With the reveal of six out of ten of The Duskbloods‘ cast of ridiculous dorks, many people have immediately fallen in love with one in particular: Zork.
It’s not immediately obvious at a glance, but Zork is a sapient bird of some sort, walking on two legs. He is wearing an enormous armor-like dive suit, because apparently he hails from deep in the ocean. He attacks enemies with a big, slow undersea cable and a speargun, and he has a special ability that lets him fire himself forward like a rocket.
Also, when he wins a game, he apparently sips blood from a chalice using his beak “like a mosquito.” Great!
This comes from creator Hidetaka Miyazaki himself, speaking to GameSpot about the origins of Zork’s character and why he is the way he is. According to Miyazaki, Zork was inspired by Ultraman and Ultra Seven, and was intended as a less-traditional vampire character than the Victorian Gothic-style folks you might see elsewhere. “I think Zork is basically as far off to the side as you can get, where he’s a bit of a wild card,” Miyazaki said. “It’s always fun to have characters like that, and there’s always people who like characters like that. We had mentioned earlier that some of the maps take place in different eras, so we wanted to have something that wasn’t frozen in the Victorian Gothic era, but something that went past the Industrial Revolution as well, and I think Zork is probably the far end of that. [He’s] very different from what you would consider a traditional vampire, but he definitely has his place in the game, for sure.
“I really want the multiplayer landscape of this game [to] almost feel like a festival. You have all these different kinds of characters, they feel and look very different from each other, and [they all come] together and it [feels chaotic]. Zork is definitely a piece of that—just a weird guy who’s in the midst of it, right?”
When asked if Zork’s beak, which protrudes out from his suit, is for drinking blood, Miyazaki said it was. “If you ever win with Zork, you’ll get a cutscene that will probably reveal that a little bit more. [His] beak thing extends like a straw, and sucks [blood] up like a mosquito. That’s probably another Ultraman reference of some sort, some sort of monster.”
Some of you may have seen such a cutscene this weekend during the Network Test (I didn’t), though there were far fewer Zorks than I expected. Most of my matches were filled with Laylas, as players figured out how strong her sniper rifle was and how easy it was to accidentally launch your Zork missile off a cliff.
I’m looking forward to The Duskbloods‘ actual launch, when we’ll finally get some more weird lore on all of these strange guys and figure out what their whole deal is. The Network Test was appropriately cryptic as to why a senator can turn into a dinosaur, why Bloodhand Jan is still in his pajamas, what the hell Zork is even supposed to be (bird? mosquito? sea monster?), and why they’re all fighting each other in a gothic-inspired town. I’m sure I won’t understand a bit of what’s going on, but that’s the fun of a FromSoftware game.