The Cruelest Puzzle
ASCII Spy is pretty full of puzzles. I'd sooner call it a puzzle game than an action one. Most of them I covered during the mission overviews, and we've seen some fresh ideas like tracking down Mr. Green along with other decent, if not remarkable efforts with disarming nukes and that one slider puzzle in space. Even when they can get a little bit out there with bulb-lasers and pre-pushing steel beams into doors, the limited number of possible actions makes most of the puzzles solvable, as long as you have a backup save that you won't mind loading once you realize 90% through that you're actually going to have to start over.
But the first mission contains the game's biggest blunder. A breach of trust so severe that I can't imagine I would have opted to keep playing the game if I had chosen it solely for leisure. It's a nasty slider puzzle with an even nastier solution that has nothing to do with the pieces you see.
After escaping the prison players eventually wind up here, at the front door to the base. There are two possible ways presented to continue, a red door whose key is in the missile of a greeble of boulders/sliders, or alternative another door with a numeric combination that needs to be punched in. At a glance, this seems like it's treating players nicely. I certainly found no mention of a combination anywhere, but rather than be stuck I could solve a slider puzzle instead. Or, if sliders weren't my thing, then I could load a save and hunt down the code. The player gets to make a decision on how they'd like to approach these doors.
It soon becomes clear that there isn't a choice at all. The slider puzzle offers plenty of room to shove pieces off to corners and it won't take long to realize that at the center is an impossible tangle. So the question is where is the combination?
It can be found in a garbage can on the city streets outside the base, something long since rendered inaccessible. Digging through the trash causes you to lose ten health due to the stink, actively discouraging you from doing so. You then have to repeat this action five more times, with nothing more than an "It stinks! Ewww...." message displayed every single time. On the sixth attempt, you'll find half a piece of paper and not lose any health.
You are then presented with a new option to search for the other half. Three more searches, and the player will be at ten health. One more search, and the game politely only takes away five health rather than killing you before you find the other half of the paper and get the code!
Nobody other than Quantum P. has ever found this slip of paper without looking at the game outside of play. There's just no way. This puzzle tainted the rest of the game for me, and yet, I don't think anything else comes close to this level of frustration. Oh there were plenty of instant deaths and soft-locks to stumble into, but only this instance manages to stretch out the time spent playing an unwinnable game for so long.
The Coolest Puzzle
And yet, in the first mission, just between escaping the prison and entering garbage can Hell, Quantum also includes a puzzle so well done that it's the best room in the game.
You have ten buttons to press, and a guide on the right that explains that these correspond to the 6 columns and four rows of boulders. When a button a pressed, the star object moves into the selected row/column and pushes it one space before returning back to its origin point. The arrows surrounding the boulders then work together to push the now out of position boulder into the currently empty first position. (Time works the same way.)
Your task is to manipulate this device in order to make columns of green boulders that line up with the blocked pushers across the bottom. Once you have everything in position, pressing the circular button turns the red boulders into solid walls, the green ones into fakes, and then frees the bottom pushers. If you've gotten your columns correct, they'll move some sliders out of the way for one last pusher, and an object detecting the lock has been opened properly will open a gap in the wall for players.
It's a very mechanical design, a bit like Town's bank, with a lot more complexity. But Quantum's locking mechanism here doesn't just provide "more", it has a number of advantages that make it excellent to work with. The puzzle has just one correct answer, but many possible roads to get there. Mistakes can be made, but either worked around by changing plans a bit, or you can just repeat the same mistaken move until the row/column is back to where it was in the first place. Watching the mechanism push boulders around is kind of engaging as well. It's just a neat little device that serves its purpose perfectly.
If more of the game's puzzles were like this rather than digging through garbage cans until you're about to die, I think there'd really be something to this game.
Of course, I am letting my excitement at seeing a puzzle that I would be just as impressed by in a game released today overlook that it does have some issues. Because the objects don't lock, moving a little too quickly will break the device irreparably. Quantum has a safety scroll warning about potential malfunctions, so players will be aware that it's delicate. Locking would have prevent this issue, but for a first release, it's forgivable.
What's harder to overlook is the speed at which it operates. Quantum does it right, making sure every object involved runs at the fastest possible cycle, but ZZT isn't known for being fast. It takes several seconds for a move to complete and everything to be ready to go again. I had the luxury of being able to adjust game speed during play, and once I understood how the buttons worked, cranking it up to the maximum made moves nearly instant, with the second fastest speed being slow enough to follow the pieces, but still rapid enough to not grow tired of waiting. In 2001, players would likely not bother to quit out of the game to adjust the speed, and that could make this puzzle feel a bit too slow, and really straining if you do make a mistake and opt to repeat until reset.
Those issues are fairly small, and pale to the trouble with those seen in other puzzles throughout ASCII Spy, so while adjusting game speed is highly recommended, it's a worthy bit of effort for something as unique as this.
I also couldn't help but look at this series of boulder-work and think of what Quantum would get up to three years later with ZZT Pinball, whose reward for completing all the tables was to decrypt an encoded image that originally exists as a chaotic rainbow of boulders. Some of the fun here likely stems from knowing what this early effort would lead to down the line.
Little Engines That Could (And Couldn't)
One aspect of design Quantum would become known for with the GAMMA VELORUM series is the use of innovative engines to transform what would be cut-scenes into playable game. In GAMMA VELORUM, these include first-person dogfights, making emergency landings, dodging meteors, tracking distress beacons, docking spacecraft, and bombing enemy bases. All fairly novel experiences, and ones that without an engine couldn't really be done with ZZT's native gameplay using the player element directly.
In ASCII Spy, Quantum is just as eager to develop some never before seen types of gameplay via engines just the same. With less experience under his belt, the results are considerably messier. Admittedly, even when I streamed GAMMA VELORUM back in 2019, these engines were often difficult to grasp how to operate them, and even more difficult to succeed in. GAMMA VELORUM is a much more well-constructed game, so if its engines were often as troublesome as they were impressive, you can imagine how well the earlier ASCII Spy fares.
It fares poorly.
By OPRGV, Quantum is aware that players need things like instructions, and labels to have a hope at understanding what they're looking at. In ASCII Spy, you really just have to figure out the mechanics on the fly, and as with any engine that dictates what happens next in the plot, failure is a game over.
The space station begins with you first having to find the station and dock with it. Alright, get to it. Press the buttons until you're done.
Okay, it's not entirely devoid of instruction. A few scrolls at least explain that the rectangle up top is the viewport, along with a hint that the station is "polluting" to help you track it. When you locate the station, it shows up on the left viewscreen. Until then, you get to wander around space aimlessly.
The labels are awkwardly positioned. The garbage detector is simply a red that lights up if any pollution is found. The large window on the right is the actual "map", an empty box with your ship's current position displayed.
You may think that somewhere in that map will be an invisible object for the space station that shows up when you bump into it. Not so. To actually find the station, you need to manipulate the two dots into a position where both are blocked to the north. These dots also move with each touch of the navigation systems, though in a more unintuitive way. The top one moves east/west when said direction is pressed. The bottom moves east/west when you move your ship north/south. Invisible walls in this region limit how far the dots can actually move, and ensure that only one specific position holds the station.
However, the check for this is first for the lower dot to see that it's in the correct position, and only bother checking the upper dot if it is. What this means is that you have to make sure the upper dot is already in the right position as otherwise moving there will never be detected. Exactly "where" the station is on the map will depend on how you move the ship, making it detrimental to try to brute force the position by covering the entire map. Similarly, whether a tile will show evidence of pollution is entirely dependent on another row of invisible walls to block the lower dot.
The entire map then provides no actual information. It only serves to stave off the insanity that would overcome them if the only information they had were two dots that sometimes move when you do. Whether that's better or not, I cannot say.
I'll be the first to admit that there's a neat idea here. The pollution should narrow down your search, but due to the weird way the dots are polled, the pollution amounts to a star that flickers on for a brief moment and then you move again and lose it. Then you turn back, and the pollution is no longer there. There's no real danger here either, no time limit or other threat to force players to move quickly. You just stumble around in the dark until you luck into the location, or give up as I did and look in the editor to figure out how to find the dang thing. At the same time, if time was a factor, then this board would only be saved from being the worst part of the experience by the garbage can papers.
Later, a similar yet simpler version is used while piloting a submarine to locate an enemy sub. This time, the player gets mercy, as the map actually reflects where your submarine is and the location of the enemy sub is indeed an invisible object that needs to be bumped into. While you navigate, the periscope updates, depicting the nearby islands and reefs. Like its predecessor, there's no real challenge, but after the space station, it's a relief to be able to comb the map to succeed. Best of all, your intel suggests that the enemy was last seen off the coast of an island, allowing you to actually narrow down your search.
The engine situation for the game isn't all dire! The code wheel is an impressive piece of tech that goes above and beyond the usual substitution ciphers seen in games like The Guardian. When the protagonist recovers information on which cell holds the scientist he's been sent to rescue, players get a more involved method of decoding it, pressing individual buttons to cycle letters to create a translation without having to break out your own pen and paper. It's a very satisfying process, giving the game some much appreciated spy-flavoring.
The same mission features a more involved method of destroying the enemy base as well. By this point, a self-destruct mechanisms are nothing new, so to mix it up a little Quantum lets players trigger a nuclear meltdown. ...It's a bit of a stretch to call it an engine, as there's almost no interactivity here, but the presentation makes for a memorable scene, and it does add a unique risk of failure.
To cause a meltdown, players first press the buttons to slide out rows of uranium. They then start the reactor by mashing on a button which causes a bullet to shoot at the uranium. The uranium in turn shoots in a few random directions, which shoots more uranium, which shoot in a few random directions... etc. etc.
It's a cacophony of noise, and while this is happening a gauge on the reactor slowly climbs upward with each reaction. When the gauge enters meltdown range, an emergency exit opens up, and once it reaches its upper limit, the core goes critical and the meltdown kills you and everyone else.
What's cool about it is that the reaction is self-sustaining. It's almost a puzzle in its own right, with players needing to just initiate a meltdown while stopping short of it getting too out of hand while they're inside. You can ease off on priming with the button, and the reactor will gently cool back down, making it a matter of finding the right moment to let the reaction continue on its own and make a run for it across the facility to get out while it's still possible to do so.
Alas, the game's final engine/puzzle is another flop. Access to the last terrorist base requires a number of keys which have to be purchased from a vendor. In order to make enough money, the spy takes on some contract work, smelting ore at a refinery. Operating the equipment is by far the most complicated thing in the game, and players are provided with no instruction to guide the process or feedback to determine if they're working successfully.
All you get is this list of what the machine's ten buttons do, and some invisible walls that change state depending on what you're currently doing. I was able to fumble my way through it, eventually producing a single gem. Each key costs nine, and don't think you can get a head start by grabbing the ones on the ground. Those belong to the key seller, and if they detect no gems on the board they will kill you. (This does mean you can pick up eight of them safely.)
The moment I realized this process was one I would have to repeat again and again, I opened the cheat prompt and gave myself all the gems I'd need. Even if I had received step-by-step instructions, I would not wish anybody do this more than once.
Most operations have no effect unless the ore is currently in a specific place, so pressing buttons with a vague idea of moving ore, doing something to it, cooling it, and spitting it out isn't too impossible to pull off successfully. In some situations though, pressing the wrong button will cause a game over. It's a real rough one for the game to end on. Thankfully that final puzzle while nonsense, is more fun to figure out than this.
Final Thoughts
In the end, ASCII Spy is a mess. Oh, it's got some good things for it. The missions feels varied. You get less obvious settings for such a game like space stations and aircraft carriers. The action is adequate, and more than made up for by the creativity seen in the game's puzzles. This is a game whose outline looks to be a winner. Even for a first release, Quantum's ambition is obvious, and what he attempts to do doesn't seem entirely out of reach. He tries his damnedest to deliver an adventure that brings you all across the globe (and beyond) and does so. It's clear playing this that Quantum is a name to keep an eye out for next time, and sure enough that next time is the first Operation: GAMMA VELORUM which improves on everything seen here significantly with less than a year between the two games.
The initial z2 reviews for the game are a bit sparse and a bit too generous, but is still proof that people played this and had fun with it despite the flaws. Later reviews brings things a bit closer to reality, citing the odd puzzle solutions and very basic plot. Yet even if it doesn't succeed at a lot of its efforts, those efforts were still worth reaching for. Tracking down Mr. Green's identity could be the basis of a ZZT game on its own. The investigation and piecing together of clues is something very rarely seen and almost pulled off without a hitch. There's definitely an appeal to this game, even after its frustrations.
Those frustrations though, put a pretty big asterisk on any praise the game gets. The garbage can puzzle alone is enough to immediately destroy any faith in the game, and that compounds as you play and find yourself with little patience for the more well designed puzzles. Game overs are often abrupt and feel rather arbitrary. (Fun fact: It turns out you'll be killed after you open the combination locked door if you didn't manually close a door earlier on the board!) If you aren't careful with your saves, you can ruin them. But since you're going to wind up cheating your way past the combination locked door anyway, is it that much of annoyance to have to do so again later?
The engines are a good glimpse at what Quantum would be capable of in later games. So there's still some nice historic value to the game, letting players follow Quantum's trajectory through ZZTing, showing promising ideas that would be better executed down the line. But it seems unfair to recommend this one for what it is. Because what it is is a series of decent puzzles with a lot of unpleasant moments in between. Your spy kit is just a guessing game. The vehicles are busywork at best, and unknowable at their worst. Quantum loves to exercise his power over the player with Try Me traps, blind choices, doors that shouldn't have keys used on them, and teasing them with gems in the refinery that get you killed for taking them. You have to do thing's Quantum's way, and figuring what that means is the most difficult puzzle of all.
