Zarya-1: Mystery on the Moon – how to achieve a good ending

This little guide explains how to get the best possible ending ("Successful" score instead of just "Partially successful"). If you just need a solution, it's in section 3.

However, if you want to understand how the game works, feel free to check out the other sections as well.

1. Introduction

It is important that I clarify that this solution was not discovered by me, but the credit goes to ArcticWolf, who first published it on the forum. Thanks also to Blake Belladonna, whose post gave me the energy to do the last tests and write this tutorial. 🙂

Unfortunately, the two guides that had been posted on the forum at the time of writing made the process seem more complicated than it needed to be, with each missing a potential point of failure. So I'm trying to kick things up a notch. But my contribution is to try all the options along the way, identify which options are really important, remove the ones that aren't, and post the result here, in a place where people hope to find it easily.

2. The benefits of failure

I recommend going through the game before various failures, exploring the many paths before resorting to this guide. The game is very well written (in my opinion), and that goes for the paths to failure, which I also found enjoyable to read. Furthermore, much interesting background information can only be gleaned from paths that lead to failure or, at best, "partial success." The "success" path is actually one of the least informative.

However, if you're having a hard time finding a good ending on your own and it's starting to seem like a chore, feel free to use this guide. The developers of Zarya 1 have hidden this ending behind several completely arbitrary decisions, and none of them give any indication as to why one choice will lead to a "successful" ending and the others will lock you out. In fact, two of the decisions you have to make can be considered clearly suboptimal in the context of your mission. Zarya-1 is not a game where you have to find an "intelligent" route to solve problems, but rather a game where you have to go through several decision trees until you find the combination that (without being able to predict it) leads to a better ending than the others.

3. How to achieve a good ending

To get to the end of "Success", you need to make the following six decisions (all others are irrelevant):

1. 1. When the team asks you which way to go down into the crater, ask them, "What's to the left?", then instruct them to follow the broken path they find there.

1. 1. When you decide who should handle the yellow door, have Savvy open it. You can also choose Chase, but in that case you have to ask him “Are you sure?

1. 1. When asked if you should use the elevator shaft or do something else, don't choose the elevator shaft.

1. 1. When you have the torch, open the door to the break room.

1. 1. After an encounter with an alien, select "Out! Now".

1. 1. When Savvy offers to disassemble the buggy, he lets her find another way to get it into the ship.

Making decisions 2, 5 or 6 differently will lead to the death of your team and the failure of the mission. Making decision 3 or 4 differently will take you off track, where the best possible outcome is only a "partial success." Taking another decision 1 (ironically) will also kill you if you tell your team to “take the safe route”, but will simply make it impossible to achieve “success” otherwise.

Any other decisions you make throughout the game do not affect the ending, although some of them provide additional information that may be interesting. Most of the decisions are mere trivia: they keep you hooked, but they don't really have any effect other than sparking a few extra lines of dialogue.

4. How the game works

As I and others searched for a good ending, we looked at many things that later turned out to be unimportant. But some of the recommendations around this time seem hard to beat, so I'll try to clear things up a bit. Apologies for the wall of text.

One of the most common misconceptions is that you have to "rush" and be careful with decisions that take time. In fact, the game can't keep track of time at all. I still see various recommendations of "don't waste time on the sergeant's last rites", "keep the team running when he calls for a break", or "don't analyze foreign material", all to "save time". But when I tried it in practice, none of these solutions had any impact. You might get a few extra lines of dialogue depending on which option you choose, but that's about it.

There are some situations in the game where procrastination leads to death, but that's not because the game keeps track of time, it's because the writer has decided, "I'm going to make this decision a dead end." Exit".

The second common misconception is that decisions in a game can have long-term consequences. This is a bit more difficult to explain. Basically, from the tests I've done, the game doesn't remember any of your past decisions. It just plays the related pre-written scenes, without recording your choices (or, in programmer terminology, without storing information in variables that can be accessed later).

Let's take the yellow door scene as an example. There are two ways to get in: Chase can open the door with a blast, and Savvy can bypass the electronics. As Chase approaches, the entire upper part of the facility loses its atmosphere, but the airlock remains intact. But no matter which option you choose, the game always proceeds to the same next scene (with your team about to enter the facility and the option to check the radar first).

Although venting of the atmosphere seems like a pretty important distinction, it's never really mentioned later on. And there's a reason for that: since both decisions lead to the same next scene, and the game doesn't store data about your decisions, it doesn't know which decision you made, and therefore can't refer to that decision in any way later.

Of course, there are decisions that have a long-term impact, such as the path that is chosen to descend into the crater. The game can handle that because those decisions lead to different cutscenes. When you're (for example) in a warehouse, the game may refer to the fact that you chose the risky descent into the crater because it's the only way to get to the warehouse scenes. But once two or more decisions lead to the same scene, the game has no idea how you got there, and thus cannot reference any events or decisions that were different before you got to that scene.

This is noticeable throughout the game. For example, many of the decision pathways converge in the laboratory where the alien substance is first seen. This means that whatever decision you make before you get to that scene will have nothing to do with what follows. For the same reason, none of your conversations with team members have any effect on gameplay, because the game immediately forgets your words as soon as you move on to the next scene.

Many decisions that players (me included) might have considered important (eg, bury the sergeant, analyze the alien substance, turn on the lights, be courteous to your team, spot the buggy at the entrance, etc.) have turned out to be unimportant. important. The game design is not sophisticated enough to work as players expect, in fact it is extremely primitive. I suppose this can be attributed to the writer for making many decisions seem significant, when in reality they have no impact.