Oktrollberfest 2026

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I'm gonna be providing brief reviews the other 13 games from this jam when I get the chance.

Robin Hood in "Barrels of Trouble"
by John D. Moore



https://jdmgames.itch.io/barrels-of-trouble

Not too much to say about this one. It's a fairly straightforward Donkey Kong riff. Robin Hood is a tad more nimble than Jumpman was back in the day, but it's balanced out by the silly complications you encounter.

Only 6 stages long. Fairly self-explanatory. Should take somewhere between 15-30 minutes to complete.

This gets a solid recommendation (I'm not just saying this because John is a friend of mine).

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The Last Tree

I'm no stranger to double-dipping one project into multiple game jams, but this seems a bit egregious:



This is a very simple game where you click bugs to prevent them from reaching what is apparently the last tree on the planet. It looks like it adds some complications in later levels, but I think I've had enough for now.

This game looks like it was made by a small child. However, some other games on this account look like they were made by AI. Not sure how I feel about this.

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Time Tri̶a̶ₒₗₗ
by MomoHut

Very rudimentary top down racer. It uses royalty-free graphics and music. Just drive around the circuit for 6 laps and your done. There might be a couple different tracks selected at random.

This does have an actual trollgame idea, and it was only submitted to one jam, so this does appear to have been purpose built for Oktrollberfest despite how unassuming it looks.

I do wish it displayed the total race time at the end.

Verdict: Neat, but insubstantial.

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Defusal
by INTJT2

Silly bomb defusal simulator where you have to deal with conflicting instructions.

It's slightly humorous.

The UI design looks very AI-sloppish, but the AI disclosure says "no." Is my gut right, or overzealous?

Perhaps my brain being forever rewired to watch out for this stuff is the real troll...

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Character Cooeste
by Noahsoft

This is a weird MegaZeux game. (MegaZeux is ZZT but Better (to the detriment of your average project getting finished).)

The dialogue is absurd. The font is insane. The characters are charming. The game mostly seems to be prefab MegaZeux objects arranged in a confounding way.

It's not too long, but I couldn't figure out how to beat the final boss. Mysterious.

A neat little inscrutable romp.

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Sly Squeaky's BREAK/OUT
by The Bit Bet

This is a rudimentary Breakout clone (it has breakout in the name). The graphics/UI have that AI-slop stank.

The gimmick in this game is that every time you lose the ball, some data commonly used to fingerprint your browser is plastered on the screen, and the robot at the bottom lectures you about the practice of browser fingerprinting. To ensure that this happens, the walls of the playfield break pretty quickly, so unless you're a turbo-expert at breakout you're gonna have your internet fingerprint exposed.

Fairly didactic edutainment game. Do not stream it if you know what's good for you.

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It's not too long, but I couldn't figure out how to beat the final boss. Mysterious.

okay. I just had to reload from a save and keep trying until I lucked into avoiding some bug that was causing pieces to be destroyed but not being registered as killed.

No idea what that was about, but I rolled credits. 

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Buried
by WiL

The gifs make this look like some Weave implementation of the classic falling sand game (it certainly has those physics).

In reality, it's actually WiL's favorite thing: a very on-the-nose, heavy-handed meditation on the futilities and joys of adult life. It will make you feel cheesed off.

It took me two tries, but I achieved a self-actualized life.

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DEMO.ZZT
by goldbuick

This is a port of the DEMO.ZZT demonstration world to the author's web based "zed.cafe" engine. zed.cafe describes itself as a "web based fantasy terminal," with a certain ZZT-ish design ethos. zed.cafe can be found at zed.cafe. This world, thus, seems to exist to demonstrate that most of ZZT's primitives have been implemented (or are implementable?) in the zed.cafe engine.

But that's not all... some say that there is, lurking in the dark, a secret room to engage in battle...

Neat little reminder to try giving this thing a spin.

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Die 2 Win
by dave2

This is a puzzle game where the puzzle game is "figure out how to die." It's sort of like that old flash game Karoshi, in a way.

This is complicated by the fact that the player character in ZZT has no means of hurting itself.

This is also complicated by the fact that some things on this puzzle board refill your health.

This is also also complicated by the fact that this game obfuscates a good deal of information.

There aren't too many moving parts in this puzzle, but until you figure out how a few particular interactions work, this one will stump you (it stumped me so I looked at the solution video :3).

A winning run takes less than 5 minutes, but this will likely take the average player more than an hour to solve (unless ur smarter than me).

Verdict: Very neat. Genuinely trolly. I'm kinda embarrassed that I looked up the solution.

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La Vie Moderne VII
by Snorb

Snorb's La Vie Moderne series is a modern treasure of ZZT. I love them (as you can see by the amount of fanart I've made of them). The games are each a bunch of riffs on the original official ZZT worlds, full of trolls, japes, and an increasingly cluttered collection of original characters (<3).

Due to life events, I was too busy to stream/play La Vie VI last year. It was a riff on Caves of ZZT (released 3 months before the community's 5-year-long Caves of ZZT Remix collab lol). I had to play catch-up with it before playing this year's world, but I'm glad I did: the ending scene with Keyko was very cute. <3

Anyhow, to keep a long story short, Snorb has now moved on from riffing on the original ZZT tetralogy and the "Best of ZZT" duology and on to the last official collection of ZZT worlds: the ZZT's Revenge hexalogy (a collection of contest-winning worlds from outside creators who Tim then attempted to recruit).

This year's world is thus a riff on Allen Pilgrim's Fantasy. I had never played Fantasy before this, so it was an interesting experience. All I knew is that this was sort of a proto-Super ZZT game (in the sense that Allen Pilgrim's Monster Zoo is the archetypical Super ZZT game). Having played this, I think I would like to play the original Fantasy now.

Also I have even more fanart ideas (curse u Snorb).

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Them!
by Dr. Dos

Dr. Dos's Them! is a riff on Zem!, a classic ZZT world made by John D. Moore (see the top of the page) nearly 30 years ago (he was a bit younger back then). Zem! in turn was a riff on Lemmings, except instead of guiding several lemmings you were only guiding one. You could select a few actions (such as building a stair step, digging, etc).

It's remembered fondly in the community, but going back to it now with adult eyes it's easy to see the ways in which it's pretty basic (tho still a cromulent time). The original author would eventually revisit the concept, uh, 9 months ago in a game I reviewed on this very forum.

Now, Them! stars a lemming named Them (it/its pronouns). Them, like most videogame lemmings, likes to amble along automatically, regardless of the cliffiness of the terrain. What separates Them from classic lemmings from Lemmings or Zem! is that its abilities are movement related, instead of being related to manipulating the terrain itself. This change in design makes Them! much more coherently designed as a single-lemming Lemmings-clone, but also being made in Weave allows it to be done with much more polish.

Them! thus ends up being a platformer with an unconventional control scheme. In each stage, Them has a list of actions it can take (e.g. Shoryuken, Grapple, Glomp, etc.). You press the left or right arrows to select the action, and the press space to initiate the action. The presence of mind it takes to not flub your inputs and execute your plan in very much Not Trivial. You will feel like butterfingers first, but if you just manage to get In the Zone, it feels so, so good.

Anyhow, looking at the game's scrapped content, I can't believe that I'm not the only person in this jam who wanted to riff on Freak da Cat's "act like a snake" button but didn't. Alas...

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October Twilight
by verasev

This is a tabletop RPG. The rulebook .pdf is 126 pages. Granted, most of that is stuff like weapon and monster definitions, but unfortunately I don't think I'll be playing this.

This game has a post-apocalyptic setting where the world ended in 1999 due to some supernatural nonsense driving people crazy and creating horrible monstrosities.

I don't really understand TTRPG mechanics enough to know what sets this apart, but the basic gameplay loop here seems to be that you have a safe home base, and you make excursions out of it to find more food, water, etc. so you can survive another day in the post-apocalypse.

This requires 12 d6 dice to play (is that normal or abnormal).

The real troll here is that this exposes my cultural illiteracy with respect to TTRPGs (shame on me).

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and with that, I've played every Oktrollberfest game.

Technically speaking, there's one more Oktrollberfest game that I haven't posted about yet, but nobody's finished playing it. It was a boardgame played on a Twitch stream, but it was taking so long that we couldn't finish it in one stream, and then the gamemaster was sick for a few days and we still haven't done a stream 2.

Feels weird being part of something... so ephemeral...