| Zankozzie’s Big Mistake | |
| by Ryan Phelps | |
| Alcritas’ Review | |
Zankozzie’s Big Mistake, the Second Short Contest winner designed by Ryan Phelps, is, in many respects, a natural heir to The Election, another scenario that fared well in recent competition. Like The Election, Mistake uses a pre-fabricated 1-PC party, seriously lacking in offensive capability — which doesn’t matter very much because, like The Election, there is practically no combat in the entire scenario. Most importantly, much like The Election, Mistake is an enormously enjoyable scenario, that is well worth playing.
The very bizarre plot places your PC in the bottom of a tower that, for some unknown reason, was developed upside down. Some misplaced magics have triggered a flash flood, and the tower is quickly flooding, level by level. Your goal is to climb the tower before you suffocate, which provides plenty of motivation.
Climbing each level requires completing various puzzles. The first couple of levels are pretty banal — for example, you’ll need to find a chair that isn’t bolted down — but after that things pick up steadily, culminating in a superb hurdle, requiring you to repair a conveyor belt in order to move a rather odd contraption (a gravel maker), in order to trigger an overload to blast your way to the top.
Mistake contains a win/finish distinction, but there’s not much difference between the paths, and winning is only marginally more difficult than finishing. Just explore fully, and you’ll find the winning path.
Two quick notes. First, the scenario includes a saved-game file. Due to the nature of BOE, however, in many cases this file won’t arrive uncorrupted. Don’t worry that much about this, however, as any 1-PC party will be able to experience the scenario just about as well. Additionally, don’t save your game on the conveyor belt level. If you reload your game on that level, you’ll most likely be trapped, as the conveyor belt starts disabled.
Mistake bills itself as a comedy, but that’s not really accurate. There is some humor, but the scenario is not consistently funny. What the scenario is, however, is consistently and thoroughly fun and enjoyable.
My score — 9.1
— Alcritas