Thought I'd go for something old fashioned as the subject for this article, but none of the truly early games were standing out. Fortunately, that's why we have the retro genre, for ZZTers who want to take a stab at a purple key collecting game even long after they fell out of fashion. The title screen for The Void of ZZT caught my eye, successfully looking like a world from the early 90s despite its actual release date being in 2007.
Its author, Victor Vandenhazel has no other documented credits. This could be a case of somebody playing the original ZZT worlds many years after their release, making a game inspired by them, and then finding z2 when trying to find a place to share their creation. Or perhaps Victor was always around and just not very active in the community. Either way, the name had no effect on my expectations for his game.
Though this makes it hard to tell just how much experience Victor had when he was making Void. Luckily, purple key games are pretty much what the ZZT editor expects you to make, serving as a great entry point. It's difficult to go wrong here. A few twists and turns of a board, a handful of lions scattered within, a key at the end, and you're all set. It's ZZT in its most pure state.
Victor, as we'll see, does what a lot of newer ZZTers have done over the years with their initial releases, and sticks very closely to the formula established in Town and the rest of the original ZZT saga. Retro ZZT games can't stray too far from what Sweeney was doing, of course, lest they no longer feel "retro" enough. But this game seems a little too reluctant to explore other possibilities. Things are remixed here and there, and it's certainly easy to tell the difference between Victor's boards and anything Sweeney ever released, yet it has a hard time coming up an identity of its own, all too content to follow in Sweeney's footsteps.
Save for a nasty moment of frustration along with a disappointing ending that's uniquely Victor's doing. This game has its share of warts, and by the time of its release, there were other good options for those who knew Town and Dungeons and the rest like the back of their hands. David Newton's ZZT: The Next Chapter trilogy serves as an excellent point of comparison.
But it's not all bad! Victor recognizes some of the struggles of the original worlds and does an impressive job of reconfiguring things to keep their sprit intact while generally reducing the friction players need to overcome to enjoy themselves. If he could just be consistent about it, instead of introducing some unique frictions of his own, Void could have been an easy recommendation.
Instead, the game is a bit of a mess, successfully dodging common problems with early 90s ZZT worlds while doing things that ZZTers had long been aware didn't make for a pleasant experience by the 2000s. This one is a real mixed bag, that I can't confidently say is good or bad, just... there.
The connection to Town is no secret. You get the familiar starting hub and freedom to head in a number of directions as well as buildings to explore from the very start of the adventure. It's a proper purple key game. The opening scroll provides the usual welcome and quickly reveals a number of ways that Victor entirely stick to the Epic blueprints.
For one thing, there's a sixth purple key. Yes, Town also does this, but it's not upfront about it.
There's also one fewer passage from the start. The iconic Palace has been removed entirely with no substitute in its place. Instead, the southern path of the world takes the job of being the mysterious inaccessible location that's restricted behind a number of keys. To make up the difference one of the purple keys of Town needs to be relocated. Something will be different, just who knows what.
A handy reference to what can be found where is also included. Unlike the Sweeney approach of mixing puzzle and action along each path, Victor intends to categorize each region of Void into a single style of gameplay. You'll still have to do everything of course, just as you would in Town, except now you don't get the experience I did growing up of finally crossing the Three Lakes only to discover the Rube Board and proceed to never head west from the start again.
Players that struggle with action, puzzles, or mazes can put them off for as long as needed. Admittedly, when you go for puzzles and mazes won't really have an impact, but if you find great difficultly in more twitchy shooting challenges, delaying them until you can amass some extra health and ammo offers players the chance to take the edge off.
Not me though, I'm the best. So when I took a look at the list of paths initially, I decided that I didn't want to do puzzles or a labyrinth as my introduction to this game and opted to head east for the action boards. Little did I know, that this was the first time I would luck out due to my choices.
In Town heading east is also an action-oriented path to its key. Victor doesn't just copy the layout of Town, drawing instead from all its paths as well as the rest of the original worlds. So the first thing encountered here is a greatly simplified take on Town's Bug Maze. It's got colorful walls and lots of centipedes.
To make it his own, Victor speeds up the board, turning from a major set piece into a transitional board before the branch really begins. Not having to repeatedly travel to the exit one blue key at a time is nice. Moving the ammo to deeper into the narrow road rather than handing it out to the player immediately, not so nice.
It's not a bad call as centipedes are only dangerous at the head as long as players aren't foolish enough to walk onto a segment. The start of the board ends up playing more like a stealth game than action. Once you reach the ammo, the danger is reduced significantly. It's not a lot of ammunition, and it's going to be needed for upcoming boards, so sneaking around is still optimal with bullets as a last resort.
This scroll is the final warning to players that if they want to explore this path, they have to complete it in one go. Unlike the original saga where you're nearly always able to retreat from danger and either try a different path or purchase more items (maybe even healing if you're lucky).
Once this line is crossed, Victor is free to torment the player however he desires.
And he does not hold back. The game suddenly makes some very hefty demands of timing and reflexes. To get the key, players need to take the single energizer, make it through a lengthy row of blink walls, and still have time to grab the key and get out of the spinning guns' sights before it ends. Re-enter when zapped is enabled for this board, so taking any damage means being warped back to the start of the board where players will find themselves stuck behind a now shut row of sliders.
The text does not lie. You have only one chance.
The blink wall timing is delicately set. Half of it moves in a typical flowing pattern where one wall shuts off at a time going right to left. The left side runs on a separate timer where it enables and disables all at once. Getting through requires perfect precision so that the right walls begin to vanish just ahead of the player, while also needing to synchronize with the left walls so that they vanish just in time as well.
Once you're through, there's no time to slow down. You must keep running, turning at the correct column to line up with the key in order to have enough time left on the energizer to make it in and out.
This took me a few minutes of experimenting with timing, waiting for the blink walls to be in a specific phase so that I could hold left and make it through unscathed. It's genuinely one of the most tightly timed obstacles I've ever gotten through in ZZT.
That difficulty can certainly be off-putting to some, and frankly even to me while I was repeatedly failing. Void of ZZT is definitely not for everybody, no matter how much you may have liked Town. Conquering the board feels like an accomplishment, a feeling very rare in ZZT games.
So the build-up on the next board had me eager to see what Victor would surprise me with next. Clearly these boards were going to have notable effort to challenge experienced players in unique ways. Town for those who can beat Town in their sleep.
Then the scroll told me I was an idiot for going this route without any torches, and I had to quit my game and start from scratch.
There's a considerable pause in the playthrough video when I read this.
Ultimately, I was lucky. I vehemently object to game design like this, punishing players for not knowing something they had no way of knowing. The game starts players off with ten gems, which is enough to purchase torches, but would anybody spend all their money on one set of ten torches before spending all their money on one set of thirty ammo instead?
Making things even worse, consider when this game was released. In 2007, Windows Vista was the latest OS and if you were getting a fancy new 64-bit operating system, you were not getting 16-bit DOS support. For ZZTers of the day, that meant DOSBox becoming a necessity to keep on ZZTing. And ZZT is notorious in DOSBox for being very finicky with the repeat rate of held down keys.
There is a reason that the second Zeta happened, we never looked back at DOSBox for ZZTing. I don't know if the previous would even be doable! You could let go of the left arrow arrow for the blink walls and Tokyo drift your way to a stop on the right tile to head up to the key, but pressing a key down took a moment before ZZT would respond in DOSBox, burning precious energizer cycles. It might come down to getting lucky at having the last guns not actually fire when you get close.
Needless to say, the amount of time spent now only to be told I had to start over, is probably a fraction of what it would be for some players pre-Zeta.
Take two...
I didn't feel like doing that blink wall gauntlet again, so I figured this time I'd explore the buildings in the starting board first. I probably should have done this first, though it wouldn't have helped.
The "Main Hall" is no Armory, that's for certain. It's a cluttered room filled with boulders and some gems with a key buried in the back. I don't think this room has an analog in any of Sweeney's worlds, or even the second-party releases of Best of ZZT or ZZT's Revenge. I'm not even sure what to call it. A boulder mess?
Players have to carefully push boulders to clear a path without blocking off something essential like this room's green key. These boards never feel particularly puzzle-y. Because there are so many technically possible moves compared to a slider puzzle, you can typically mash through them, just vaguely looking for any gaps to occupy.
It feels like the only time you need to reload a save if you accidentally over-push. Never do you think you're succeeding only to realize that you're on a dead end.
This one is no exception. Perhaps you can do a bit better to get a few more of the bonus gems, but that's asking for a lot more effort for minimal reward.
The path to the real puzzles has a lead-up board to complement the one seen on the dreaded eastern road. A library provides players one last detour before locking in.
The library itself seems a bit too literal for a throwback game like this. Virtually none of the buildings you enter in the original worlds provide any facsimile of their real world counterparts, save perhaps the cells in City's prison ...prior to its second room which has a bunch of unguarded bombs to explode at your leisure.
And granted, there's not a single shelf of books here, so lacking the context of what the board is, library might not immediately spring to mind. There are some books as boulders being read by library patrons, with plenty waiting re-shelving (once the shelves are delivered) at the librarian's counter.
Everybody gets cross with the player when they try to start a conversation. Valid. This is a library and they're reading after all.
This location stands out though thanks to multiple locked doors, and even one of the purple keys at the librarian's desk, though all they'll say when you try to talk with them is "Shhh!". Victor understands the value of showing players things they can't yet reach. It keeps them guessing, and makes reaching certain keys a bit more exciting when you've been waiting to collect them.
There is one book on a table that's free to read yourself. Victor slips in some hints for players to remember. Remarkably, several of them are useful. It's definitely worth remembering that there's a color code for the labyrinth and the importance of red in the cove. The one shot for the key here is also very good to know.
But without either the key to the computer lab or the green lion looking character that is not a toilet as I suspected it would be, there's nothing else to do other than continue onward.
Again Victor sets up a gate that forces players to commit to their current path. This time you're able to look at the puzzle before deciding if you'd rather walk, so there's some chance that somebody might do so.
It's a pretty gentle start. Getting the key out a tangle of sliders can be daunting, but Victor's key is teasingly close to being on the outside right from the start.
With these designs, I can never tell if it's intended for the player to be able to get inside the sliders and start excavating pieces out or not. From the start I figured I'd get to do so given how much open space there is around the rest of the board. Anything you take out of the puzzle makes it that much easier to move around the remaining pieces, and it doesn't take much at all to get the key loose.
But this is just the first puzzle. It's a solid foundation to build on, Victor has several boards still to try and challenge the player with something more difficult before awarding them a purple key.
Alas, that's not how it plays out. The second puzzle is straight up lifted from Town, and recolored blue. Victor is upfront in the game's introductory scroll about including a few boards from other games. But it's not Town that he's talking about. I'll have more words about this once we've seen them all, but for now, yeah, it's a good Sweeney puzzle where you need to make sure that sliding the rows around in order to push a column doesn't cut off access to the other rows entirely.
What is IMO a pretty significant misstep leads to another confusing board.
This is very clearly not a puzzle. It's comparable to the exit of Dungeons which also tasks the player with getting all the gems before they can leave. Victor opts for forest rather than breakables which makes the tigers less of a threat as they can't free themselves.
A very generous take might be that the player is in control of which forest tiles they get rid of, allowing them to think twice about what they open up and where.
Does it count as being "solved" if I never opened up these areas where there were no gems to collect? I wondered if maybe Victor's plan was to then demand that players defeat all the enemies afterwards, but the smiley blocking the way out is true to their word about only getting the gems.
Regardless, it's a staple ZZT action board that somehow wound up on the puzzle route. It's certainly nothing to complain about. Though I do wonder why Victor provided so many supplies here. The heart gives 100 health and the ammo provides nearly 250 bullets. You won't get this level of free support anywhere else in the game
Puzzle number three fares much better. It's City's Headache Room, but not literally. Victor does a really fine job with this one, owing to his willingness to take advantage of unblocked transporters placing players directly adjacent to themselves. Planning a route through here involves noticing spots where you need to go through one transporter, and then immediately turn around to end up somewhere that isn't where you started.
Usually these are just the kind of mazes that I tolerate the most, as zipping around the board is faster than slowly traveling down a hallway in a traditional maze. Here Victor manages to take an established kind of board, while finding a way to make it more than a rehash of the source material, making this one of the better puzzles on the path.
Perhaps more impressive, he does so in a way that doesn't actually have any dead ends. You may wind up going in circles, but you can always go somewhere.
And that's the final puzzle. The presentation gets a bit overly simplistic here with a pretty vacant looking board, though I do appreciate that it continues to use transporters following the maze. The key is collected, 1000 bonus points are awarded, and a passage back to the starting crossroads is provided.
Still not wanting to return to the eastern path, that left me with only north as an option.
It's a good thing the puzzle path gave me hundreds of ammo for an action sequence, as without it, this warmup would be a lot more dangerous.
Victor does something cool with this path. It's going to be a castle with a labyrinth as hinted at in the library, except rather than provide the purple key to players and then lock them in until they can acquire the scepter from the castle, the scepter is used to get a large quantity of gems from this would-be buyer. The shop, which occupies the space where Town placed its bank, sells a single purple key for 200 gems.
So the scepter is less a a proxy for the purple key of the castle, but is instead more akin to finding the bank vault combination. Familiar, but different.
Speaking of familiar, but different, there's also the random passage leading to a cave here. The little detour in Town is completely optional. Players that venture inside deal with some enemies, pick up some supplies, and if they're bold enough to open a locked purple door at the back end, they can get a promotional blurb for Caves of ZZT alongside a replacement key. I was quite curious if Victor would promote a sequel or something here.
He doesn't bother with anything like that. The only thing in this dark room are a few centipedes, not even a lone gem to pick up. This board isn't as big a waste of resources as it appears however. There is a caveman in here who promises to "return the favor" if you kill all the centipedes. ...That sounds like he's going to kill me.
But no. You are rewarded with health, ammo, and gems. Between the caveman and the scepter-wanter outside, that's 150 out of the 200 gems needed to buy a purple key. Handing out the gems like this is such a generous way of getting money for a mandatory purchase while still asking players to go out and pick up gems here and there. It puts you close enough that that you can feel confident spending some money at the shop, while also making it very clear that this would be the ideal time to push for getting the last few gems to be able to buy the key and then be free to spend any leftover money at your discretion.
The health and ammo aren't quite as generous as the raw numbers suggest, as you'll be using plenty of those resources to clear out the cave. I still finished with an appreciable amount of extra ammo, but just barely left with more health than I entered with. Of course, the better you do in the cave, the more potent the reward ends up being.
There castle. No toll required! In fact, this is the only path reachable from the start that doesn't lock you in.
Seeing free torches on the ground just made the "start over idiot" moment I endured sting that much more. Why is Victor willing to provide torches before they're needed here, but not on the action path?
The castle interior appears considerably different from Town. Three passages to choose from suggests a lot of rooms to explore here.
The deviation from Town might make players hopeful for an original twist on what I'd consider to be the weakest part of the original game. While Victor does manage to streamline things, what he comes up with isn't any more exciting.
Rather than a large dark maze filled with a number of ambushes, and a second invisible maze, this is just a matter of picking the correct passage. There really isn't any decision making here either. Each passage takes you to a tiny spot in a different room with only one other passage to continue to (as you'll arrive on the match colored passage to where you entered). The path boils down to a 1-in-3 guess at the start, and then running through some passages to see if you're correct.
I wound up getting it correct on the first guess, which was at least nice after my poor luck at the start of the game. A second of the paths will also lead to the key, albeit on a more fraught path which puts individual lions in the rooms.
Thirty seconds of wandering a dark passage maze is better than ten minutes of wandering a dark castle maze sure. It just isn't much of a bar to clear, and it's barely clearing it.
There also is a purple key here as well, which was a surprise to me. Given the gems you'll get for the scepter, you're basically getting two keys here. Just handing the player both rewards like this kind of defeats the excitement of the game having a sixth purple key when one path winds up giving you two at once.
At the very least, perhaps Victor could have considered putting the scepter on one path through the labyrinth, and the purple key on another. The same technique of smaller rooms within a board could lead players to the purple key room with a disconnected section for the scepter, and perhaps a third with some extra gems or supplies for the final route. You'd give players a reason to explore every path, as opposed to what happened with me thinking I got lucky and immediately getting the heck out of there.
There's also the matter of the clue back in the library which says to "find the color code".
There are a series of gems before the maze which provide the solution. (Great minds think alike. I did the same thing with the fruit in the trees in Captain Cutlass.) I think that would be a cool detail if there were some more incorrect choices, and to some extent there are! In some cases, going back into the passage you just came out of will take you somewhere other than the previous room, including a handful of actual dead ends. You'll just never actually encounter one unless you think to "turn around".
In addition to the 100 gems, selling the scepter also gives players the yellow key for the library. Again, rewards players receive are just dumped on them here. Maybe the third path in the castle could have had the yellow key? Though at that point, maybe the castle shouldn't have been a passage maze if players needed to get so much stuff from the northern path.
Two hundo well spent.
Shut it!! I'm going to the library!!
