forrester was made in 2005, and i encountered it maybe a year or two ago, but it’s been on my mind lately because of the zzt games i’ve been playing. forrester is a game for megazeux – a game creation tool that zzt inspired – that has been made to resemble a zzt game in look, sound and play (the super zzt games in particular).

forrester – whose name may derive from “and the forests will echo with laughter,” a line from stairway to heaven that appears in both the first and the last of tim sweeney’s zzt episodes – is a game about memory: about nostalgia, not in the simple dumb sense of developers using “retro game” chic to get players to associate a game with their childhood favorites, but of whether some of the things we carry may be weighing us down; while others are reminders of what time has proven true. it’s about when comfort becomes safety and safety becomes a trap.

a message has never fit its medium so well: to put that another way, no story has ever been better suited to being a megazeux game. where else to raise questions of the value of nostalgia and the danger of the familiar than in a “classic” adventure for an archaic game creation kit near the end of its lifespan? this game is the product of a kind of decadence.

you’ll need a copy of megazeux to run forrester.