There's no time to waste apparently. If I don't get this queue size down now, somebody will try and make it hit page three. Even I can do better than that!
Not to mention, a number of already fresh releases for 2025 are upon us! I hope you like explicit content, because it's looking to be a very R-rated year if these initial uploads are anything to go by.
Plus, the usual assortment of recently streamed and recovered unpreserved worlds, with a bit of a WiL focus thanks to his substantial end of year contributions that ensure that it's gonna take a minute to get us back to a single page.
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“Kimchi Revolution” by applebaps, Gamma Lyrae (2025)
You are an anarcho-communist kimchi maker in a post-apocalypse. Make your kimchi and take it to various settlements. Establish human connections and explore the political and social landscape, questions of gender and how best to live and treat each other. Can your commune federate with everyone? Find out in KIMCHI REVOLUTION! Contains a plethora of things that need content warnings, and a consent form is included at the start detailing all of it. Made with a great deal of selfless and compassionate assistance from my partner, Gamma Lyrae. Thank you, love, for always taking the time to help me be better.
A new game from applebaps (creator of 2020's Food Fort) and partner Gamma Lyrae. This one has a number of content warnings attached to warrant its explicit content tag, which is explained both in game as well as in the file's feedback section.
“DADDY'S DORMITORY” by _catbutt_, PUNISH_PORNSTAR, suresh (2025)
Welcome to DADDY'S DORMITORY! An invitation to study under the tutelage of a famed philosophy professor gives you just the impetus you need to leave your childhood hometown behind and dorm at a distant college. Under the backdrop of a constant pop-punk party at the turn of the millennium, you will cultivate new relationships, experience the wild side of dormitory life, and perhaps even partake in a forward-thinking project with massive repercussions for all of humanity. Enjoy the latest from MBGS, a close-knit team of friends who seek to break new narrative ground and introduce unconventional themes to ZZT. Look out for our other hit ZZT titles, JEREMIAD, and MOTORBOAT, and please be excited for what we have in store for the future!
After a brief hiatus, the folks at MBGS return to bring us a new game with some gorgeous board designs and wild themes. Another explicit game, the specifics of which I do not yet know!
“Thoughts” by WiL (2025)
The capstone to WiL's uploading of a massive backlog of unfinished projects from roughly twenty-five years ago. A short essay about where these worlds came from, a failed attempt to publish them ages ago due to a hostile community, and pleas for others to come to terms with their early creations and share them with the world.
“El-Greco Games Visual/Audio Test (EGGVAT)” by WiL (1997)
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An audio/video test world which contains no audio. It does contain a hand-cranked FMV sequence of a walking stick figure powered by the player changing frames by moving between boards over and over! The purple board transition effect makes it rougher, but here's a gif of each frame instead!
“Spy Guy” by WiL (1997)
It is the year 2046 and World War III is in full swing. You are a spy whose mission is to assassinate the leaders of the "canine brotherhood". A mix of stealth, strange puzzles, and getting hints from "WiL", which of course stands for, "Watcher in Life". Thank goodness for this omniscient being from another world, as these puzzles ain't easy.
A very ambitious game for the time, and one that really showcases how even early on WiL recognized how powerful good writing could be in a ZZT game.
“HOTSHOT ZZT” by WiL (1998)
An action game divided into single screen levels, each dealing with a different aspect of your soul. These can be played in any order, and all of them need to be completed in order to cross the gate of victory. There's a cool idea here where having boosted soul components (wisdom, strength, patience, etc.) from finished stages can impact other challenges to give you an advantage.
Originally intended to be playable in 3D via Nickelodeon's Noggle 3D goggles which were given away in things like cereal boxes and lunchables. Incredible.
“Creation” by WiL (1998)
In addition to having an incredible quote about ZZT on its title screen, Creation is an excellent depiction of ZZTer's trying to do the most complex thing they can possibly think of with the program. In this case, it's a Sim Earth-esque life creation simulation. You begin by designing a planet by adding various components such as water, minerals, and gravity with the order and intensity of these leading to dozens of represented outcomes showing your planet and its chances of ever sustaining life.
There's a real neat idea at the core here, but everything is very picky making it hard to tell what, if anything, you're accomplishing until your planet is "done", with the majority of outcomes (understandably) being not good. This incomplete game has the most content if you choose to have a white planet as that's the only color to get a second file for additional work to be done after initial construction. Flipping through the possible worlds is a lot of fun, especially given how snarky the narrator can be.
“Goop” by WiL (1998)
A goopy puzzle game. WiL's incomplete and highly experimental efforts at designing puzzles. With next to no explanation, it's up to the player to figure out what the game wants on a given board, with a number of seemingly impossible requirements to fulfill. As it turns out, a lot of them are really original. The star to key puzzle is quite impressive in particular.
It suffers from being a tad obtuse (and you start out trapped?), and goes in a weird direction at the end with 3D MOVEMENT (changing walls to fakes to say you're flying over them). The goop was worth the wait though.
“Guerrila 2000” (1995)
One of those messy chaotic looking games where there doesn't seem to be any story until you're suddenly told to find evidence in the "cocaine room", and soon afterwards find yourself taking a teleporter over a moat of acid. Weird game to the say the least!
“Humble” by Alex Arrowsmith (1995)
Another wild game. A game so wild, that the author includes a note on how you can email him for the uncensored version, as apparently the uploader at AOL who first published the file to their archives didn't care for the content of the original. The game can get pretty gross with toilet humor, and pretty tacky with how your mother handles your father wanting a divorce. It ended up being kind of interesting for getting the author's opinions on mid-90s television, and a real obsession with secrets to uncover to get the true ending, which is just credits.
“Com Fight (v1.5)” by Syas669 (1996)
The most explosive ZZT game I've seen. A key-collecting game starting from a central hub where you need to have to survive a number of boards which tend to be littered with pre-lit bombs. Features a boss that you can't attack because they don't move and are surrounded with ricochets positioned so that bullets would deflect instead of hitting them.
“Game Collection #1” by Alex Ho (1996)
A single-screen game collection with two games. For once, one of these things was actually pretty functional. The first is a maze game that wants you to race to the exit faster than a timer measured by moving slime that seems impossible to beat, but has no penalty for time running out. The second is "Battle Pong" which is more of a basic ZZT shoot em up against an enemy with a lot more health than you. While neither game is the most exciting thing, you can beat them both, which counts for something.
“Puzzler's Hell (Demo, Corrupt)” by eJECTION13 (1998)
Another ambitious puzzle title! This one is tragically corrupt, so a number of passages simply cause ZZT to crash when taken, which is a real shame as the puzzles that are here seem solid, in particular for a game dated 1997. What you can play is a passage puzzle that requires knowledge of how ZZT handles walking from passage to passage, a very well executed puzzle to collect keys where stepping on forest tiles causes them to turn into walls afterwards, and a slider puzzle with buttons to flip between horizontal/vertical that I kind of gave up on very quickly.
