Invasion ZZT Revision

The opening title screen is pretty simple, just basic text, a starry background, and three blinking objects in the sky. It's reminiscent of Compound but less visually busy and significantly more clear that you're looking at some UFOs.

Alena quickly sets herself apart from her peers just by looking at this opening board. Most furniture and household objects are composed from ZZT's basic walls. This can cause some problems as it's difficult to tell what can be interacted with, but for the vast majority of objects, you don't actually need to.

The story starts out with a UFO hanging in the sky and the protagonist deciding to make sure their dog is okay.

The narration isn't kidding about the clicking sound. The game does get off to an admittedly rocky start by having the UFO endlessly play some clicking sound effects that will quickly get on your nerves.

There's a good number of things to find around the room that help give some details to just who the player is controlling. They're a young child with a love of Nintendo.

Despite some of the items sounding like they're being put in an inventory, none of the items actually do anything. You won't need the Game Boy or radio to progress, only to pick up some bonus points.

Alena doesn't waste the player's time and dumps them right into the back yard where two aliens block the protagonist from doing anything about the third alien luring doggy on to the UFO.

Once doggy is on the ship, the aliens promptly teleport back and fly off.

Because the ship disappears, there's a large black spot in the yard. Most games would design around this by just having the backyard be black or opt to live with it (this is ZZT after all), but Alena is clever and quickly works it into the game, transforming an unsightly spot into an important sign.

It's ominous! This dog-napping isn't seen as an impossible event, but concrete evidence of some suspicious events being alien phenomena.

Note the moment spent to decry humanity's own treatment of animals. The reviews for this game bring up the idea that Alena is affiliated with a group like P‍E‍T‍‍A or Greenpeace. Taking some basic sympathy to the degree that the author is part of a large organization is quite a leap, but we'll see throughout this game that Alena won't shy away from her beliefs. A lot of the writing in this game clearly comes from the heart and she manages to nail bringing attention to serious issues and upholding an inspirational level of positivity without detracting from the game. It always feels properly integrated into the world in which these events are unfolding and never preachy.

While our hero's mom won't believe in aliens, his friends are definitely more the type. This lays down a goal and turns a seemingly hopeless situation into something that might be tackled.

On returning to the house, this time you get to see the first floor. You can see what I mean by the lack of objects as furniture. Couches and tables are obvious enough, but some more creativity is used for the TV or kitchen sink.

And speaking of the sink, it's a good example of the kind of care Alena puts towards world-building. I would fully expect a ZZT game to have a kitchen sink. What I wouldn't expect is for that sink to give insight onto a character. Up to this point you're not even aware that the protagonist has a sister, but now we know a little bit about her and her secret late night snacking.

I want to thank this game for teaching me about Eugène Poubelle who introduced dustbins to Paris and did such a good job that they just named them after him.

I don't know why Alena thought to share this information, and in fact many many garbage cans throughout the game will bring up this same message.

Nothing about this game explains when it takes place. This may just be an eventful Saturday night and Sam needs to rescue his dog from aliens before returning to school on Monday.

The only other thing to examine here is one of the dressers in the dining room that contains a camera. Again it's just for points, but in this case it's kind of a shame since we're dealing with evidence of beings from another planet. If you're taking a camera, it should absolutely come up throughout the game.

Oh there's a second and third floor. I really like this visible roof making this home not just a perfect rectangle.

The first thing to do is obviously check out the bathroom where I am shocked to find not a single message. This is unprecedented.

The lower bedroom is your sisters and is locked. She's got a significantly smaller bedroom than Sam's penthouse suite.

The proper thing to do is for Sam to sneak into his mother's room, rummage through her dresser, and find the key to the shed in the back yard which should contain a spare key to the front so he can leave the house, find his friends, and then hopefully doggy.

This is a cool shed.

Love the snowmobile, love the random toilet in the corner, and I adored the lighting after realizing that the bright spots on the floor are in fact moonlight coming in from the windows. This game makes a lot of unconventional choices graphically, and this one really exemplifies the positives of those choices.

lmao

Again we see Alena's ability to take the unrealistic aspects of a video game and give them a context in which they make sense.

And then things get quite serious for a moment. Sam had a brother and a father and lost them both within the past two years. That's extremely rough on a kid.

Sam has no problems letting his feelings out, and the blunt emotional honesty seen throughout this game is what really makes it special. His mourning is cut short however, as another alien comes out of hiding and approaches him.

This is escalating into far more than an abduction.

Quite a lot happens all at once! Earth is in grave danger, an alien sympathetic to humanity has been killed, marking the first death of this invasion, and more aliens are out there.

All of this happens before the player can even get a chance to pick up the key to the front door.

It's a whole new world.

That night sky, those dark mountains with a great sense of height and depth, that tiny little house for scale. This board is wonderful.

Progress in Invasion ZZT is a very linear. You always have one thing to do and need to do it before advancing. Despite this, there are these more open spaces to explore as you work on achieving those goals. This could easily be a detriment as it can be a bit of a nuisance to enter a home and find nothing inside, but because this game's world is so much fun to explore (and very rarely has enemies or danger to deal with) it didn't really bother me any when I picked a wrong direction.

In this case, Sam needs to find his friends and there's a decently sized set of boards to explore until you find the two of them.

One thing this game reminds me of in a lot of ways is the SNES RPG EarthBound. There are a few decent comparisons to make with a group of children saving the planet from alien invaders, an early ally from the stars who explains the situation and is promptly defeated, but also these mountains and ropes. If you take a look at an early EarthBound dungeon, I don't think the similarities are a coincidence, especially when Princess Alena here is named after an RPG protagonist and has been doing product placement for two Nintendo systems so far.

There's a massive amount of text dropped here.

Sam's friend Andrew is close by and definitely won't need to be convinced about an alien threat after witnessing them himself.

The nonchalant "cool" in response to finding out Sam has a weapon that can harm them is great.

We get another excellent look at the honest and positive attitudes this game offers constantly. Andrew is scared and willing to admit it. Sam praises his courage in being able to discuss it and being willing to help out.

One of the more unusual things about this conversation to me is that this child has a phone. We're talking about a game made in 2000 and even the re-release here is from 2002, hardly an era where kids would have their own phone. Still, all it does is speeds things up a little by making sure Anne will be receptive.

Andrew leaves for his lab placing a white key for Sam to pick up so he can enter later.

This actually goes beyond EarthBound (I think), taking time to comment on these ropes to upper levels rather than just asking the player to accept them because this is a video game and they need to be able to access this higher level.

The mysterious clubhouse can't be accessed and there's this strange purple gel all over the place. If there's any meaning to it, it's unknown for now.

Descending from the clubhouse we get another great looking board. The upper mountainous areas are split from the main grassy valley so this left half is cut off from the rest. I really like when ZZT games do this arrangement where there are multiple trips through the same board, but different areas of it. Regardless of which path the player takes, they find something to examine and something out of reach. It's a quick way to build anticipation.

Thanks to talking with Andrew, the player at least has some idea what the mill will be like, but these boxes and the additional purple stuff must be examined to know what they're all about.

The first box has a gem. The game's documentation mentions that if you find all of them you'll be able to access a bonus dungeon at the end of the game. Actually finding all of them on your own would be quite a challenge, but the revised edition includes a document with a complete list and some screenshots of harder to find gems.

We'll get to the pros and cons of this system as they come up, but this first gem is almost certain to be found unless you're purposely avoiding it.

I really can't stress how much this game encourages sympathy for its characters. This poor kid just wants his dog back.

As Sam descends the last rope, he spends a moment trying to piece everything together and connects the present events with more mysterious ones in the past. This UFO business is nothing new with sightings at the mill by none other than Sam's uncle. It's a rough situation and the lack of people who would even consider listening to some kids means that it's up to the trio to do anything about it.

Lastly in this final blob of gel at the bottom is a weird diagram that tries to shed some light onto the gems and the gel, but it will take more than Sam to figure this out.

Climbing back up and going around to the mill itself and it's currently gelled-up tight, but not as tightly as the clubhouse. For now he needs to keep moving and find his friends.

A quick trip along the path past some more great looking mountains with caves leads to something a little more populated looking. This also happens to be just east of Sam's home so it's possible to do make this trip in the opposite direction as well.

After finding Andrew out and about, I assumed this must be Anne, only to be tricked by an ineffective scarecrow.

Yes this is a Canadian flag, and yes the author is Canadian as well.

This happens to be Anne's house and he quickly explains the situation to her.

You get this entire home and there's almost nothing to interact with. It's so odd for a game to just not bother with this stuff, but really it just asks how necessary any of it is. (You can learn about the poubelle from another trash can though.) Possibly the one useful factoid is that Anne has a brother named Marc, though this will never come up.

Sam heads upstairs to Anne's room where once again we see a sibling get favored treatment in the amount of space they have claim to.

This moment right here is 100% where I knew this game had me in its grasp. There's a truthful answer to Anne's first question here. I talked to Andrew.

But I paused on this prompt.

Sam has snuck out of his home. Aliens are planning to invade Earth. Anne's parents and brother are nowhere to be found. (Sam refuses to go up some other stairs to the parents' bedroom.)

Could I trust Anne? Is Anne really Anne? Can the aliens disguise themselves as people? Would I be protecting Andrew if I didn't mention him? Would I be endangering him if I did?

It was one of the most intensely psychological questions I had ever been asked in a ZZT game.

Or at least the most intensely psychological question until this second one.

The options are make a joke answer and revealing a lot of information. The first question was a test for me, but this one is more of a test for Sam. Maybe I was the paranoid one, but if Anne turned out to be some sort of fake that was a part of the invasion I'd say Sam was the one at fault for revealing that he has a weapon capable of defeating the aliens.

SAM.

SAM SAM SAM SAM SAM.

Oh, this actually isn't nearly as worrying as it sounded at first.

Time for another lore dump.

First off I love that cuts in allowance are causing funding issues for Anne's research.

Then I love the accurate depiction of children going with "dummy the ugly cow" for their insult towards this girl who believes in paranormal activity.

And lastly we get Sam coming to her defense and doing some very mild flirting that you'd expect from a gradeschooler.

Anne falls for it. There will definitely be more hints at a blossoming romance between the two as the game progresses. This is definitely a case where the pitifully low standards for convincing romance in ZZT games works in this game's favor, as what should be incredibly generic ends up being one of the better romances of ZZT I can recall, especially going by the time this game was originally created.

Anne runs off to Andrew's lab which gives Sam a chance to check out the place. By now though, the nature of the game is understood and despite a reasonably full set of rooms here your options for interacting with things are this junk pile, a bunch of books about the paranormal on Anne's shelves, and Artho the cat who is eating from his food dish.

Well this is another nice board. I still haven't come across Andrew's lab so I'm just wandering outside where there's this man fishing on the beach and something out in the water.

I think it's a duck.

No, but seriously Sam rules.

After a thorough examination of the overworld, Sam finally makes it to Andrew's lab. The tiny red building is his home, and the massive structure in the back is the lab proper.

Sam has the key but Andrew mentioned a barrier needing to be shut off. That's done by hitting a switch on the odd spot on the wall. This is also where things meet up. You can't actually go inside without talking to Anne first as Sam won't deactivate the barrier until he's talked to her. It's a little clunky if you try to do things out of sequence. (Perhaps it would've been better to have Andrew reveal how to disarm the barrier and for Anne to have a spare key instead.) I managed to keep on the path the game wanted so no issues for me at least.

Anne gives a status update and then it's time to speak with Andrew. For a moment I was glad Princess Alena put Andrew in the doorway so that I wouldn't be tempted to interact with all the things inside the lab that probably won't have any code.

Things are starting to come together. Sam's weapon and Anne's ammunition are strange alien technology, but Andrew has been able to figure things out enough to replicate the ammo. With just one gun though, the only person who can stop the invasion is Sam, and it seems like the old mill is going to be the best place to start learning just what's going on.

Andrew is making himself extremely useful and just dumps hundreds of ammo on the player. It's a massive amount and will be all the ammo in the game until about 90% through it. Limited, but not so much that the player needs to think twice about shooting. It wouldn't have taken much to just give several thousand ammo and not have the slightest doubt, but this large but not massive number and the dialog warning about making it last does a lot of work to coerce the player's style of shooting.

Andrew does move and let everybody inside, so you'll get to look around a bit after all.

Talking with Andrew again reveals his early analysis of the purple gel. The details remain sketchy, but it sounds like a few torches will be enough to get into the mill where the gel is a bit weaker. Andrew provides the torch and vows to keep working on recreating Sam's weapon so that more of the squad can defend themselves.

The first think I want to know about is what appears to be a body suspended in a tank. That's a bit extreme for a child's science lab.

It's... very peculiar. Even rereading this after having completed the game, I'm still very unsure what this is supposed to mean in the context of this game if anything at all.

Also it must suck to have saved the world and be a hero and be labeled an alcoholic in your memorial. Sorry Dollar, I hope you got the help you needed.

In the middle is this cool robot.

Even the robot is bursting with positivity.

There's one last part of the overworld to check out before going to the mill (well, you're supposed to go here afterwards), and that's Sam's uncle's farm. I really love the sense of scale the mountains get by having all these buildings be just a few tiles tall.

Bessey is amazing and comes completely out of nowhere. By this point these gestures about peace and harmony are to be expected, but "talking cow" not so much.

She does really kind of break the rules of the world though. Not one other animal will speak in this game, and not one character will be surprised that Bessey does.

Sam's Uncle's house actually does have a few things to examine to learn a bit about his nameless uncle. For now, there's nothing you can actually do here, but the locked door and connection to another board obviously points to this being a sort of checkpoint for later.

Right now, Sam's uncle has no interest in Sam's claims, but that "unsubstantiated" line hints that perhaps he could be convinced with some proof.

As long as we're here, let's explore the rest of the house.

Haha this is great.

See, this is the good exploratory content I'm after. Exploring this home teaches you more about Sam's uncle than a lot of ZZT games will teach you about even a major character.

And then Sam just chugs cough syrup. Sounds like a great time to check out the mill.

The torch burns away the gel at the old mill and Sam enters, beating Anne here despite his detour.

The weird abstract objects being made up of ZZT's various walls works really nicely here. I have no idea what anything here is supposed to be, but I don't think I'm supposed to. It's a creepy old mill filled with purple alien gel.

Anne brings some new information. Atmospheric disturbances show that something has landed on Earth, but not taken off. This is good news as it's not too late to find doggy if the aliens have yet to leave. Of course, it also means that the aliens are still here. There's a little more flirting about Sam protecting Anne which is definitely her reading into things in this case.

As you move through the mill, the two will converse a bit. This helps explain the layout the place which is split across a basement, ground floor, and upper area with a sort of conveyor for transporting grain running over each level.

There's purple gel all over the place which blocks off access to the lower-left room entirely guiding the player to the upper level instead.

With more gel it looks like a dead-end. However, one of the two boxes has a white key inside.

Sam and Anne are unable to see past the gel, but you can and it's definitely enticing with some strange device in the larger room that definitely doesn't look to be grain-related.

The key unlocks the door to the basement where Sam and Anne are about to have their first violent encounter with an alien.

There's quite a lot of dialog going on here, but it does reveal a little bit about what the invaders are up to. Basically, humanity sucks too bad to be allowed to live. This isn't that unique of a theme in science fiction, where an "enlightened" alien race wants to prevent humanity from messing things up outside of Earth too. The criticism is valid, but in this game it doesn't work all that well with how overtly fascist these aliens will end up being. This isn't a quest to convince these aliens of humanity's worth or that they can change, or even to hold up a mirror to their own injustices. The plot would function the same if the aliens simply didn't care about human because they weren't the same beings as themselves.

After what feels like quite a bit, Invasion ZZT finally offers up some action. I had my fingers crossed here. Everything was in the game's favor already. Some badly programmed enemies could quickly run what's been a really captivating experience into the ground.

The shooting aspects of the game are fortunately reasonable. The alien just moves and shoots in Sam's direction at a slow enough pace that it doesn't take much to dodge. Though the aliens do take seven shots which is quite a few for some generic baddies.

Sam is on the record as being against ethnic cleansing.

Even after their encounter, Sam and Anne don't really know what exactly the aliens are going to do, and now they suspect the noises will have alerted any other aliens in the mill. It's time to find a way upstairs.

The conveyor runs through the mill and should be safe to move across provided it remains off...

This run across the conveyors is another excellent example of the suspense Alena is capable of building.

In reality, you're perfectly safe. You can't fall off, the machinery won't start (although those white blinkwalls on the right side make it seem otherwise), and it's just a walk from one passage to the next.

Yet with just a few words about the possibility of the machine being activated, you can't help but step cautiously. There's a real fear that at any moment something will happen and you'll need to react to it or be killed. Being able to make a... run-of-the-mill... walk like this into something worrisome demonstrates the strengths of Princess Alena's writing.