Journey to Hell 1: The Arrival

The patron pick for this one, is definitely not a game I would have expected anyone to take note of.

The characters in Darkseekr presented a glamorized ideal of what teens into the occult were like. Strong, mature devotees of their interest willing to go to any lengths to discover how much truth there is to all of it. Journey To Hell deflates the balloon, giving us a more realistic picture of these kids were like in the world where your midnight seance wasn't going to get any actual results. The game's author, ZZDevelin, loved some demonic imagery, making it a staple of pretty much all of their releases. Fighting demons is certainly a solid basis for an action game, and Develin's excitement for the then upcoming Doom 3 as shared on IRC and forums became rather infamous. This game has some clear homages to Doom in general, adapting the limited text of the games into ZZT form to the best of their ability. The excitement is definitely there. Journey To Hell is Develin's expression of that excitement. It attempts to capture what they think is cool about demons and shooting them until all that remains is a bloody mess.

You could do worse for inspiration, even with ZZT's unique challenges when creating action games. Yet this is also a game that makes the same misstep nearly every ZZTer does at one time or another, committing to far more than they, or ZZT, are capable of. The game presents itself as the first chapter in a series of six. ZZTers have managed that feat before with Adventures in Jaconia, SaintZZT, and of course the ubiquitous Chrono Wars. It can be done, but it requires some real discipline and commitment.

I would know. After all, having all that energy and looking to let it out in a lengthy series of ZZT games that only ever gets a first part is one that I can certainly relate to. This monstrosity I made when I was 12 was just as eager to come up with six episode titles in advance. I was also just an incapable of presenting my ideas in a way comprehensible to anyone else. Develin just goes and goes and goes here, resulting in a game that's roughly equal parts cinema and company logos as it is an action title.

A generous read might be that this is episode one. Players are starting with a blank slate and its up to the author to fill them in. Unfortunately, it's all bouncing around so rapidly in Develin's brain that players actually learn very little about this world, who they are, or what the plan is. It becomes one of many beginner-quality action games that doesn't offer much of interest to the player. This one gets a bit of a bump from some of the art and at least attempting to have a story, but Chrono Wars it ain't.

With not a whole lot of game to appreciate, most of the positive things to say stem from the art boards. This is definitely where Develin shines the most, and clearly a point of interest for them. Prior to this game, Develin already had two art compilations to their name. These are of course filled with drawings of demons, Pepsi logos, castles, and skulls. Exactly the kind of devil-worship energy somebody who would call themselves Develin should have.

It's all of a quality that's easy to snicker at, but it's genuine, a trait that's much more appreciable two decades on. Develin wasn't afraid to put themselves out there, a far healthier form of expression than victimizing fellow teens and being afraid to release anything that might not be up to community standards. Even the recently covered Space Case from 1999 felt like it was unique crude for the era. Journey To Hell is roughly of similar quality, though now released to a community of players that hadn't just seen Infestation 2 (and 3) and Lebensraum. This was a group familiar with Bloodlines 1+2, Cherry Pie, and The Mercenary as well. There were countless options available if you wanted to turn objects into red fakes. A game like this stood no chance of anyone saying anything nice about it back in 2003.

The title screen is worth a thousand words. It's quite busy, and honestly a little hard to read the text due to a lack of contrast with the background, though that might just be my age showing. Blocky letters of some weird mixture of blood, flesh, and stone spell out the game's title, with an additional exclamation point. Excitable is going to be the word to describe Develin's creation. They're bursting with energy and ideas far more than they can handle expressing in ZZT.

The title also provides us with a glimpse of what Develin does best: creating weird portraits of demons and monsters. This fella with the flaming hands gives you a good idea of what to expect inside. These manage to look kind of neat in their own way, yet childish as well. The key being the way objects are used. Pointy pusher teeth. Beady little unconnected line walls for eyes. A degree sign for a nose. It's a kid's drawing, in ZZT form. Round eyes and triangular fangs are just the way these facial features are made, rather than constructing faces from block characters and using objects to create finer detail.

The demons are so cool, that before the game gets underway, players are dropped in front of the author's self portrait. A weird looking cyber-dude who continues the kid's art style with a perfect pixel smile.

Goofy as it all is to me now, such a non-serious interpretation is not what Develin is going after. We are his guests here. And we've got some big words that could do with an accompaniment of punctuation. Develin wants to invite is to a look at their world. A world of demons and the apocalypse and, well, basically classic Doom.

It's only once the actual introduction begins that the game looks like a normal ZZT game made by a budding author. It's simple, but it's clear what we're looking at. Welcome to Hell. Planet Hell, a lifeless world of little importance.

The introduction hates to end a sentence. It's an effort to create a sense of mystery, leaving thoughts hanging in the air. It's not entirely ineffective, though it is betrayed by players already having a feel for the quality of the game by this point. If there's going to be a good mystery here, it's going to take more than slow moving text to draw the player into it. You can tell that this scene is way cooler in Develin's head.

Not that it's entirely uncool. Planet Hell seems to be the focus, with humanity's misunderstanding of the planet likely to give the yet to be seen non-human enemies a jump start on whatever their plan is. Were this just Doom, it would be Hell vanishing like the martian moon Deimos. Instead, a star is suddenly erased from the sky in the blink of an eye, a simple #change effect that only happens at the end of the scene, offering a bit of surprise after the board has been entirely static while the introduction text rolls.

Planet Hell and its extremely nearby star (perhaps that's how it got the name) look alright. ...Earth however looks a little bit too green. Unsurprisingly, the board is just a copy of the previous with the planet recolored and a sun replaced with a much smaller moon. It's a shortcut many have been tempted with thanks to how simple it is to export and import a board.

I think adding in a little variation would have benefited this board. You could get away with the same shot of a different round planet like this if there was some board between the two to make it less obvious. The identical star layout two screens in a row makes the scene come off as minimal effort. Especially when the area unused by Earth's moon that was originally taken up by Hell's star didn't get filled in with any additional stars. There's no effort to hide this board's origin, which makes it less interesting to look at when you just got done looking at the same thing.

It doesn't help that the aura of mystery on the previous board is also immediately rehashed. This time, from the perspective of "You" and "Man". In Develin's excitement, they fail to establish who we are, or what we do that would warrant us being the ones to investigate. The banter between the two as the star disappears and subsequent confusion that follows winds up carrying over to the person at the keyboard playing the game. The first few lines indicate who is talking only for the majority of the conversation to not include such indicators. It's hard to tell exactly who is saying what at times, which would be a bigger detriment if anything else in the story was explained here.

Hell's star vanishing sounds like it's only the latest in a series of celestial oddities. Earth is having unusually long nights, which sounds like it's probably more of a concern than planet Hell, but the man seems to dismiss the possibility the two events are connected.

A huge explosion suddenly occurs, and a ship is destroyed? Whose ship? What does it mean?

This is where I lose the plot. Not only are the consequences of these events entirely unknown, but I'm also distracted by the explosion I just saw. Just how big was it if it could be seen from Earth, or alternative what happened to our solar system if planet Hell is now one its planets. We know there's Earth. We don't know when this game takes place, or what kind of technology we have, or where we're about to go to in order to investigate.

A star has vanished. Nights are longer. A massive explosion takes out a ship. And now there's a multiverse. All this to get the player out the door and boarding a ship to planet Hell.

Absolutely none of this will ever be mentioned again, sorry. Journey to Hell is a classic example of a ZZT game loaded with lore that the author keeps locked up tight in their head. I'm sure there's an organization that the player works for. I'd bet money that some shady group knows more about Planet Hell than the people in this game. And everyone in the game knows a lot more than the player will ever get to. The whole story isn't something that will be told to the player. Hooking players in with a story is an essential component to smoothing over the subpar aspects of ZZT. You can run on gameplay alone, but it better be good. And you'd be right to guess that Journey To Hell's gameplay isn't going to astound you.

Love this guy though. He's just like, "Sup".

It's another board following the title screen that lists off any names and companies and any kind of branding to make it sound like a big deal. It's a game by the Develin. Of Phobos Inc.??? Real good fake it til you make it vibes here, and why not? Phobos Inc. has just as much legitimacy as any other ZZT company really. It's a name attached to the release to make it sound more elaborate than a kid making video games on the family computer.

And if the game ends up being a hit, having a company gives the author some soft power. It offers a chance to be on top of a label rather than joining one from the bottom if they were to be recruited by more established ZZT companies. Although by 2003, ZZT companies were cooling off a bit, with more ZZTers just not bothering with them they way they once did. The big names had nearly slowed to a stop in output, with Mirror Image Games being the only real standout.

In fact, if you look at the list of 2003 releases with a company attributes to them, Phobos Inc. makes up a sizable amount! With the old guard moving on, perhaps it's the better play to make your company and aim to be next "big" group.

While it's hard to say if it mattered any for Journey To Hell to be released under a company, what's more certain is that Develin's dropping of the company name like this after the introduction is an uncommon sight that feels almost ahead of its time. Title and credit screens, and maybe a dedicated board accessible from the main menu are the usual spots you find a company name. Mirror Image Games had had a very iconic style where all their releases started on a company logo board that players had to move across before getting to anything else.

This seems classier. Were the game's story something that succeeding at getting players' attention quickly, I think this would have been a cool way to promote the company's involvement. I'm picturing this kind of thing something like Compound after the generator explodes or ...wait the second game I thought of actually did do exactly this. Voyage of Four is a perfect example, running its credits after players watch the protagonist's life get upended when his village is abruptly attacked. I guess it's not all that "ahead of its time". Regardless, fake it til you make it Develin. You've got the right ideas, you just need to figure out how to deliver on them.

After multiple boards of introduction and credits, players finally get the opportunity to do something other than sit in their little box in the corner reading text. Things begin with our unnamed hero outside of a massive "D" rocket ship ready to launch for planet Hell to figure out what happened there.

After all the buildup, the actual game suddenly clams up so things can start happening. Whether it's Develin themselves getting bored, or a rational worry that the player themselves might, there's no more need for text. The man you can talk to says that you're welcome to board "teh shuttle" [sic] before removing themselves from the scene.

In terms of quality, well, the board may be quite gray, but it's a reasonable looking ship. I'm assuming the "D" is for Develin? There's nothing really else it could be because we weren't told about anything else!

The board falls prey to a rookie mistake where the perspective is from the side, yet no restrictions are put in place to keep players from making gravity-defying movements. Our hero is free to levitate to the ship. Does this impact the game negatively in any way? Not really. It's just a very easily avoidable issue. When an author isn't bothering to do something as simple as a row of invisible walls or invisible text, it alters your expectations in a negative way.

The interior that follows suffers greatly from being such a big empty room. While Develin is willing to take advantage of the space allotted to each board when it comes to art, they seem to have a hard time coming up with things to detail the environments that players can actually move around in.

The very empty ship has what would appear to be a bug. It implements the iconic ZZT scrolling star-field effect, however the stars all vanish well before reaching the end of the screen.

The issue comes from not taking the easy solution of using #walk to move until an edge is struck and then :thud to turn around as everyone else has done. Instead, the movement commands are hand written... with #go commands of all things. At least /e/e/e/e/e/e can be mashed out quickly. While using the full command to move instead of the shorthand, it looks like Develin got tired of typing and called it good enough.

Other than watch the stars, the only other thing to do while waiting to arrive at the planet is pick up some supplies locked in the back. Players already have the white key, in fact, they started the game with one! I wonder if this is like Space Case where players for some reason started with full set of keys that the author had to awkwardly get rid of at the start of the game with a big column of doors.

For the landing, a little animation plays out of the ship landing with more narration about how quiet and tranquil the planet is, and how that's about to change. Not because you've arrived, but because it's actually kind of overrun with demons.

One thing I can't get over on this board, is how the mountain has two tiny half blocks on top to round it off.

Why bother for just two tiles? Why not smooth out the entire mountain? This tiny detail is pretty much the only detail on the board.

Okay, for real now. No more intro sequences. No more walking to a passage. The actual game starts here after this final incredible paragraph that really encapsulates the game's writing. Descriptive, but not really saying a whole lot.

Annnnnnd it's a faux-platformer. It takes some real work to do this kind of gameplay justice. Gemhunt has gorgeous looking levels with a huge variety of set-pieces that make each board a treat for the eyes while also being loaded with secrets and surprises. Daeadalus' Obelisk used water to incorporate shooting, with a number of environmental hazards to weave between so that even when the enemies were gone, you had to move cautiously around each board.

This is a water-focused system like Daedalus, but without the level design to match. And that's not surprising given how young and new of an author we're dealing with here. Nobody had any real expectations for this game except Develin (maybe), so nobody was actually let down except Develin (probably).

So you get to climb a mountain and "leap" over a pit (or voluntarily fall down it for no reason) while shooting right to hit all the enemies without being in any danger of them reaching you first. The most demanding thing here is waiting for the enemy on the mountain and the one that will climb it as they try to reach the player needing to be lured to a point where you can actually shoot them at all.

There's at least some thought put into making use of the player's ability to shoot up. The basic demon enemies are supported by a dragon placed in the skies whose movement doesn't need to respect the law of gravity.

To give the game some flavor, the dragons explode into a blob of blood when killed by placing down a slime. Thanks to the buffer of water dividing the ground from the skies, Develin isn't obligated to turn the whole gory mess into fake walls, letting them squeeze in a tiny extra bit of shading. It still floats in the air forever, but it's a more original flavor of blood then you might be accustomed to in your ZZT games.

The praise probably feels hollow when the follow up board is made of entirely flat terrain and the sky is no longer there.

As the dragons also just home in on you, they quickly give up their advantage of distance, bunching up like this on the other side of the water and getting in one another's way. They can even find themselves trapped momentarily in the blood of their brethren making it even easier to line up a shot.

A cave at least suggests some new possibilities. And it kind of is. This is the last faux-platformer board, and it couldn't come any sooner. Develin hasn't had much in the ideas department for this kind of gameplay, showing everything they had in the first board really.

The format is abandoned, replaced with run-and-gun instead. Actually being surprised by bullets appearing in your torchlight is the first time on planet Hell I've felt any sort of danger. It's a low bar, but there's a bar now dammit.

Of course, the enemies are just the dragons from outside, only now a little more potent thanks to a mixture of darkness and being able to approach from more angles. They're unchanged in code, which means they still bleed breakables, something that's more of a hindrance now for players and dragons alike that need to shoot their way through to reach their target.

The dragons fall victim to friendly fire as well. The only ammo players have gotten up to here was what was on the ship, so while there's still plenty to shoot blindly into the darkness and probably hit a target, it feels risky when there's no indication more ammo will be forthcoming or just how many boards remain. By waiting patiently, the dragons will mostly defeat themselves before players even see them.

The aftermath is admittedly pretty cool for those that enjoy gratuitous ZZT violence. The floors are covered! While ASCII blood may not be the most realistic, it's still quite effective at memorializing a hard-fought battle.

Another go at it using built-in creatures fixes the friendly fire issue. Tigers don't leave red fakes behind though, so who can say which style is superior?

Yet just as with the surface of Hell, Develin constructs some more interesting shapes to navigate only for the first board. Afterwards it's once again time for flat and uninspired terrain. The darkness at least doesn't immediately make it obvious to the player.

Develin then presents an arena with the boss of the cave, "Death's Wing". That's kind of cool sounding! And while their appearance is the same as the other dragons, they're a little more aggressive when shooting, and thankfully take more than one shot to kill. It's a genuine showdown.

The rules of combat change again as well! For this board, ammo stops being a concern as the player suddenly finds themselves with a sword. JDM Sonic's old sword engine seen in the ZZT Encyclopedia gets implemented here, restricting the range of both your own and Death Wing's attacks. It forces you to get in close, and makes shooting a little unreliable.

The way these engines work is by checking if there's any bullets on the screen, and if so, counting down a few cycles before a #CHANGE replaces them with empties. The length of your sword is determined by how long the object idles before getting rid of the bullet. However, if the enemies are also allowed to shoot, that timer will begin when the enemy fires. If the player shoots afterwards, their attack will have a smaller range than intended.

This kind of thing is why the sword engine never found a lot of use. It's why Ruins of ZZT didn't have any tigers in it! Develin doesn't worry about the inconsistencies, which, fair enough. It's especially not going to matter much when you're fighting a single target on one board rather than trying to use the engine for an entire game. It makes things inconsistent. You can't be confident an attack will reach from the maximum distance.

Is the fight any good? No. Not particularly. It's still an enemy that just constantly runs in your direction.

There is however something clever about the way the fight starts. Most people would have just let the boss start the moment players enter the board, but Develin actually ties the fight beginning to the scroll. This scroll provides an oversized health boost (+1000), but more importantly removes some invisible walls that surround Death's Wing and explains to players that a sword engine is now in effect.

The ending screen is a genuine treat, as long as you don't think to hard about it. It's a pretty eye-catching view of a cliff overlooking the fallen foe with a massive sword impaling the beast. Don't worry about the size disparity or that you fought Death's Wing in a cave. Just enjoy it. This is as good as it gets. (And it's over)

Boards like this really demonstrate that for a much as a traditional newbie ZZT world as Journey To Hell may be, there's a real spark of creativity here. If this is the kind of thing an author can do this early on then I think there's hope for some of Develin's later releases.

There are still many areas in which the author has quite a bit to learn. Yet there's an undeniable enthusiasm here. It's obvious that Develin knows more than they know how to express about this world and its inhabitants. I don't think there's secretly a great game to be found here or anything, just that it's an early step for an author who has yet to really show their potential. Like Space Case or Nature's Revenge, this game is one where the graphics can surprise you when the author goes for broke, tied to some extremely forgettable gameplay.

Final Thoughts

What more can I say?

Taken at face value Journey To Hell has very little appeal. The story throws a bunch of things at you with no explanation, which ends up hardly mattering as the story that players get to experience consists of nothing more than "Get your ass to Hell" and stabbing a dragon. The room design is uninspired, and the game is so red that you'd think it was a Virtual Boy title.

To be kind to the game, the early shot of the planet and its star is a decent enough way to start the game and get players on board after the strange portrait of the author at least. That closing scene is one worth looking at as well. Develin's best feature is easily the art, which has a unique aesthetic going for it. It's certainly crude, but the strange creatures they create from blocky shapes have their own appeal. They're something uniquely ZZT in nature, and serve as a useful reminder that the people making these games (before we all starting approaching 40) are kids blessed with the opportunity to make their own video game.

Every complaint feels like I'm whining that the finger-painting hanging on the refrigerator isn't getting me emotionally invested. Journey To Hell is a game that you probably don't want to spend your limited time on Earth playing, but it's a necessary step for the author to be able to make something that does resonate with someone other than themselves. You have to pay close attention to notice what Develin is doing here that could be worth developing further, but those things are there. This game has multiple modes of play, incorporates two kinds of weapons, features some distinct art that you can identify from a mile away, and at least tries to bring the player in with the story of the secret truth of a seemingly lifeless planet. A lot of ZZTers started with far less interesting concepts than the ones here. If you want to focus on the negatives, spare yourself the ten minutes necessary to play this one. Otherwise, consider where this road could have lead...