There’s no point denying it: screenshots of the Studio Jandora created, Enix published, adventure game Zarth may look just a touch, um, prehistoric to modern eyes. What we have here is a game that debuted all the way back in 1984, yet still tried to cram an interactive sci-fi story as well as several generously sized pieces of pixel art onto nothing more than a humble pair of MSX cassette tapes.
But in truth it was, to a certain extent, a lush experience for the era, even though the game had to fit into 32KB of RAM (just to emphasise how small that is: the photo at the top of this page is over a hundred times larger than that) and only had slow and linearly-accessed storage to pull data from. It’s clear right from the start that Zarth is trying so very hard to squeeze the most out of every single scene. For all the intense limitations each digital drawing’s obviously straining against (especially in this version of the game—the PC-88, etc. releases show more colour and detail), Zarth always dares to go for the most interesting or dramatic camera angle, even if the hardware’s not quite up to the challenge. It’s thanks to this bravery we get to see intricate close-ups of complex technology, towering robots in the depths of space, and tight corridors that extend off into the distance. They may not look polished (or in some cases, particularly readable) in 2023, but they always feel bold.
Zarth’s so ambitious it even includes an active day/night cycle in (terrestrial) outdoor areas too. Spend a while out in the fresh air and the scene will change to a nighttime palette for a few commands, and then revert back to normal after a similar length of time. Not only is this surprisingly immersive, this also slightly changes what you can and can’t do for a short while too. Thankfully it’s a completely binary system so it doesn’t make your adventuring that much more difficult: you might have to do something while the sun’s out, but you never have to do something at an imaginary 10am, for example.
All of your interactions with the game are handled using a good old-fashioned text parser. The structure of your requests is limited to a simple NOUN VERB setup (typed in katakana)—SWITCH USE, for example—with movement generally limited to the four cardinal directions and a handy catch-all “EXIT”. To help save your fingers and a little time the MSX’s function keys act as shortcuts for a few commands (such as hitting F1 to auto-type “COMPUTER”), although this functionality is somewhat “balanced out” by a few fussy issues. It’s not possible to TAKE ALL, which can leave you fruitlessly typing yourself in circles just in case you think you missed something, and the game stuffily bothers to differentiate between looking at a room and looking at a wall in the same place. To make matters just that little bit more aggravating, the manual lists some, but not close to all, of the verbs you need to use during your adventure, and that meant in some places I wasn’t just unsure of what I was supposed to do, but if I could do something at all.
At least it’s one of those games where you’re never more than about an hour away from the ending if you know what you’re doing, although working out how to get there can take a heck of a lot longer if you don’t—especially as there are a few instant game overs lurking here and there. To help anyone unlucky enough to come face to face with one of those, or just making little progress in spite of their best efforts, the developers included some extra assistance inside the game’ box: three individual hint tokens to mail off to them alongside a detailed description of your problem (and a stamp), in the hope of receiving the aid you needed back.
Unfortunately I was a few decades late to try that feature out, although the various guides I found online and tried to use instead (I recommend this one for the MSX game) did at least accidentally reveal something interesting: the game’s key scenes may all fall along the same lines on every format, but there still seems to be some significant differences between them. An early interior wall on the MSX has a piece of rope hanging on it and nothing else, but in at least the PC-88 version there’s also a rifle on there too, something you can take and presumably use later on. If I ever find the time it might be interesting to play that version through, to see if this was axed to make a later puzzle a little easier for the person playing, or something cut purely for space’s sake.
One very cool feature this tape version of the game has that I’m guessing its disc-based counterparts don’t is password saving. Now yes, I know the thought of dealing with ’80s passwords is usually enough to send any sensible person running for the hills but I honestly love the way they’ve been implemented here. They’re always memorable and easily typed words and phrases like “Top down” and “RAM” (although written in Japanese) for starters, but best of all their lack of personalisation means that if I’ve done enough to earn one then no matter what happens next, I know I’ve got an unalterable pre-made starting point to fall back on. With a password I can easily rewind to the beginning of any scene and see what else (if anything) I could’ve done differently, or if I feel I’ve tied myself up in a textual knot I can go back and give myself a fresh run-up. I’d honestly be happy to see more adventure games with password systems like Zarth’s.
And as for the story that unfolds during all of this key-tapping action? Hmm. Expectations need to be kept in check, in my opinion. Zarth can display no more than five lines of crudely rendered text at a time (and more often than not shows even less), so by its very nature the adventure here has to be short, simple, and to the point even when it’s not in its own narrative interests. As an adventure it’s soundly outdone by many similar games from roughly (roughly) the same era/hardware issues—Enix’s own Jesus is just one of many much better games—but I wanted to experience a fun romp through a vividly-rendered ’80s sci-fi setting that wasn’t going to take an eternity to clear, and that’s exactly what Zarth delivered. Can I really ask anything more of it than that? I don’t think so.
Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster 