut is much more open, with a large forest to be explored.

The northern board contains a book explaining the goal of this area: get the idols to drink something and summon the yut-yut at the temple.

The river is being blocked by a spade shaped tree. Given ZZT's graphical ambiguities, Louis can opt to cut down the tree or play poker with the spade. Playing poker gives the player 10 gems for winning automatically.

But of course, chopping it down is necessary to make it to the rest of Yak-Yak.

Here's the first idol, but without any sort of offering there's nothing Louis can do here just yet.

South of the idol is the temple, where Louis can sacrifice himself at the shrine of rhubarb and get himself killed.

Below the temple is a petting zoo full of less than friendly animals. Each of the scrolls tells the player to pet the animals. There is no purpose to this board. It's just a very dangerous petting zoo.

In the southeast and northeast corners of Yak-Yak are more pig idols.

The west forest consists of some trees doing ballet.

A monkey requests you use the bomb to destroy them in exchange for some V-8. It's got eight different vegetable juices!

The bomb can't be pushed over any forest, so the player needs to make themselves a path for the bomb before activating it. Once bombed, the trees are destroyed and the monkey gives you his V-8.

And can eat his cottage cheese. This is some vintage random monkey cheese humor from 1995 we're dealing with.

The southwest corner holds the final pig idol, and with some V-8 the player can finally begin giving the idols something to drink.

Or well, they could, if the game didn't seem to forget about the V-8 after using it once.

We've got a bug here! ZZT only lets you keep 10 flags at a time, but Sundria doesn't bother clearing any flags. So we've got a flag for the towel, the key to the submarine, the shovel, the V-8, that we've appeased one idol, etc etc.

If you have 10 flags set, and try to set an 11th, #10 gets overwritten. In my case, flag #10 was V8 which got overwritten by the fact that I gave some to an idol. Fortunately ZZT's cheats let you set and clear flags so once I had identified the issue I was able to clear a bunch of unneeded flags and give myself the V-8 again.

And with that, I could juice them pigs.

Nothing appears different at the temple at first, until the altar is examined and Yut-Yut makes an appearance.

Yut-Yut played us for a fool. They give us the key to return to the center of the earth, which also gives access to the fourth and final key to the castle. Louis's quest for knickerbockers is drawing to a close.

The final passage is opened and the player gets another ride via pushers to a passage.

The castle blinks in and out of existence due to the blinking colors, finally confirming for me that all this blinking was not supposed to be.

That's the end of Louis's quest, to be continued in the Megazeux game "Castle of the Aardvarks"! Castle of the Aardvarks was indeed released for Megazeux and is considered a classic early MZX game.

The game closes with an ending screen littered with various scrolls to plug the sequel, give credits, and list the game's cast. There's no object that ends the game, so Louis is stuck here forever! The end.

Final Thoughts

Yapok-Sundria was a lot of fun to experience. I wonder if this articles seems a bit harsh on it? Yes, instant game overs are a poor design decision, the graphics are frequently blinking when they shouldn't be, and it's possible to run out of flags. Yet, like a lot of older ZZT worlds, Sundria gets by on its strange charms.

There's not a ton there, but even in its minimalism, you'll get a weird sense of what the world is. It makes me think of the comic strip "Pogo" in terms of setting. It's an adventure to see the world and its characters, all strange and unusual animals with strange and unusual personalities. A lot of the humor is what today would be considered generic randomness, but I feel like in 1995 this sort of thing hadn't been done to death. Playing Yapok-Sundria as a contemporary release won't do it any favors, but it does feel genuine. It's not random for the sake of being random as much as it's random for the sense of conveying something that you wouldn't see so much elsewhere in 1995.

Sometimes that line between what is random and what is important gets a bit too blurred, like with the meatloaf and the doilies. The mountain climb is also very dull (and Yapok admits as much in the guide in the game's text file). The game feels very safe to explore as long as you don't forget to save, and exploration is really what it's all about. The quest for knickerbockers is pure MacGuffin. Louis's journey is completely contrived, and it doesn't matter at all. And in the mid 90s, ZZT would allow something like that to thrive. Yapok-Sundria isn't an obscure ZZT world lost to the ages, it was a success.