Ascii Spy

Today's subject comes courtesy of a high-rolling patron. They provided a number of games they thought would make for a good Closer Look, and this one is the one that grabbed my attention. ASCII Spy is one of a handful of ZZT games revolving around the thrilling adventures of a secret agent, a theme that could certainly be the basis of a high quality game, but one where I can't think of any such examples. The spy genre is instead loaded with the works of young authors making story-light games that don't do much with the concept, or games whose stories are unintentional comedies. Spies get into situations with overwhelming odds and somehow find a way to beat them. They're classy. They're cool. They smoke cigarettes.

But in ZZT, they get monkeys to kill guards, spend most of their time in elevators, and form uneasy truces with the enemy in order to prevent a shootout while they infiltrate.

ASCII Spy continues the trend. This time, with a very notable name attached. This is the first release by none other than Quantum P., maintainer of z2, creator of Operation: GAMMA VELORUM, and ZZT-OOP wizard. This doesn't make the game's flaws a disappointment. If anything, it's more amusing to see the events of this game play out and draw parallels to the much more tightly designed games he'd create afterwards. It makes this game a treat rather than another shoddy adventure by someone who released a game out of nowhere, and never came back.

It's not the craziest spy game I've seen. That's a title that won't be easily taken from Secret Agent Chronicles. But what it lacks in unintended humor, it more than makes up for with some genuine attempts to impress players via numerous puzzles and several unique engines. Players are offered a strange ride through a strange world, with many stops along the way to appreciate the roots of one of ZZT's most prolific of programmers.

Hardly Brief Mission Briefing

The game begins in the president's office, where a messenger burst in to share the bad news. They look at a map of the world and nothing looks amiss, until the messenger says to input the command "locate enemy". Upon doing so, the blob representing western Europe and northern Africa turns red.

Folks. It's terrorists. And not just any terrorists. Communist terrorists.

To put a stop all this, the CIA's newest agent is brought in. As with any good secret agent man, you have no name. What do you have, are the spy skills necessary to take on several missions around the globe as delegated by the president in order to stop the terrorists. The game revolves around this structure of being briefed, shipped out, and returning to be briefed on the next mission. It nicely divides the game up into chapters, keeping most missions from ever intersecting, playing more like individual episodes.

In broader terms the missions are fairly similar. Several involve finding an enemy base and then blowing it up. Others involve hunting down specific people. Some focus around vehicles, giving players the chance to pilot a submarine and even fly into outer space to deal with a spy satellite. A young Quantum clearly prioritizes delivering unique experiences, preventing it from becoming a repetitive series of near-identical missions. For a first release, this grander design helps keep what will be a flawed game interesting at the very least.

Each of the game's seven missions are standalone, with little plot development happening mid-mission. The terrorists are simply bad guys, and while communism is brought up in a few briefings, it's generally very vague what the terrorists' goals even are. It's a simple good versus evil setup, with a hint of pre-9/11 American patriotism serving as your motivation to bring them down. This same simple conflict would persist even into GAMMA VELORUM, where one of the most frequent criticisms in the game's reviews amounted to the lack of established stakes, and generic villains who are evil because the game tells you they are, rather than showing it by letting them have any success or declare a manifesto.

Without much to connect the game from mission to mission, the tone of the game is probably sillier the than serious threats of nukes, experimental weapons, and traitorous spies would suggest. Quantum leans in to it. NPCs, whether terrorist or civilian, are a comedic level of oblivious to the world around them. The places the player visits in town have plenty of little gags scattered throughout as well. Everything is about as serious as the original ZZT worlds where you have your corrupt mayors and you also have your hot dog stands just outside the gates of Hell. There's some awareness of how silly it all is, though it doesn't come off as a comedy.

The first mission introduces players to exploration, without asking much of them. You arrive in town via airport filled with weirdos. A distracted programmer playing Space Invaders, a potato chip salesman, a scientist whose new acid quickly melts him away, and a shape-shifting magician. These are the kinds of folks you can expect to find throughout the game. They come off less like every day people, and more like they would show up to make or break your day in The Sims.

The town itself is the smallest in the game, and certainly makes it obvious where you need to go next. Later towns hide the base and include a number of dud buildings to enter for hints on where to go or sometimes just weird things Quantum came up with. For this first mission, the distractions are kept to a minimum to ensure players get where they need to be.

What little can be explored is quickly realized to be pointless. The one other building has a ball that runs around. The park has a few people enjoying nature, ...save for the crashed car that swerved off the road leaving a trail of dug up grass in its wake. Then in the top corner is a genuine ZZT Syndromes textbook case of a Try Me trap. If you're tempted by the ammo (or wanting to know what the scroll says), you can enter an obvious one-way transporter...

...and enjoy your five ammo and game over.

Being Quantum's first release, it's not too shocking that he would want to exercise this new power he has over the people playing his creation. While this instance makes the trap obvious, there will be more moments where you'll need to load a saved game, hopefully one that is before the error in judgment/reading Quantum's mind was made. My playthrough got quite accustomed to looking up solutions and having to ?ZAP away walls in order to not lose significant process.

The infiltration mission doesn't go very well either. Attempting to sneak around the side is an instant game over as guards that aren't visible kill you on the spot. The front door is actually your way in, but it too does not inspire confidence in your abilities, as it means walking into a group of guards and immediately being brought in for questioning. Players can also talk to the lone guard outside the fence, where they'll be ordered to step inside the building through the front door, or be killed if you dawdle.

Your character is supposed to be the new agent, and it certainly shows. Heck, when you first get off the plane you can't even remember what your mission is. You enter the terrorist base solely because it's there.

The bulk of these missions rely on situations created for Quantum's two early loves, puzzles and engines. You can really get a sense for the kind of games Quantum would go on to make in later years from this first attempt here. Immediately you need to escape some bindings and then make a getaway when all the guards fall asleep during the leader's speech. (See, it can't be that serious of a game.) You're prompted for which way to pull on the ropes to loosen them, either freeing yourself or adding another entry on the list of instant deaths as you suffocate yourself.

While rummaging through some drawers for documents and paper clips, another guard discovers you and escorts you into the jail.

The escape sequence is then followed up by another escape sequence. This time the classic ZZT prison escape. A patrolling guard endlessly circles the cells, offering instant death should they come in contact with the player. The way to survive is awkward series of dying, learning what you did wrong, and then trying again with knowledge you couldn't have had the first time. Attempts to take down the guard from behind or with ammo given by a prisoner are automatic failures. Instead, you need to find the correct cell where a prisoner will give you a key (as well as the ammo) to the next room, and then talk with a second prisoner to get a club to hit the guard with. By ZZT standards, that's pretty typical.

Quantum's implementation turns it into a fiasco of game overs. The prisoner who gives you the key may convince you to open the door forward immediately where you'll be caught not in a uniform and killed. The prisons who do nothing only say "Hello" when spoken with. This includes the prisoner who gives you the club! In order to get the club from them you have to talk to the key prisoner first. With no indication that this person is special in any way, I had to look up how to get the club, not thinking that one of the ten seemingly identical NPCs would say something else now that I had the key. The others certainly don't!

These leads to two boards that are so interesting that I'm not even going to mention their specifics yet. The first contains game's best puzzle, surpassing anything else the game will offer by a significant margin. The second, sadly, contains the game's worst puzzle, surpassing anything else the game will offer by a significant margin. The two boards send shockwaves through the rest of the game, with each new puzzle eliciting fear or excitement until players get a grip of what to really expect from the game rather than these yet unmentioned outliers.

So instead we skip ahead slightly to a room of ruffians (not pictured) and unmoving guards that wake up when the agent takes some papers from a desk. Documents are the typical objective of these missions, and their contents are always left unstated. They're a signifier that it's time to leave, though the inevitable self-destruct sequences that follow communicate "run" equally well.

Later missions are a bit more creative with their finales, letting players create the conditions for the base to explode, and then coolly slip out the door while the terrorists are caught unaware. Right now though, Quantum is keen on invisible mazes instead. Begrudgingly, thanks to a time limit, there are at least some stakes here, so it doesn't get my usual disdain of being a time waster and nothing else.

The maze layout is mean-spirited, the time limit is tight enough that there's little room for error, and the opening commits the player to either heading left or right. Only the right side actually reaches the exit, so the incorrect option is a very slow death where at best you can realize you're in trouble and get some information about the right path before having to try the maze from the beginning.

You do at least get an explosion out of it. Quantum blasts the hell out of a red cube, with a smoking crater being all the remains. I hope the rest of the town is okay!

After a brief rendezvous with the president, the agent is sent to another town for his next mission, finding Mr. Blue. Mr. Blue is a terrorist and a rich gangster, making him dangerous in three ways. Unlike the previous town where the terrorists were quite open about their operations, Mr. Blue tries to maintain a low profile hiding a secret base that the agent will need to uncover if they wish to apprehend him.

So while the starting point doesn't seem all that different, the mission does demonstrate Quantum's commitment to not just repeating the same structure again and again. This time, exploration becomes a pivotal component in finding the base.

One annoyance that I didn't realize until I was done with the game, is that the player's starting position isn't outside another airport. Placing the player next to a passage like this suggests to me that that's where they arrived from, and so I missed out on a board entirely. Not that I was missing much.

When a building doesn't house the base, it's up to you to figure out if there's anything helpful inside. Here in the zoo, you'll need a key to get in, with the one person and scroll locked away towards the back tempting you to investigate.

Non-essential boards like this are where Quantum allows himself to get silly with it, in this case the person is an exhibit on homo sapiens. The only one who will be laughing is Quantum, as the zoo requires a key meant for somewhere else, with the exhibit not providing a replacement. Soft-lock zoo.

Other such boards are a little more exciting than pockets of monsters. Visiting the lab lets you play with uranium atoms (they're huge), where shooting one will cause it to shoot in all directions, starting a big reaction until the material fizzles out. This is actually foreshadowing and will be useful knowledge in a later mission, a rare instance of there being any overlap between them.

While the base isn't here, the lab isn't entirely a red herring. Two scientists discussing a science fiction story they recently read is actually your big clue as to where the base is, though you would never recognize it as such until you found the base anyway.

Other locations of lesser importance include a museum that only contains an experimental dishwasher capable of handling fine China (you push boulders into conveyors), and a restaurant where you can witness a man matching Mr. Blue's description walk into a restroom, and walk out looking completely different. Oddly, while this is indeed the man you're looking for, and the agent clearly sees him don a disguise the game doesn't provide any way to interact, making it another false lead that really shouldn't be.

The library is the actual destination. As with any good ZZT library, there are plenty of book titles to examine scattered about, and even organized by subject. Quantum's book titles are unusual to say the least. There are a few humorous titles among the more sensibly named "Mozart" and "Egypt In The 11th Century", yet I'm not certain they're supposed to be humorous.

Am I the only one who finds "Benjamin Franklin's musical instruments" amusing? Others like "Killer Death Martian Rays", "6000 Ghost Stories", "THUMP! in the 1700s", and the kids section having "The Beginner's Book of Thermodynamics" seem more clearly designed to get a chuckle out of the player.

The sci-fi series discussed in the lab happens to have a secret passage behind it that leads players directly to Mr. Blue. Any good ZZTer will want to look at all the books in a library so I'm confident most players would have no trouble finding it, which is nice since I certainly wouldn't have thought the scientists discussing a book would have meant to go look it up at the library.

Mr. Blue removes his disguise from the restaurant before sitting down, and then is easily lied to to convince him that you're a new hire. From here you have free reign of the base.

After ...finding a key in the salad dressing at the salad bar hidden in the back of a library, the back rooms make for a clumsy second level. There are keys I never found out how to collect, which lead to more rooms that I never managed to access, yet the main path takes you exactly where you need to go. The others all seem to just lead to more keys, and were it not for some unique objects that do things like ask for your ID number (of which I have no clue how to find a valid one), I'd assume it was all inaccessible decoration.

Following the easiest path to take, leads to the discovery of a nuclear bomb which needs to be disarmed. It's a puzzle of mostly guessing, grabbing tools for a toolbox and touching the proper tile to open the bomb without exposing yourself to fatal doses of radiation. Afterwards, you just leave, forgetting all about Mr. Blue. I guess your mission to "trail" him means that the government can keep tabs on him now easily enough. It probably would be nice to know where he got his nuclear weapon.

It's the third mission that really shows that Quantum wants players to do more than go from town to town digging up terrorist cells. Now it's time to head into outer space to stop other spies from selling photos taken from orbit. I am amused that the cameras are being taken by human beings in space, and that this mission isn't about destroying a satellite.

This mission is probably the best of them all, as the lax security means the agent has free reign of the space station. The station is filled with a number of small puzzles with keys as rewards for solving that are necessary to access the documents you'll be taking. (Don't worry, you'll stop the photography as well by blowing up the station with everyone on board).

The puzzles here by the standards of this game are solid. Solutions are obvious things like using a bomb to attack two guards at once instead of being caught be one while attacking the other.

There's a wild puzzle somewhat reminiscent of Mission: Enigma, once you get past the horrible hall of keys, finding a spot to get rid of the extra one elsewhere onboard.

The main chamber has a laser shooting an orb that forms an impassable barrier due to the player's guaranteed low health. A box, a pair of glasses, and a light bulb have to be manipulated in order to find a way to get past the laser while also keeping the orb hot.

Quantum's solution is insane. Shoot the glasses to get a lens, and then hold that lens in front of a light bulb. This creates a second laser that will shoot the orb.. Then, you can safely block the first laser and be congratulated by a guard who becomes another green key. Hope you didn't think to take the last one from that huge set inside with you!

There's also a uniquely minimalist slider puzzle. If anything, it's more like a Town bank vault with just two options for its digits. I found this one rather enjoyable, as the internals are complex enough at a glance that you have to put some effort into solving it, while being simple enough to unravel quickly enough.

The purpose of the path being to approach this bizarre board filled with duplicating lions and pacing guards that won't do any harm. The guards, lions, and lunatic don't actually do anything. The slider puzzle only needs to be solved to provide access to these extra green doors so you can solve the puzzle on the opposite end of the station.

It doesn't seem like you did any sort of espionage on the ship, but oh boy does it explode once you take your leave in the escape pod!