Submission #8179: Samsara's Flash Peasant's Quest in 01:00.08

throw baby

The SWF was taken from Flashpoint.

Filename: peasantsquest61.swf
CRC32: E3BCC1FD
MD5: 500A217E413094E90C45FA023D1DE3B2

Peasant's Quest was released when I was in high school. I don't even need to continue the Haha Funney Jokez first paragraph bit, the fact that this game is almost 20 years old and the fact that I'm almost 20 years past high school is enough humor for one entire submission text.

People all the time be asking me why I talk like a bunch of dumb animal characters, and Homestar Runner is a big reason for that. The other big reason is neurodivergence, but let's not get into that right now. Despite extremely inconsistent updates due to the fact that The Brothers Chaps are incredibly talented and incredibly busy individuals, H*R is a product that's been an extremely consistent part of my life, my humor, and occasionally sometimes I watch an old SBemail every now and then. Naturally, for a site and world built entirely in Flash, there's been more than a few fun games and even a couple of ones that aren't as fun! I'll let you decide which games are which, but I'll just say there's a reason I didn't submit Homestar Talker.

It's because I didn't think of it until now.

Peasant's Quest is an ode to old Sierra-type adventure-type game-type games, starring you as Rather Dashing, Trogdor as Trogdor, and A Baby as Something You Are Able To Throw. It's full of the same wit, charm, and warm chit as any other Homestar Runner product, and it's a game I remember fondly from my teenage years, and you're damn right I still hate the fact that I can say that and have it be 100% accurate. Trogdor burninates your thatched-roof cottage, so you go on a quest to Not Slay him. Sorry, spoilers.

This run uses the Kerrek glitch, which is performed by pressing Enter (i.e, sending a blank text command) at the same time the Kerrek tries to pound you, continuing my recent tradition of having at least one April Fools' Day submission involve pounding in some way. By doing this, you are able to invisibly walk offscreen after this with completely disabled collision, and go anywhere you want on the map without such silly things as boundaries or corporeality. The only drawback is that the game still thinks you're in the process of being game over'd, so pretty much any textbox will lead to that happening. Given that this is a minute long run, the drawback isn't exactly major in any way.

While this isn't a long or overly complicated game by any means, I feel it's worth explaining the typical path a player takes through the game. Normally, to progress through the game, you need to become an accurate peasant. You start off not looking like one, you start off not smelling like one, and you start off not Being On Fire like one. You need to acquire a peasant robe to look like one, you need to defeat the Kerrek and obtain its belt to smell like one, and you need to Be On Fire to Be On Fire like one. Or, you can MAKE FRIENDS WITH KERREK and skip all of that. Try that in your own game!

Once you are peasant-passing, you can get past the knight guarding the entrance to Trogdor's lair and go through some T E X T A D V E N T U R E P A R K O U R to make it to the three keepers, who ask you questions, and getting them right and/or giving them certain items will earn you three items that are necessary to Not Defeat Trogdor. Sorry, spoilers. Once you earn the helmet, shield, and sword, you can finally enter Trogdor's lair.

The glitch changes the route significantly, as it skips everything up to the third keeper. The beginning's fairly simple, it starts by just walking over to where the Kerrek is to set up the glitch. The Kerrek can spawn in on the first time you enter the screen, but going back and forth to spawn it in doesn't lose any time since we have to go down anyway. After getting glitched, we go straight to the penultimate screen of the game and talk to the third keeper. This triggers an autosave, so we can restart the game and load it here to get the game back to normal, while also suddenly becoming an accurate peasant with the potential of Not Defeating Trogdor. Sorry, spoilers.

The end of the game is completely normal. Walk right, use sword, talk to Trogdor, and get burninated.

I'm going to estimate this is 8 seconds faster than the RTA record, because I am still too lazy to time it out accurately. There are a couple subtle movement tricks here and there to save frames (all 12 per second of them!), but the majority of the time save is because the RTA run takes a game over to deactivate the glitch instead of restarting the game entirely.

I had a lot of trouble making both this and Where's an Egg? and literally 100% of it was my fault. If you hear me complaining about it, just know that my complaints are directed at Me, Samsara, and not anyone or anything else. Also, please remind me not to disable sound in libTAS. I have no idea why sound was disabled in the first place, but boy howdy did that cause a lot of headaches!

Thank you for enjoying my backup option to my backup option for AFD 2023.

feos: Claiming for judging.

Samsara: Cancelling due to sync issues with the reset.