Zipper (Playdate)

For those familiar with the works of Bennett Foddy, seeing his name next to one of the Season 1 Playdate games can be a terrifying prospect. Foddy is known for designing difficult games like QWOP and Getting Over It, these often deliberately frustrating experiences with controls that take quite a bit to come to grips with. For him to release a game on a system with a built-in crank feels like it’s just asking for some new challenging twist on in-game movement. Surprisingly though, his game Zipper uses the crank for almost the exact opposite purpose, making the movement of its samurai lead easier to plot out. Here, Foddy prioritizes having Zipper be a loving throwback to isometric games like The Last Ninja over trying to concoct a way for the crank to complicate things.

 

Zipper sees you playing as a samurai in black who has mastered the classic cinematic technique of being able to zip across the battlefield in an instant, slicing through his enemies with ease. However, he also is only able to move in straight lines, the player’s coverage of the grid-based battlefield being only what’s in front of him, behind him, or to his sides. You can cover as much ground as you want when moving, but the action in Zipper is turn-based and after you’ve made your move, the enemies in the area get their chance to move as well. While they still move on a grid, they can move in more complex paths during their turn, but the distance they travel is comparable to how far you moved as well. If you only move a single square, they will barely move, but if you zip across the screen, they’ll be able to cover considerable ground and often catch up to you for their own killing blow.

You must pass by an enemy on the side or appear in front of a swordsman to kill them, Zipper a strategy game about plotting out your moves to safely slay your enemies or at least make it to the room’s exit. While it doesn’t directly tell its story, when you enter rooms or face specific enemies, you’ll hear little bits of dialogue about how your samurai has turned against his clan or get information on how he acquired his zipper technique, but sometimes the text is there just for color or even a bit of comedy. The first enemy you face for example will shift to sillier lines on replays, but the main thing important to your success is knowing you must reach the leader of the clan and slay him. However, he is locked up in a castle and you must find a key first to gain access, the player pushing through different exterior areas and facing whatever foes might be there to defend. Beyond basic swordsman who only kill you if they can get right up next to you, you will start encountering a few more complex foes like pikemen whose spears allow them to not just reach you from further away but block certain attack routes with the weapon’s shaft. Ninjas can attack from afar with shurikens, meaning if you end your movement while you’re in their line of sight, you’re toast. New enemy types as well as how they can be mixed and matched allows for an effective evolution of the game’s difficulty, with the castle even having a few rooms where special considerations make them more like tactical puzzles rather than reactive turn-based combat.

 

Needing to figure out how to safely cross the latest room you’ve encountered makes exploration and progress in Zipper interesting and engaging, especially since you aren’t necessarily required to do anything specific to overcome the challenge. Sometimes you can just try to bypass the enemies, although if you must backtrack through that area later you might be in a tough situation. When you slash through foes, the blood that sprays from their wounds can actually blind nearby swordsmen, giving you a turn where they can’t do anything so enemy positioning can have an extra bit of useful complexity. Zipper seems to have the makings of a strong strategic action game where each individual room presents a specific challenge where the broader exploration complicates it in an intriguing way, but unfortunately there are a fair few elements that let this concept down a bit. The first and perhaps most egregious is that enemy movement is not wholly consistent. Unless you’ve entered a room before, you can’t exactly anticipate how a specific enemy type might move. Since you are limited in the directions you can attack, being able to set-up for your slashes is key to success, so not being able to accurately gauge how a foe will move can undermine your strategic flexibility. Maybe the enemy will move in a straight line, or they might arbitrarily step to the side along that line at some point, there being no reliable way to predict which they’ll go for…

 

If you choose not to use the crank that is. When you are plotting out your movement on a turn, you can start turning the Playdate’s crank to reveal how the present enemies will move in response. Rather than blindly throwing yourself into an unwinnable situation since the game AI doesn’t follow set movement rules, you can get a preview of how they’ll be positioned so you can pick the best action for yourself. This may sound like an incredible amount of power and in some areas it certainly is, but many rooms require movements that account for multiple turns if you want to survive, so being able to preview only one turn ahead doesn’t account for the more complex demands of the area’s layout. The difficulty is able to be preserved despite reducing it in the already easier rooms, and some unfortunate variance is removed so you aren’t left baffled by enemies moving in unusual directions that go against what you were lead to believe. Bennett Foddy actually recommends against using the crank though while also saying, when he plays without it, he barely makes any progress in his runs, but it feels like the crank is important for overcoming some moments of ambiguity.

Overcoming ambiguity is particularly important considering Zipper is a game where one hit will kill you and force you to restart the game from the very first area. The lack of checkpoints certainly does add some tension and make you play more carefully when taking moves, but Zipper also doesn’t feel like a game built well for this idea. In many rooms, once you’ve figured out how to kill all the foes within, there’s no more value in replaying them. Harder rooms or ones with a broader range of solutions might have valid reasons for making you replay them, and the game does track your movements in the form of “Life”, each turn you take reducing it by one. You have more than enough to clear the castle should you succeed, especially since few rooms really give you the space to take too many small actions without dying, but the score also feels a bit meaningless in the face of some other factors. The key you need to open the castle is randomly placed, meaning it can be near the castle gates or down a path with almost ten more battles you’ll have to fight. What’s more, some rooms can have the foes you face within swapped, meaning random elements will be more responsible for your end score than any skill. You won’t know where the key is until you get clues from statues as well, so anyone truly interested in the leaderboards will be left resetting constantly for the easiest key spawn and enemy arrangements rather than truly honing their skills by optimizing fights.

 

If you choose to treat the game as more an effort to face down the clan leader though, the flaws in the scoring system aren’t that important, although key placement being random can still sting as you might spend a long time looking around only to meet your end to a room you might not even need to face in another run. Most fights have individual merit in terms of being well-designed encounters, although there is another bit of weird variance that doesn’t gel well with how punishing death can be. The exact tile you enter a room from can greatly change how you can tackle the dangers within. A room that could be cleared with one easy zip down the middle might turn into a complex dance of crank-spinning to survive if you entered from one square to the side, some rooms almost seeming like they might be unwinnable if you do come in at the wrong spot. At the same time, absolutely required rooms usually seem to be designed more cleanly to avoid this, but it again makes bad key placement an aggravating element outside the player’s control. While Bennett Foddy’s games often try to teach ideas of perseverance and the satisfaction in overcoming adversity, Zipper’s extra elements of randomness and permadeath feel like they push you away from some of its interesting content. While individual rooms may provide enjoyable challenges down a certain path, the random factors can undo your strategic play and force you to retread through solved situations for little reason.

THE VERDICT: In Zipper, when you’re in a single room trying to puzzle out how to move just right to slice through your foes, the strategic play works rather well. Different enemy types and the added consideration of how leaving men standing might come back to bite you later adds some texture to individual skirmishes and the broader exploration. However, the potential of the tactical elements is let down by random elements, be it minor things like enemy movement that thankfully can be overcome by the crank or more impactful design choices like the placement of the castle key. With your death forcing you to replay battles that you’ve likely mastered as well, Zipper often asks for patience without rewarding it, the gameplay engaging but the game containing it adding complications that impede your ability to enjoy it.

 

And so, I give Zipper for Playdate…

An OKAY rating. While there is the interesting complication of enemies you leave alive making backtracking harder, Zipper might have been better off just making itself a linear progression through challenge rooms so you can enjoy their strategic design on its effective merits. The crank makes up for the variance in enemy movement if you aren’t stubborn about consulting it and not every move even needs such double-checking anyway, but other elements feel like they are unnecessary barriers to enjoying the battles at their best. Certain paths are just best avoided and if the key spawns down a challenging path you might as well reset and hope for better luck. The risk you put yourself in feels unnecessary despite providing some mentally stimulating fight layouts, the path of least resistance sparing you time that would be otherwise spent repeating the same actions in rooms you’ve already solved that are just barriers to getting to places of importance. Death should have some stakes, Zipper could perhaps get away with just a few key checkpoints so you’d be set back a few rooms rather than going back to square one and left to wander in the hopes Lady Luck put the key somewhere with less repetition. A lot of Zipper’s design choices work on the micro level, the action has a very effective format that rewards planning ahead and the enemy types mix up how you approach the differently shaped rooms well too. On the macro level, Zipper’s design choices obstruct your ability to experience the fights without really adding much of value. It is likely that memorization, while not an interesting element of the game’s design, is an intentionally included barrier since The Last Ninja games essentially required it at parts to overcome their issues, but Zipper controls well and has sound strategic elements, it just placed those in a broader experience that threatens to wear out the welcome of a nicely design fighting system.

 

Zipper doesn’t aim to frustrate like Foddy’s more famous fare, but it does end up frustrating the player a touch in a way different from the likes of QWOP and Getting Over It. Those are about honing your skill to handle a difficult play style, but the challenge in Zipper works well and produces difficulty from the degree of thought needed to survive rather than coming to grips with some deliberately complicated system. The frustration instead comes from the elements outside of the regular combat, the structure of the broader experience an obstacle to your success outside of your control. Finishing Zipper will still be a test of intelligence and planning, with or without the crank, but luck has an impact that can’t be ignored as well and one that makes victory less sweet than if it was truly a triumph based only on applying your talent for forethought and strategy.