♦ Livestream of the ZZT world "Bizanloo Special Edition" by Booth (1997) [https://museumofzzt.com/file/view/bizanloo/]. ♦
A Trippy ZZT Adventure! The genre that ZZTers invented themselves is hard to pin down the specifics of. Trippy worlds tend to be adventure games with psychedelic colors, weird colors, dream-like environments, and strange interactions to solve puzzles.
Bizanloo is one of the more overlooked examples of the genre compared to bigger hits like "Pop", or "Kudzu". After playing it, I kind of get why. While it's not a bad game really, it feels like it's not doing anything that hasn't been done before and better by other games in the genre.
You explore, as one often does, a mysterious blue mansion in another dimension in hopes of finding a way back home. To get back you'll have to deal with living statues, operate machines that can turn anything into anything, uncover secret passageways, and find a use for your own clone. You'll also answer trivia on topics ranging from religion, to Douglas Adams to ASCII character codes.
These are all par for the course, with Bizanloo suffering from a lack of atmosphere that the genre is known for. Instead it comes off as a collection of assorted puzzles with little sense of wonder as you wander from big blue room to big blue room. A library offers some hints as to how the player got there and what this place is, but there's very little to examine. Almost everything exists solely to be used a puzzle component offering little suggestion why it would be here in the first place. This is at its most extreme with the transformation machine that can turn a plate into a crowbar or a book into an amulet. Every item collected in theory can be ran back here to be used for something. The arbitrary transforming of items comes off as an easy potential solution to every puzzle both for players as well as for the author to find a way to get something in the player's hands based on what they currently have access to.
Luckily, it's fairly brief and a full walkthrough exists allowing you to take a quick journey through this blue world which isn't bad, but falls short of the highly regarded status of other worlds in this fairly narrow genre have.
♦ Play this world directly in your browser ♦
• https://museumofzzt.com/file/play/bizanloo/
♦ Originally streamed on May 12th, 2023 ♦
