Puzzles
Fending off demons and humans alike before confronting the headpriest Malachai is no easy task. Jami has more than enough problems that need to be dealt with to reach Devon already, and that's before considering the handful of puzzles that she also needs to solve in order to obtain key items. The focus of Jami's Undercity is definitely more on the action and RPG elements than solving obtuse mechanisms, yet their inclusion is a smart call to help break up the monotony of the so-so combat the game would suffer from otherwise. While a worthwhile inclusion, one thing I'm realizing when I think of these puzzles after the fact, is that I think every single one of them has some flaw that brings them down, ultimately making them probably the game's weakest component. I'm still glad they're here. It just wouldn't have taken much to improve the execution of them.
Most of the puzzles aren't anything experienced ZZTers won't have seen in one form or another before. On the very first board of the undercity, Jami will immediately run into a door that can only be opened by pushing a boulder onto a fake wall. "Start to crate" (Caution: Internet humor from 2000) is rarely invoked in ZZT, but I can't help but be amused that this is the first puzzle the player encounters. I'd at least be willing to go to bat for this "puzzle" as being a gentle proclamation to players that they won't be entirely relying on violence to reach the end. Don't worry, it will get better than boulder pushing.
Kind of.
Eventually.
It won't be long before Jami finds another prisoner locked behind bars. Further investigation reveals the bars to be made of silver. A separate puzzle leads Jami to acquiring a silver key. Checkhov's silver is on full display here, as the girl beckons Jami to sit down in the chair in the cell and rest for a bit. No other interactions with the girl are offered, so while it seems like a bad time to rest what with the strict time limit before Devon crumbles to dust, the player will be inclined to oblige.
And wouldn't you know it, the girl promptly straps Jami to the chair, takes away her weapons, and transforms into a werewolf, killing poor Jami instantly.
So maybe the solution to this puzzle is violence. It's just a very specific kind of violence as there's a silver bullet found on the same board that can be used to shoot the girl, which reveals her true form and causes her to drop a pendant that will allow Jami to open the exit to the next area. The puzzle itself isn't too bad. The repeated mentioning of silver provides a pretty clear hint, and the bizarreness of a freed prisoner just hanging out in her cell afterwards makes it obvious that there's something amiss. Players that die of course also receive the knowledge that this woman is a werewolf and will know what they're up against next time.
Where it strains itself is that there are two ways to "solve" the issue. The much more natural, interesting, and cool way being to sit in the chair, have Jami's gun appear on the chair's arm after it's been taken away, to then grab it back, and then finally touching the girl to fire the shot (it's point blank range so actually shooting isn't an option in ZZT). This needs to be done while the moon is still rising as part of the transformation sequence, and properly done would be a pretty unique trap even if players aren't be surprised at all by the fact that it is one.
The thing is, touching to shoot is rather unintuitive, making it seem like getting in the chair whatsoever is an automatic game over. As an alternate solution, the player can just shoot the girl before sitting down, leading down to the same death sequence and pendant being dropped. Players are very unlikely to do this unless they've already died to the trap, giving the impression that the death is effectively mandatory as it's the only way to obtain the knowledge that the girl is a vampire. This is a game I've played plenty of times over the year. It wasn't until I looked at the code this time that I ever realized there was a way to actually save Jami after sitting down.
The far more likely to occur solution where the player actually shoots a bullet before sitting down makes for a scenario where Jami goes out of her way to free a prisoner, only to immediately shoot her for no discernible reason. No mention is made of the pendant prior to the werewolf girl's death so Jami just gets lucky by killing an enemy with the pendant she has no idea she needs. Congratulations Jami, you didn't just kill an innocent girl and we're all proud of you.
Jami is an ally of demons, so I guess it's not entirely unbelievable that she might just shoot some kid, (she's specifically referred to as being a teenager), but nothing else in the game makes her seem "evil". She's just in love with somebody that's part of a... rough crowd.
Sensibility aside, the flaw of the puzzle comes down to the awkwardness of thinking to try and interrupt the scene by touching the object in the middle of things. If this was as simple as grabbing the gun back (perhaps combined with scrapping the ability to shoot the girl in advance), I think this would actually be pretty impressive.
Now, what is impressive, is the herb mixing puzzle necessary to get the key to the cell in the first place. Though this too is compromised in its implementation. The witch Jami fights does have that giant cauldron, and once she's out of the way, there's no reason Jami can't use it for her own needs.
Her needs in this case being to destroy a massive plant that happens to be blocking the path to the silver key. Jami is lucky enough that the witch had several scrolls containing information about herbs scattered around, and an entire garden can be found along with the herb obstructing the key.
Using the three scrolls, Jami can learn to identify the herbs growing in the area, learn what herb can destroy one another, and learn what herbs can be blended together to act as a different herb? Perhaps the terminology isn't the best, and perhaps Jami's ability to pluck any of the herbs save for the one in the way is a little clunky. Nonetheless, players can use the scrolls to identify the rogue weed and what three herbs need to be mixed together to counteract it. From there, Jami picks the herbs one at a time and adds them to the cauldron. Stir thoroughly, and apply the mixture to the problematic herb. Mix correctly and it will be destroyed. Mix incorrectly, and it will grow massive vines and kill Jami with them! Yikes.
Again, solid idea for a puzzle that suffers from the details. Jami can only pick one herb at a time which turns the herb gathering process into a slog. It might not have been so too bad if the herbs had all been on the same board as the cauldron. This isn't the case, so the player instead has to walk back and forth between boards multiple times to gather ingredients. Then, the ingredients have to be added to the correct spot in the cauldron. Even a simple scroll to warn players that they should add the herbs from left to right would be an adequate workaround here. Ideally, adding an herb to the mix would cause an object in the background to spawn in an invisible wall of a different color, and then mixing process could just check that the necessary three colors are found to determine if the mixture was correct, removing order from consideration entirely.
There's some attempt at being forgiving that I have to give credit for though. A trash can by the cauldron allows Jami to discard either an ingredient or her mixture so mistakes can possibly be fixed. The herbs are limited, so it is possible to use all of a necessary ingredient and be out of luck. This is unlikely to actually happen as the puzzle so slow paced. Even bumping into an herb accidentally won't matter as the player has to confirm that they want Jami to grab it.
Despite some potential for trouble, I do think this is the best puzzle in the game. I just desperately wish Jami could either pick all three herbs at once or that the herbs and cauldron could have been moved closer together.
The werewolf and herb puzzles are at the very least memorable. There's another early puzzle that's far more bland where Jami has to use a terminal to input a numeric password that accepts digits from one through five. Do you read files to learn the combination? No. Do you count trees in a row of landscape paintings that correspond to the digits? No. Do you beat information out of the acolytes? Nope.
You brute force it.
It's an unspoken rule of gaming that this is not how you handle combination locks. Players will be so inclined to assume that they need to acquire the combination via some other means that when I first approached the terminal I just closed out immediately. It got to the point where I was unable to make progress and had to use the file viewer to realize that I needed to get the combination, and that the brute force method was the only way to do so.
As usual, BlueMagus tries to make this better than it could have been. Entering an incorrect digit closes the prompt immediately, rather than allowing Jami to enter a five digit combination and then be told it's incorrect. Had I bothered to try entering a random code I might have noticed that it cut me off instantly, or lucked into getting a digit right and then noticing that it stopped afterwards. Admittedly, everything is here to figure this out, it's just not how players expect to interact with such devices. Even when you do know that the combination has to be brute forced, it's not fun to solve. The combination, 42513, seems to have no bearing on anything. I'd be a lot happier if I could complain that I overlooked some hint as to combination rather than griping about having to guess your way through.
The game's final puzzle is another bust. A row of buttons can be toggled on and off with a button to check if the combination is correct. Don't brute force this one! Incorrect answers cause a trapdoor to open beneath Jami, sending her plunging to her death. This time the solution is to talk with some "random crazies" that are harmless to Jami (and again showing her to have little interest in wanton murder as they cannot be harmed either). Some of them are different in appearance. The handful that stand out from the rest provide ones provide clues like "second from the right" which allow the puzzle to be solved. One of them offers the critical hint to press the center button. Players acting on this information will soon realize that there are an even number of buttons to press. With the roughness of the game's previous puzzles, it might be tempting to just guess which of the two buttons counts as the center for this, but BlueMagus is just up to his old tricks again. The buttons are spaced out with gaps in between them. Touch the blank center space of all the tiles and Jami will find a secret button that's being referred to by the clue here.
If the punishment wasn't death for wrong answers, I'd be on board with this one. Players get to think a little rather than just taking notes from the crazies verbatim.
Oh, and like with the herbs, Jami has to run back and forth across two boards for the hints and the buttons. At least here players can just memorize the three clues right away. They'll run into the crazies and receive hints before seeing the buttons though, so you'll likely have to backtrack once when you realize this information is pertinent right now.
The other components of Jami's Undercity leave players wanting more. The run-and-gun combat was fine, with room for improvement to bring it up to the level seen in BlueMagus's more demanding dungeon crawls. The RPG engine has some real potential that goes unused to keep things randomized. Very little of what Jami goes through advances the story, but the characters and world that are presented here lay a decent groundwork for a series. The puzzles... well, they add in some variety and that's about it. Most of the game is good, with opportunities to expand and make Jami or a sequel something great. The puzzles instead stumble, and are responsible for basically all the frustrations of the game. Clean them up a little and they'd be a worthy addition if not nearly as as unique as the RPG component. As they are now, they drag the game down overall.
Remix
The choice to play Jami's Undercity specifically, was an exciting one for me. While I had played the game several times in the past, what I had specifically played was Jami's Undercity Remix, a revised edition released more than half a year after the original. This is one of a few instances with revised ZZT games where for the longest time only one specific release was readily available. For many years, this original version of the game was lost to time, only surfacing again comparatively recently, being properly published on the Museum in late 2019. I'm always fascinated by the changes these games get when they have multiple versions, but especially so when those earlier releases are MIA.
BlueMagus also opted for re-titling the game as a "Remix" as opposed to the more common alternatives of just incrementing a version number or using the term "Special Edition". In 1999 the latter term hasn't quite caught on as much as it would in the years after, so "Remix" it is. That word might lead one to believe this could be a sort of re-imagining of the game, which could be an entirely different experience to the original. After playing the original for this article, I could not list a single difference in gameplay, writing, or visuals between it and the remix save for the title and ending art. I decided to take a *ahem* closer look at the remix and get an idea of just what actually changed.
Very little! It turns out. While every board is tweaked in some form, the remixed version seems like a strange effort now.
Obviously, the title screens reflect the different release with some new art. In both cases, staring too long at Jami will make you realize how much of struggle it must have been depicting a human being. I will give credit to the original though for including both her gun and sabre. She looks a lot more confident than in the remix where she looks kind of scared with those giant eyes.
The positioning of the gun though is excellent in the latter. The "font" for the game's title also looks really nice in the remix. If I had a list of "Best capital J's in ZZT", surely this one would be on top.
Jami's home shows a reasonable number of differences on closer inspection. The remix shrinks down her oversized bed to be a bit more in scale to the player's size. Her toilet is also smaller. A sentence I will probably never write again for the rest of my life.
But the strangest thing is the shading for the walls being redone. I guess this makes the showerhead blend into the wall a bit more, but beyond that I don't see any reason to change it. The original's shading looks more natural to me with the breakables being used to suggest the next door apartment's interior not being displayed. Changing that to solid walls makes it look more like how you'd depict a roof in ZZT instead. This is honestly me reaching a bit. In neither instance would I have noticed anything about the shading, positive or negative, were I not able to look at these images side by side.
There are numerous minor revisions to the text. A date is appended in the remix, which helps establish the time period the game is set in, but without one "(then) modern times" is going to be the practical assumption just by looking at the design of Jami's apartment.
As for the gameplay, it seems unchanged. Levels are just ever so slightly tweaked, primarily to complement the many bloodstains on the floors by adding more stains onto the walls. Boxes change in size, and some walls are adjusted slightly to make the paths more consistent. If it's not a perfect right angle, it can get right out in the remix.
The only change implement that I think is really necessary is adjusting the battle engine so that the enemy's Blocker object rests on a cyan wall rather than a yellow one. These tiles switch between breakables and fakes depending on whose turn it is to attack. With the original yellow color this means Jami's hair will be caught by the #change command as well, which can be distracting although the art is still chunky enough that the loss of shading hardly makes a difference. It's just this involuntarily twitch of the eye when you feel like something moved in the corner until you figure out what actually changed. (The original screenshot on the left here shows the hair-glitch in action.)
Another battle also complete redoes the enemy portrait, renaming them as well. What was originally a humble "guard" is now a "black op". The latter looks more threatening for sure compared to the doofus in the original version.
For an extremely unwarranted change, the four objects that give Jami the clues for the switch puzzle have been reduced to three, with the critical hint about a secret center switch being removed entirely! Without that hint I suspect most players would sooner think that the puzzle had been programmed incorrectly. This information doesn't appear to be provided anywhere else in the remix, which is quite a big misstep in my opinion.
Finally, the art that ends the game has been replaced for the worse as it's just an adjustment to the pose used in the first ending screen. The text is no different, but Devon now just reaches for Jami and appears to be in the process of getting up. The fangs of the originally are a really great shot for the game to end on! I'm saddened to see them go. My headcanon, ruined.
Out of all the special editions of ZZT releases I've seen, I think this is the one that makes the fewest changes between releases. I'm really surprised that BlueMagus bothered to give this one a distinct name when the adjustments seem to consist entirely of minor cosmetic and grammatical tweaks. With games like Kudzu 2.1 the game receives a vastly different ending. With the similarly named Boof: REMIX the graphics get a huge overhaul across every board while maintaining identical layouts. Tseng's Gem Hunter SE brings the game's graphics to more modern standards while adding in a bonus area with an extra boss fight and ending. Jami requires you to go through the boards with a fine-toothed comb to find anything different about it.
I wonder if the remix name was just because it was more of the style at the time than making a big deal over 1.1 or 2.0 updates. Other games have had forgotten revisions discovered such as Quest for Glory, and even BlueMagus is no stranger to it with four different releases of Dungeon Master's Gallery to his name, which both Jami releases fall between.
Usually I'll have an opinion on which version is the best one to play. With Jami it really doesn't matter. My take on the ending being ambiguous is non-canon. I guess the original has better hints for the switch puzzle towards the end? Beyond that, it's unexpectedly indistinguishable.
Final Thoughts
Okay, so writing it all out reveals that Jami's Undercity has plenty of flaws that could be addressed. The puzzles are not good. The primary combat is mediocre. The RPG engine is good, but feels like it could do better. The story merely bookends the game, not mattering at all in the middle. There's plenty to pick at here, which barring the RPG engine seems like plenty of valid reasons to give this one a pass. BlueMagus has done better.
Yet none of it feels like a deal breaker?
Despite the flaws, the game is short enough that all of them can be overlooked pretty easily. The world shown here is one that's fun to explore even if there's not actually much to uncover. Most of the mediocrity amounts to the game playing like typical ZZT worlds. Mediocre is a better way to compare Jami to any game, not just ZZT worlds. Put in the context of a late 90s release, this one has clear effort and ambition on display. Backtracking for the herb puzzle and to brute force the combination lock aside, the game moves at a solid pace. The environments may look samey, yet there's just enough here to hint at a world that Jami is just barely scratching the surface of. It would have been easy for Jami to amount to "girl versus vampire hunters", yet BlueMagus and JamiJo herself seem to have larger ideas for the world in mind. The torture devices, the werewolf, and the witch all expand the possibilities of what can happen in this world, to Jami and to Devon. It's a game that's really in need of a sequel, and clearly the team behind it agreed.
What's here is just a brief glimpse into something greater. Jami's Undercity can do with some refinement, something that the remix edition neglects to actually bother with, but it still gives the player an overall great experience that makes it a notable release of the era that probably deserved more formal recognition than it got. It was released at a time when the "Game of the Month" award was still being applied to all releases rather than just those released in a particular month making it harder to stand out as a good game that had to compete with the greats. Flipping through the dates, Jami finds itself in the company of Defender of Castle Sin and Gem Hunter 2, tough acts for anyone to keep up with.
It also suffers by competing with some of BlueMagus's other releases. Darkseekr, the first person (as much as ZZT can handle) dungeon crawler and Compound, another BlueMagus title where the unusual setting gets to do a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to stimulating the imagination. Perhaps Jami was a lesser focus and didn't get the attention it needed during development. It remains a solid experience and one that I would say is definitely worth the short amount of time it takes to complete, and has enough tricks up its sleeve to leave players glad they tried it even if it probably won't make anyone's top ten.
