Flame Frost Blade

Despite being built off a more developed world, there's still a menu with two areas to venture off to a-la Jurassic Park ZZT.

Things open with a rather large scroll that contains a whole lot of information. The "kings" aren't royalty, but part of a gang, and of course the plans are huge.

Every ZZT game is the same isn't it? Kings, like Jurassic Park ZZT will have a 3-D level and a side view level. The graphics will be staggering. Then just as in Flame Frost Blade we can expect a huge RPG world with a story full of twists and incredible programming.

But that's being mean. Matthew, the game's author, just wants to make a cool game, and so did the others who made demos we've seen so far. There's room for a lot of ZZT RPGs and there will be plenty of overlap when features are as vague as "good graphics".

Finally the scroll explains the two paths. Credit to Matthew, he wants to get people interested in the big story, and realizing that it will take more than a few opening boards to get things going, he's also included some extra boards to help the player get invested in the game's plot.

Also showing some good foresight, passages that can't be entered have been replaced with an equals sign. This really helps the player not waste time checking every door in case they can go inside. Since ZZT passages (without the use of special colors) are always white on a dark background, a more common convention once special colors became available was to do something like black on a dark background for doors that don't open. Of course, another popular alternative is to just use doors or objects that use door-like characters as well. Still, considering the need for the player to know where they can and can't go is a promising sign!

Well, here's our story. Already I understand more about this plot than anything in Flame Frost Blade.

The demo begins in your home which has some interesting shading for the walls, and a lot of nice furniture.

I feel like it's been awhile now since I've gotten to take dozens of screenshots touching everything in the player's house. So let's see... this starting room has a plant and the ransom note on the ground. You can (and should) pick up the note and take it with you.

The lower right is our bathroom, with toilet, shower (a rarity), and sink.

You can of course flush the toilet and get a scrolling marquee of text saying "<FlUsH!>". You cannot shower, but you can wash your hands. I kind of see what Matthew was going for with the triangular shower as perhaps a shower-head, but it seems like an odd choice to me.

There's a kitchen with some burners you can turn on despite having nothing good in the fridge. The player and his wife also have a dishwasher.

This room connects to the basement, but like in Flame Frost, it's a decorative part of the house that can't be entered at all.

The bedroom is actually the important part of the house as it contains the phone to call the police from.

Dang, they won't even send somebody over.

This whole phone is one of those weirdly complex ZZT things. It's not enough to just have a phone object, but there's one for the cord and another for the "phone box".

I don't understand.

The dresser contains a plug in both senses of the word with some ASCII art of an electrical plug and a list of upcoming games by Zed-Omega Productions. This apparently includes the recently streamed Secret Agent Joe Moe. Only a small handful of worlds on the Museum are credited to ZOP, yet I seem to recall its name coming up quite a bit in older ZZT worlds. This might be because of the toolkit A.I.Z.I Enhanced with ZOP which was fairly popular.

In addition to the phone and dresser, the player can also get some sleep (but only on his half of the bed) which adds 100 health.

Finally, we have the living room with a bowl of candy, plant, couch, and TV. Continuing the trend with the phone, there's a separate message if you touch the back of the couch or its arm rests. Amazing detail.

I'd watch this.

Going outside we get a rather strange looking town. Buildings come in all sorts of shapes here. The warehouse is falling apart, and whatever the red building is meant to be also has something weird going on around it. At first I thought this was some weird shadow, but the path near it is also weird.

The lighting is also really stark. Most of the board has a fairly standard grass fade, but the top right has a huge jump in brightness that makes it looks like there's a storm clearing up or something. If Matthew said this was the case I'd be impressed, instead I think it's just a weird quirk of how he opted to shade the board.

All the buildings are marked with inaccessible passages, but the warehouse has a note outside warning about how dangerous it is.

Another sign points out that there's another scary place not yet available.

Lastly, down in the corner by the lake is a note written by your wife! She's going to be taken to a red house. Oh no!

I don't know if any of you are invested in this, but I'm afraid that's it for this opening segment of the demo. The player will never get to tell the police that the Kings have taken his wife to a red house.

I'd be a little disappointed if it was the red house on this board.

Unlike Jurassic Park there is no way to return to the main menu, requiring the game to be restarted to see the rest of Palson and the full story for the game.

Sure right now it looks like this is just another part of town in which your wife has been kidnapped, but the kidnapping plot is merely the start of this adventure.

Only two boards of the town are accessible, and there still aren't any places to go inside. This second board seems to break convention by having some passages, but they're objects where you can just knock on doors and talk to occupants.

They don't really have anything to say. The red house is empty, the blue building is closed for remodeling, the hotel next to it just has no response when the door is touched, and the one person you can speak with in the green home yells at you to get off his property.

This Boy's club house rules. Do they exclude women? No! Girls allowed.

Convenient grammar mistakes aside, you still can't enter the tree house either. This demo isn't very substantial.

I went from praising the use of a distinct character to mark inaccessible buildings, to discovering that the diamond shaped building that's blocked by a locked ZZT door actually isn't a door at all.

Okay so this is the inside of that building and things are looking rather intense suddenly. Two portraits of aliens(?) take up a large part o the board, and lots of the linewalls and floors use blinking colors making for a quite flashy experience.

I'm not sure if this is meant to be before or after you save your wife. Are these two members of the Kings gang or is this a Secret Agent Joe Moe situation, where what at first seems to be the game's plot resolves when you're barely a third of the way through the entire game.

The back room is also very flashy and has another fake door. This leads to a "Wise Man" who has quite a bit to say and really does expand on this game's story quite a bit. Get ready for a lot of text.

Oh my god.

I love everything about this. This is peak over-imaginative fiction here, and nothing else in this demo would have made me think there'd be anything like powerful monsters from another dimension who want humanity's lungs.

So our hero is in fact the chosen one and his poor wife just had the misfortune of being the one picked to reveal the secrets of our respiratory systems to the Kings gang.

And then we get philosophical about Simpsons quotes.

Lastly, the conversation ends with this note revealing the scope of the game. This seems to imply that there isn't a wrong choice for where to go, which is better than picking a bad door and being instantly killed. I actually kind of like the idea of there being four paths to take, with each one being the "canon" one and the paths not taken being implied to be deadly.

Of course, this is the exact kind of thing that ensures a ZZT world won't be finished. Now the author has to make four games instead of one. This kind of massive variety of scenarios to this day I believe has only been pulled off by Alexis Janson with Code Red which has a whopping eight paths to choose from. Most games that attempt this simply don't happen, though we've seen with NextGame 33 that an alternative is to just cut your losses and release the game with only a few of the planned scenarios completed.

It's a little confusing how the game says there are two paths here, but none available. I don't know why the other two rooms like this one wouldn't be in the other corners even in the demo. This board is empty and has a passage that just loops back to the same board. (I imagine the two missing boards would be the same way.)

The last corner though, has an object that matches the player's appearance.

It's you from the future warning you to avoid this path. Try not to think about how if the player takes this path they'll die, but also go back in time to warn their past self about how they will be dead. Time and space is always like that.

The passage here actually does lead back to the main menu which is strange, but I guess it means there's at least a chance of playing the entire demo all at once.