Recap / UFO 50 Game 8 Planet Zoldath

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A roguelike top-down adventure title where you must explore a randomly-generated world to find the three pieces of a treasure map, interacting with aliens and picking up weapons and upgrades along the way. This game subsequently spawns the Campanella series, and has a more direct follow-up in Pilot Quest: Return to Zoldath.

Tropes found in Planet Zoldath:

• Action Bomb: Some of the randomly generated enemy types can explode on death.
• Artificial Stupidity: Pursuing enemies don't know to not run into the poison puddles. Naturally, this can be exploited.
• Battle Boomerang: The Boomerang can be used to attack enemies.
• Delicious Distraction:
  • Monsters are attracted to meat, especially if it's cooked, causing them to stop attacking you and seek the meat out instead.
  • One method of dealing with the Snail is the Meat Printer, which spawns a meat when used. This will attract the snail towards the meat, opening up the passageway it was blocking.
  • Cooked meat will summon the giant fly to try to eat it. Killing it generally rewards you two rare resources.
• Early Installment Character-Design Difference: In-universe, this game is the debut of UFO Soft's Mascot Pilot, but he has the body proportions of a standard human as compared to his finalized Super-Deformed look.
• Forced Transformation: The Metamorph gun can temporarily turn enemies it hits into small chicken-like creatures, which can be stomped on by the Hazard Boots. It reflect off walls and hit Pilot, temporarily turning him into one. This allows Pilot to pass through small openings like the insides of logs or the shells of dead snail aliens and is sometimes necessary to solve puzzles.
• Heart Container: Collecting energy cubes increase maximum hitpoints by one.
• Helpful Mook: Two of the alien species will be the Genuinely Gentle sort unless attacked, which the player can usually recognize by their lack of movement or attacks. These aliens sell important key items or even map pieces. One species will be fellow travelers (implied to be archeologists and/or missionaries) but the other is a local race and will require you to you have the Translator on hand to interpret their speech.
• Inside Joke: Friendly aliens occasionally talk about quibble racing when spoken to; in-universe, this game comes years before the proper debut of the quibbles in Quibble Race. According to Quibble Race's history tab, the quibbles were originally designed as part of a board game created many years before that game's release.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: One alien says that the planet feels like home despite always changing—a reference to the procedurally generated layout.
• Limited Loadout: Pilot can only carry two items at once, and will need to drop items to make room for others. Part of the puzzle is needing to know which items to bring along to complete certain areas, such as the snail enemies requiring the pulse generator to kill, followed by the Metamorph gun deflected at yourself to shrink you down into a small creature so that you can actually pass through the shell it leaves behind.
• Luck-Based Mission: All the maps and aliens are randomly generated. For the latter, this includes how much they fire at you as well as how much damage they deal, meaning that you might face off against rather passive mobs, or very deadly ones.
• New Work, Recycled Graphics: One of the possible aliens that can spawn is a recolored mature Feloris from Bug Hunter.
• Power-Up Magnet: The Boomerang can be used to collect items and can even travel through walls.
• Roguelike: The map design, item location, and even the behaviors of the aliens are completely randomly generated, and death is permanent, causing everything to be rerolled if you get a game over.
• Timed Mission: You are timed, and if you take longer than 20 minutes, the Campanella will get vandalized. You can still win the game if this happens, but getting the cherry disk requires you to win before the 20-minute mark.
• Transformation Ray: One of the items is the Metamorph, a gun that fires blasts that turn enemies into small chicken-like creatures. It also reflects off walls, and will turn Pilot into a similar creature if it hits him — which is needed to get past areas that he can't normally fit in.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Many of the aliens you encounter express their disdain for treasure hunters who pillage the planet for resources and kill its inhabitants before leaving—exactly what you are currently doing. If you spend long enough on the planet, one of them will vandalize the Campanella.
• Wingdinglish: The untranslated alien speech is just the English translation with the letters swapped out for alien characters.