Zardy

Zardy is the titular antagonist of Zardy's Maze.

Visual Appearance
Zardy is a living scarecrow with glowing yellow eyes and a stitched mouth with a piece of wheat sticking out of it. He wears a black witch hat, black clothes with a neck cover that has yellow trimmings, as well as tan boots. He carries his signature weapon, a hoe, in his left hand.

Appearances
Zardy appears in the main game and in all of the challenges. In custom challenges, the number of Zardys is set to 1 and cannot be changed.

Behavior
Despite being the game's namesake, Zardy has a rather simple behavioral pattern. Zardy wanders the maze at a slow pace and constantly moves towards the player's location, where the audio cue of Zardy's hoe scraping against the ground alerts the player to his presence. If the player gets too close to Zardy, they will be struck fatally in the head by his hoe and killed, forcing them to restart. Zardy can be warded off by shining the flashlight on him for several seconds, which will force him to stay still and slowly begin to turn transparent until he disappears completely, where he will then later reappear on the map. Zardy also kills the player if they stay in the corn for too long, where the player's vision slowly fades to black until Zardy eventually kills them.

Strategy
Being able to make Zardy disappear with the flashlight makes him simple to deal with, but forces the player to make sure their flashlight has enough charge to do so. The largest threat he poses is forcing you to have to melt him if the player is trapped between him and another enemy, but even then he is still easy to deal with. Hiding in the corn does not work on Zardy, and he will just wait for the player to reemerge before killing them. If the player is playing without a flashlight, Zardy provides a significantly larger threat in long narrow pathways and will force the player to turn back or cut through the corn.

Trivia

 * Zardy appears in the Friday Night Funkin' mod V.S. Zardy, which was also worked on by SwankyBox.
 * Zardy was created long before the game during SwankyBox's childhood.
 * Zardy is the only enemy that can not be disabled in the challenge mode settings menu.
 * Zardy was previously called "Zahrada"