The subject of choice this time around is one that's rather personal to me. In my childhood, back when I would browse Duky Inc.'s ZZT archive (home of 287 ZZT games!), I came across this one with the funny name of "Joe Blow Socipoon" at just the right age to fall in love. It quickly became my favorite ZZT game for a number of reasons, some of which I could tell you then, and some of which I only really understand now.
It's not a game that I've ever heard anybody else ever talk about. Its author, froznfire has no other known releases. It's just a game that appeared from the ether one day, like a little gift just for me. Why, when I was in the fifth grade, I even ripped off this game's story (dramatically shortened and less violent) for a short writing assignment[1]. Nifty Land and Swell Land live rent free in my head.
But for all the games I've revisited over the years, I've yet to go back to this one. I don't think I've played it in the past twenty-five years. It's clearly a game that I liked that had little influence on or attention paid to by the ZZT community. It's also a game whose underlying simplicity in every aspect made me worried that if I ever did revisit it, I'd realize it was never any good in the first place. "Don't meet your heroes", as they say.
Well, the joke's on present day me, because my 10 year old self was right. This game is actually really good.
Joe Has A Little Bout With Amnesia
Right from the outset, you can tell that this is a game created by someone still fairly new to ZZT. It's not completely dire. The game doesn't start you on the title screen, leave you with yellow borders, or drop you in without establishing who you are or what your motivation is. Yet it certainly hasn't fallen too far from the tree that is Town of ZZT. The usual crossroad starting point is employed on a far less visually interesting scene than Town to be sure. It trades bright colors and distinct structures for a minimalist outline and some text to make your decision of where to go more involved than picking your favorite cardinal direction.
Graphics are admittedly not froznfire's strong suit. Nearly every board looks like this. Solid walls of a single color are the sole component of most of the game's architecture, which makes for some very scant looking boards that rarely inspire confidence in the rest of the game. It's fortunate that ZZTers are forced to quickly accept that all but the prettiest creations are going to look "ugly" to the uninitiated.
Later on, froznfire really embraces this low-effort style, with one of the game's many little author's notes discussing the convenient color-coded sectors of the world making it a lot easier to pick colors. With over sixty boards of gameplay, minimizing time on graphics helps froznfire to actually finish a game this lengthy that one presumes is their first release.
Joe Blow does give you some quick motivation. Players wake up in a strange place with no idea who they are or how they've gotten here. Yes, it's an Isekai. And yes, you will eventually learn that you are none other than Joe Blow Socipoon. I will opt to spoil this "reveal" and write "Joe" rather than "the currently nameless protagonist". And I will do so with no regrets.
Players hopefully pay attention to the opening text and head to the store first to get a little more information. Otherwise, they'll just be playing boards and grabbing things off the ground for no apparent reason. The shopkeeper, though protective of his full set of keys on display, is willing to help Joe out, allowing him to take whatever he wants from the secret room in the back, including a spare white key.
Notably, the store doesn't function as a store. froznfire's skills are still a work in progress, and a number of shortcuts are used throughout the game to carefully maneuver around the things they don't yet know how to do.
Unlike barefaced solutions to avoid programming like the steal store, froznfire acts more like a stage magician (or perhaps con artist), creating illusions to trick players into thinking the game is more complex than it really is. You don't get to grab the items off the store shelves. You'd have to pay for those. The backroom in turn gives players their starting supplies thanks to a good Samaritan who still runs a store, even if Joe doesn't happen to shop there. There's no need to purchase supplies if you can get them freely elsewhere.
These illusions occur regularly throughout the game. One aspect I only noticed now thanks to SolidHUD's extra information is that at no point in the game is a single flag ever set. This isn't too rare with worlds by newcomers who work around their lack of understanding. Here froznfire leans on keys and doors as a way to still tell a story, but other times he just assumes that the player will progress through the game as expected, doing the sensible thing.
For the first chapter, froznfire condenses the Town experience into a fire hose of activity. If you wish to reach the next chapter of the game, you'll need to find not five purple keys, but all seven colors of key. Seven keys sounds like enough for an entire adventure on its own, so it can be a bit of surprise how quickly you collect them. Nifty Land consists of ten boards, meaning every board has a key to collect except the starting hub, the front of the shop, and the "teleportation center" that froznfire uses as an alternate exit for screens where turning back would either be a slog (a maze) or outright impossible (a board where you have to dodge pushers that will eventually block the room's entrance).
Unlike Town's palace, collecting the keys isn't the end of Joe's journey, merely the beginning. A dimensional tunnel awaits on the other side of the locked gates, sending Joe out of Nifty Land and into a new place known as Swell Land.
Here the game begins in earnest, letting froznfire's greater ambitions be realized rather than stick to key hunting. A stunned observer of Joe exiting the dimensional tunnel speaks with Joe to figure out what he just witnessed. According to Swell Land legend, its people arrived from Nifty Land thousands of years ago, however there is no evidence of this, and many consider Nifty Land to be a myth. Joe considers himself living proof, however Pedro points out that with no other witnesses, nobody would believe them.
A detour to the library at Pedro's suggestion teaches players a bit about the worlds they're traveling through, along with the dimensional tunnels and the research being done on them. Why, there's even to be a test of sending a scientist through one today! What are the odds?
Joe latches on to the idea of proving Nifty Land's existence surprisingly strongly, with discovering his own identity and origin taking a backseat as he searches for a Mejor Miguel, a researcher who might help him find a way to confirm Nifty Land is real. The game goes from single screen action challenges to a much more relaxed design. This even extends to the graphics, where Swell Land is split into color-coded sectors and everything is colored to match. froznfire frees themselves of even having to pick colors, letting the sectors do the work.
Joe's walk through the much larger town is now much more linear as there are no more keys to collect. There's only a single path through the town which keeps Joe always moving forward save for the occasional diversion into buildings like "Super Crap Mart" where an item Joe shows interest in has just been stolen, adding "catch the thief" to his to-do list for the day. Also ahead of finding out his identity.
Danger like the lion gauntlet in Nifty Land is pushed aside. Telling a story becomes froznfire's #1 priority, with the only real obstacle being a construction site puzzle that revolves around blocking blink walls to make a safe path forward.
At the end of the road, Joe enters a café where after a bit of a runaround he finds Miguel whom he manages to convince of his plight. Miguel mostly offers him advice, suggesting finding another tunnel to perhaps travel through, and showing a good sense of priorities by focusing more on helping Joe with his amnesia.
While good intentioned, his plan for the amnesia thing is a bit silly. The prison sector has a fingerprinting station where they can identify anyone, Joe included. Entry to the prison requires Joe to meet up with a forger that can provide him with a phony badge to get inside. The search for the forger is over as soon as it begins, as not only is Miguel acquainted, but the forger is also sitting in the same café.
To claim a badge Joe needs to answer a riddle, which is really just some very basic trivia where the answers form the numeric combination to the forger's vault. Once satisfied that Joe isn't an idiot, the forger hands over the badge, and escorts him to the subway to travel to the prison.
After a er... conflict with security (tigers) at the subway station, Joe arrives in prison, finds the fingerprinting station, and gets his prints taken. The verdict comes in. Name: Joe Blow Socipoon. Residence: Earth. Yet players don't get to celebrate for long, as Joe continues to search for why he came to Nifty Land, how to prove its existence, and how to get back to Earth.
So it's fortunate for him that when gawking at prisoners in the next room he meets up with a pioneer of dimensional tunnel research that's being imprisoned for revealing too much information about the tunnels. Their function was intended to be kept under wraps from the public, until Mr. Jorge Gonzales spilled some information. There's a quick prison break, that goes south quickly with the researcher being recaught by the head of prison security and escorted out at gun point leaving Joe without any real leads.
The game gets a little confusing at this point since Jorge will never be seen again. Joe just kind of forgets about him. While Joe should be stumped about what to do next, for the player the answer is made obvious. The guard drops some keys, and the player opens the relevant doors simply because that's the only thing they can do. Joe kind of ditches the guy, and ends up in "Crime City", pursuing the thief to their vault. Everyone in Joe Blow has a vault, so this shouldn't be a surprise.
There's an agreement where if Joe can survive the vault and reach the exit, then the thief will give him the stolen "Super Neat Item". While Joe wanted it early on for its ability to create excessive amounts of ammunition quickly, the thief who stole it did so to collect money from a scientist that plans to turn the device into a bomb to blow up Swell Land!
The vault itself doesn't have much to it, though it is certainly long enough thanks to a massive passage maze that makes up the bulk of the tower containing it. There's a "fight" with an economy sized worm which ticks the box of another new ZZTer being unable to resist making a giant centipede. At the top of the building, Joe reaches the Super Neat Item, however the scientist teleports in and steals a critical component from it. This leads to the final chapter of the game of discovering the scientist's whereabouts and putting a stop to their plan.
It's a pretty short chapter though. The thief gives you the name of the scientist, you head to the research facility where he works, find his grand plan to destroy Swell Land just after he'll leap into a tunnel to Nifty Land sitting opened on his computer, and then take a shortcut also mentioned in the document to the tunnel experiment to confront him and save Swell Land.
froznfire's coding is just competent enough to carry the game to its conclusion, so players that make it to the finale won't be shocked when their opponent doesn't move, only slowly throws out stars until they've shot a handful of times, dropping the remote detonator for the explosive device and making Joe a hero to the people.
In the end, Joe declares the tunnels too risky for people to use, takes some of the scientist's explosives and detonates every last one. He is then asked why he didn't go back to Earth, coming up with a lie on the spot to cover up his stupid mistake and proclaim that he wants to live in Swell Land forever. And so he does, being placed in charge of security and offered a starting salary of 5,000 gems per month. Hooray for the mayor. Hooray for Joe Blow Socipoon.
Duct Tape And Dreams
froznfire's game is enjoyable, competently made, and impressive not based on what it does, but on what manages to do without. I've seen my share of ZZT worlds by authors with little to no grasp of ZZT-OOP's basics, and these games usually suffer for it. It feels clumsy to have a scroll apologize and tell you to let these tigers kill you instead of using #endgame. It's a bit awkward to enter a room and have everybody inside speak at once. While Joe Blow isn't as dire as some games have been, froznfire avoids using a lot of basic techniques that allow for a more natural control of player progression, as well as methods to better handle players that attempt actions frozn is unable to account for.
Perhaps the best example of this is when players arrive in Swell Land. Pedro stands out as some of the only color on the board, and players are inclined to explore the board they're on before heading somewhere else. Pedro's suggestion of getting some useful info from the library then draws players' attention there.
When you're done with your reading, there's no READBOOK flag set. Pedro runs #ZAP TOUCH during the first conversation. froznfire is left to assume (and hope) that players do what they're told, and only speak with him again after going to the library.
Going by the actual to see what interactions are forced to occur to progress, it turns out Joe can pop out of the portal and ignore both Pedro and the library entirely, blazing past them to head deeper into Swell Land with no clue of what's going on. froznfire's game is a story first, and so they're probably not wrong to make the assumption players will do as expected. If a player is ignoring any text they can, there's not much left to get out of Joe Blow, with the experience being willfully spoiled instead.
When locked doors get involved, that's froznfire putting their foot down and demanding the player do as they decree. The game's first chapter is it's most Town-like, tasking Joe with collecting their own complete set of keys and taking them to the "Gate of Seven Keys". froznfire will not permit anything else.
This board shows a number of things that appealed to me about the game when I was younger. Firstly, the gate itself makes sure that opening it feels like an event, as opposed to dropping off purple key after purple key. The pushers and sliders make for a fancy framing around Joe's goal, and ensure that you take the more satisfying approach of opening all the doors at once. The sound produced by so many doors opening in a row is a beepy sound of triumph.
A little extra buildup is inserted via scroll for the final door too. You simultaneously get the satisfaction of blasting through a bunch of doors as well as the more special moment of opening the final door.
There's some more appealing design with the green key puzzle. It's built up via the text as opposed to just being there. The puzzle is hardly one at all in terms of difficulty, but it certainly feels original.
Yes, all you do is walk up the gap where the spaces happen to align. It's neat though! When players interact with and navigate text elements in ZZT, it's rare for that text to actually be a message written on the board rather than just a way to get some characters on screen without using dedicated objects. This puzzle makes the text as much a part of the world Joe is exploring as it is to present information to you at the keyboard.
froznfire excels at this kind of light puzzle design. Joe Blow features quite a few small puzzles, all of which are built up as being far more difficult than they actually are. To a young me, this was perfect. Many classic ZZT worlds ground to a halt when I'd run into puzzles that were just too much to handle then. I could never beat Town thanks to The Rube Board, or accomplish much of anything in Nightmare. Joe Blow was approachable, taking a much more kid-friendly design than most, allowing me to enjoy the game fully.
The initial chapter's key collecting features this instance of a puzzle that isn't quite what it seems. Pushing the bomb down the chute suggests timing is key, but pushing it immediately will still end with the bomb snugly tucked under the big wall of breakables. Players need to realize that the bomb is just part of the puzzle, and that they need to be over by the pushers to squeeze through a gap before they push themselves too far south, blocking off access to the key.
...Or perhaps that's not the intended solution at all! Maybe the the chute is a red and white herring, with an alternative way through being the intended method. Push the bomb over to the breakables yourself, ignoring the conveyors entirely and the blast radius will be enough to blow up the big wall, without harming the one that blocks the horizontal pusher. This allows Joe to go around and grab the key at his leisure!
I completely missed this as I played, and really am left wondering if this technique is an oversight or froznfire being more clever than I gave them credit for.
Even that store in Nifty Land right at the beginning of the game has its own little puzzle. This kind of block pushing puzzle has doubtlessly shown up in dozens of games before it, and I imagine many will associate it with something like A Link To The Past. For me, this is where I first ran into it, and so to this day this specific arrangement of blocks is the Joe Blow puzzle. When I streamed creating The Mars Rover, when it came time to design a puzzle board, what else would I put right at the start?
This board might not look like the construction site the purple object claims it to be, but it does include another basic puzzle. Again, what you need to do is obvious: use the provided boulders to block off some rapid-fire blink walls. With this one, froznfire hopes you'll second guess yourself (I sure did). As you slide the main set of boulders down, the one you had to push to allow the lower pusher the chance to move gets blocked off.
While it may look like that's the end, success isn't out of reach. The last boulder in the bottom row then allows you to free the vertical slider, with the tiny jut in the bottom of the chamber intentionally allowing you to block the final two rows and push the last boulder west so you can enter the lower portion of the room.
Although the game quickly finds a voice of its own after the first chapter, setting aside Town-style gaming, I suppose one can't help wanting to make a bank vault of their very own.
By this point, I've seen more than my fair share of bank vaults where the author fails to secure them properly. Some let players see the inner mechanism, allowing them to discover the combination by manually lining up boulders. Some let you input beyond the maximum digit, going so far as to let the player into the mechanism itself! froznfire's design is fortunately up to code.
They do depart from the usual method of finding the combination though. Joe isn't told the combination outright. He is given a riddle, and told the answer is the combination.
It's trivia ideal for fourth graders, testing their English, geography, and sports knowledge at extremely basic levels. Well, until you find yourself wondering if you're supposed to count "Y" as a vowel or not here. (You aren't.)
For one final puzzle, the game goes all out when Joe has to raid a thief's tower/vault to steal back a stolen item before it's used to blow up the world.
...It's a passage maze. Listen, they can't all be winners.
Try as they might froznfire can't make this part of the game fun. Maybe that's my anti-maze bias showing. I don't know.
What I do know, is that this is seven boards of collecting a full set of keys and ascending to the top of the tower with not a single obstacle to add the least bit of excitement to the process.
That being said, froznfire did at least try their best, experimenting with the format in a way that makes the maze go by a lot quicker than it might have. His failed experiment is admirable, and despite the big frown on my face I can't deny that this is possibly the best passage maze ZZT has to offer.
The trick is in the labels. Rather than randomly pick passages and get dropped off who knows where, players can use the numeric labels to know which floor they're going to be taken to.
Having the boards labeled with floors, and passages labeled, allows you to get a more helpful goal than "I saw a blue key". You can hurry things along by using the passage colors, instead saying "I need to reach the purple passage on floor seven or the green passage on floor six". The connections between floors are mapped out accurately enough that finding the last key is like being on one of the upper levels of hell rather than the depths. You'd rather not be, but it could be so much worse.
The inaccuracies too are surprisingly minor. Many a ZZTer has incorrectly assumed that ZZT will place players on a passage the connects back to the board they came from rather than the actual rule of finding the lower-rightmost passage of the same color, disregarding destinations entirely. Only a single floor doubles up on a color. Thankfully the two can both be reached from one another, so if you're looking out for it you may catch the mistake on your own.
The other issue I noticed is that a cyan passage takes players to floor four, without there being a match at its destination. This means players will wind up wherever they last were on the board, which may or may not be a good thing. (The player's default location would see them trapped, but the opening portion of the maze is a few linear passages so you'll go through the fourth floor before it could be an issue.)
For a grand finale of a puzzle, the sheer scale of it does make it stand out considerably more than its earlier brethren. It's not the ideal way to spend so many of your last moments with the game, but it's impossible to deny froznfire's idea of what a passage maze should be is miles ahead of anything else. Early on, it's almost kind of fun, with new keys turning up at a steady pace. It's only at the end where it starts to drag. I wouldn't recommend anyone put a passage maze in their own games, but if you must, this is the one to emulate. Had froznfire been a little more OOP-savy, perhaps instead of keys there could have been buttons to press and a gentle "find four out of seven to pass". Given the era of the game though, I think something that generous towards players is little more than a modern daydream.
- [1] As long as I'm confessing my childhood plagiarism, a year or two later I ripped off It's The End Of The World! as well. It got read in front of the class and was a big hit.
