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ZZT Game Reviews
Although the ancient DOS game ZZT is incredibly obscure in the modern age, its golden era, stemming from the mid 1990s to the early 2000s, spawned an incredibly diverse cornucopia of creative games that pushed the ZZT engine far beyond anything its creator ever envisioned. Despite its limitations, the grand versatility and ease of use of the ZZT game creation system (GCS) attracted many young and talented creatives who took advantage of the game's capabilities to forge many timeless worlds.
The library of ZZT fan games includes everything from genuinely profound tales, to impressively complicated engines that turn ZZT into an entirely different game, to works of utter psychedelic lunacy. On this page, I will give my personal opinions on many of the most important and most majestic of these creations.
Due to the fact that I have enjoyed long-term friendships with a number of legendary ZZTers, and because, as an autistic, I am quite prone to
polarised thinking and struggle immensely with rating things in a more nuanced way than "I LOVE IT!" or "I HATE IT!", I have chosen to forego giving numeric ratings here to avoid bias. I will also only be reviewing games that are genuinely of very high quality and/or have notable historical value.
Since there is no reliable ZZT website that is still receiving updates (although quite
a few abandoned ancient gems), I will also occasionally sprinkle in various historical information about the ZZT community when it is related to the game in question.
Virtually all of the ZZT games that have been released can be downloaded, as of this writing, from either
Exploited Chaos or
z2.
Edible Vomit
| Author: |
Drac0 |
| Genre: |
Adventure |
| Date released: |
March 1999 |
Title screen. |
Although Drac0 is known for a number of other excellent games, including Teen Priest 1 and 2, and for being the inventor of the
ALL CAPS phenomenon, Edible Vomit is undeniably the spectacular jewel in the crown of his prestigious ZZT career.
The protagonist of Edible Vomit is Freddy the Ferret, an addict who has injected himself with an unknown potent drug and entered a trip of epic proportions. Now fiending for even more powerful drugs, he runs amok trying to find a dealer known only as Jimmy the Rat.
An eerily beautiful garden featuring trees with animated glowing fruits. |
Taking place in a psychedelic world spawned from Freddy's intoxicated mind, Edible Vomit features a beautiful and unique art style and a whimsical world full of odd collectibles (including the Moon itself!) with equally odd uses. Yet underneath all of the playful craziness, the game carries a constant air of melancholy, as Freddy continually runs into one tragically ill-fated person after another, all brought to bleak ruin through the same path of self-destruction that he himself is fervently racing down.
I am a very big fan of unapologetically lacing over-the-top comedy with dark subject matter, and this is another area that Edible Vomits shines in, constantly injecting classic Drac0 humour to lighten up the otherwise morose tale being told. One excellent example is Freddy's hallucination of the houses in his neighbourhood being giant mushrooms, which is referenced in his tear-jerking heel-face turn where, in the middle of describing a heart-wrenching list of the tragedies he has encountered during his adventure, he laments the fact that his friend is stuck living inside of a mushroom due to drug-induced poverty.
I may be a tad biased due to having had a close friendship with the author during his life, but I am hardly the only person to believe that Edible Vomit deserves the title of greatest ZZT game of all time. Between the timeless story, the incredible creativity, the lovely unique art style, and Drac0's legendary humour, I cannot say enough good things about this game.
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PPDV
| Author: |
Viovis |
| Genre: |
Viovis |
| Date released: |
February 1999 |
Title screen. |
It can be said that there are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who would react to PPDV with either disgust or terrified confusion, and the ones that react by squeeing with laughter and glee (guilty as charged). This divisiveness is to be expected. Viovis is a legendary ZZTer, known foremost for
his prolific catalogue of utterly bizarre games, all marked by a distinct style of depraved surrealism that arguably warrants defining a unique ZZT genre after the man's namesake (a genre that not only encompasses games made by Viovis, but also by imitators such as
Voighdt and
myself), and PPDV is arguably the oddest and roughest game that he has ever put out.
This makes just as little sense in context. |
While its magnificent sequel, PPDV2, does make a (beautifully peculiar) effort to be profound and impactful, PPDV is a chaotic mind dump of complete unapologetic Viovisian lunacy. A psychedelic journey through a world of cackling zombies that assault English letters and die when they're reminded that they're not yellow, a conspiracy to manufacture bird cages for humans, and a sentient coffee mug that likes to read newspaper comics. The game has no plot whatsoever, and rarely even maintains any semblance of logical consistency from one board to the next.
The game is most certainly not without its negatives -- it's noticeably rough around the edges even by the author's standards, with the art being largely a bunch of bare bones ANSI scribbles instead of the creative graphics that Viovis is known for. Yet, in spite of everything, it is far from being without its charms, having spawned a number of amusing catchphrases such as "THINKING IN THE DARK GIVES YOU THE INABILITY TO SEE". If you want to spend 10 or so minutes worrying about whether a stranger slipped LSD into your ZZT, PPDV is more than worth your time.
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Town of ZZT
