Zork Zero is the real Zork Two. It's the size of the original mainframe Zork, which was essentially Zork 1, 2, and 3 combined. It has fancy border graphics to reflect advancement, and more visual puzzles given the new capabilities of the hardware. It's loyal to the original systems and formula of Zork, unlike Beyond Zork which is far more of a departure. It's fine. If you like the first three, you'll like Zero. If you don't, then you won't. It's consistent in quality with the rest, and there really isn't much more to say.

it's not as good on a replay as it was the first time through... there are a lot of choices that feel interesting on a first play (the size of the 3d overworlds, the sorta-rhythm-game segments, the obvious lampshaded padding in the second half, the metacommentary) but wear off later on.

BUT! this is probably the most gamey analgesic game (at least until angeline era gets released) and i think it benefits from that. by gamey i mean that it feels super in love with and engaged with the nonsense language of video games; where even the ocean and sephonie really stretch for real world thematic resonance, and the original anodyne is sort of unformed and messy, this one feels like it has a complete and coherent point of view within itself, because of the way its different gameplay styles and aesthetics are stitched together. and that lets it access all kinds of emotional complexities and weird little grace notes. (desertnpc/no such scene is the obvious one, but i was struck this time by a missable npc in pastel horizon who you basically steal life force from. and the overall warmth and sweetness of the new theeland area.)

it's a super imperfect game. but those imperfections also give it a very human quality, and i don't think i would change anything about it.

When Outer Wilds came out in 2019, I bought it immediately. I then allowed it to languish for five straight years as one of the only two games I've ever bought on the Epic Games Store. That's just one of the problems with me. Part of it was my desire to save a small-ish game I was excited about for a rainy day, and a much larger part of it was the fact that my gaming projects tend to be dictated mostly by the release schedules of major franchises, and it's usually difficult to figure out where to fit indie games into that agenda when they're not tied to anything else. In those five years, I polished a fair deal of hype. Majora's Mask is one of my top three favorite video games, and I have been automatically interested in any game since then to flirt with its concepts. I have been waiting for something like Outer Wilds since The Year 2000.

It is genuinely shocking to me then, that while I both like and respect Outer Wilds, I have somehow ended up among the least positive voices I know on the subject. In some respects, this has forced me to confront a simple truth: I do not actually like puzzles. There is, however, definitely more to this ambivalence.

Almost all of my first playthrough with Outer Wilds was spent frustrated, demoralized, or both. Twenty-Two minutes is, in my opinion, already too short of a cycle. In practice however, for most activities in Outer Wilds, the viable timeframe is much, much shorter. Combine this with easy failure states for many of those activities, and the fact that success does not remotely guarantee any actionable information, and you have a recipe for repetition, irritation, and exhaustion. It is in fact, far easier to have a miserable time with Outer Wilds than people would have you believe, especially for someone as stubborn as I am.

Spectating Outer Wilds discussion is incredibly strange for me. To hear others tell it, the game has some revelatory "aha" moment around every corner, but I can tell you that I felt unsatisfied with around 70% of the information I found. I struggled to find any investment in what I saw as exceptionally bland lore, and most clues felt unrewarding, as they often meant nothing to me without other necessary dots to connect, or were redundant. I constantly struggled with the choice between staying to dig deeper into an area, or going somewhere else in hope of finding a clue that I don't know I need. Both were potentially a waste of time in the face of an unbelievably irritating or demoralizing run back to whatever I was doing, triggered by the godforsaken cycle timer. Usually when my logic got stuck, the clues wouldn't have helped me anyway, because I was being thwarted by some miscommunication in game design or storytelling, not just the intended, actual puzzle. There were numerous times in Outer Wilds where I had already been given the relevant clue to overcome something, and still failed to apply that knowledge because of some other misunderstanding, and an uncertainty as to whether I had everything that I needed to know. With the clues unhelpful and that being all there was to find, I did not, at ANY point in Outer Wilds, have some glorious "aha" moment. Not one, single time. At best, I found something and thought "Okay good, now I can go do this other thing." At worst, I found what was supposed to be a huge, weighty lore revelation, and felt absolutely nothing except disappointment at another dead end.

And yet, despite this uniquely bad experience, Outer Wilds pushes the idea of "time-loop puzzle game" nearly to its limits in a commendable way. It is inspired, it has heart, and for the most part, it's rather well executed. It's just that I will never be able to have the experience now that everybody else seems to have had. Outer Wilds is a game you play once, and whether by bad luck, rough design, or simple, psychological incompatibility, I found the worst way to play it.

Sucks to suck, I suppose.