Zen

Dis gai Yatpat link me his gam he say he like me revews but 2 b honest the ding is BAD it look lik he make it thru a week or something but he say my revew gud so dis gam greet play now pls n gib monie to him but i wan 10% for be manager n if u r mad right now or have not stopped reading good job you have been on the internet before.


Yutput did really ask me to take a gander at Zen and I was humbled if you consider flailing my arms back and forth patting my cheeks making a noise like a dying rabbit "humbled". Joking, I would never make a noise like that. The game is sadly well made, I say sadly cause he made it in a week and he himself warns people about downloading it's open source as it is "bad programming". This is all very sad because it's designed, made, and looks better than I'd say over 60% of Byond's games. I don't want to go on a rant/tangent here but do people just not have standards?



Anyway, the game's art is simple but works as it's all made by the same person in the same style proving yet again uniform style is a big factor in making things look good. The interface is very bare-bones but it removes a lot of the ugliness of default byond, but I think the interface background color could be changed still.

In this game you never see a tabs area OR a pop up alert as everything is done with mouse drag/drop, clicks, the numerical keys, shift, and the movement keys. Overall good controls scheme, I never had to really shift where my hands were or let go of the mouse. I do wish you could scroll through your hot slot bar though.



Combining things to make other things, the core or key mechanic of the game itself you either have to "push" (shift + movement keys) dense blocks into each other or drag and drop items onto other items. I REALLY like the "push" system, it's fun and feels very "kinetic" and a creative way to do this. Besides the fact I accidentally made a few furnaces and didn't see any way to undo them it is a solid game mechanic.



The only issue comes from a common issue in combining systems, something even minecraft would have if their craft windows weren't a grid. In this game you can drag and drop items in order to combine, however the fact recipes were determined by which order you dragged things onto others and the ultimate limit of having two items per recipe is severely bad for future content and playing as is. This is not THAT big of a deal, but once you have A onto B makes C, but B onto A makes D it gets a bit odd. From that recipes can get a bit weird and convoluted, recipes should sort of make sense; like in minecraft all tools use wooden handles in the form of sticks. Speaking of minecraft and sticks, you can use sticks and any items to kill things or break blocks in minecraft, tools just do the same thing just better. This system works a lot smoother than one tool one use.



These type of games strive on experimentation and exploration, you want to initially survive to see what's around you but you can't right away cause for whatever reason mechanics makes exploration too difficult with no items, so you get items and make shelter; and at this point the player is introduced into the game's mechanics and feels like they accomplished a great thing. From that point the player enters a cycle of survive to explore and explore to survive which eats a massive amount of time and is hopefully enjoyable. Besides the first few things I made by experimentation I could not kill the bad guy who kept chasing me at night so I had to rely exclusively on the guide in order to figure out what things made what which kills a large portion of what makes the game fun.

The issue with the recipe and their mechanics is actually a really hard problem to figure a solution for and really is not that game breaking of an issue. Zen is still fun and you can easily pour hours of your time into it.