The Kingdom of XYZ

The Kingdom of XYZ is a ZZT-inspired game authored by Frank0127.

The King loves to meet new visitors, and you are encouraged to take a day trip to his fancy castle to the West. To get there, however, you will need to search the land for a red key to unlock a big door that's in the way. To do that, you'll have to collect a bunch of other keys to unlock a bunch of other doors. Can you endure the many tree puns of the forest maze?

You can find Kingdom of XYZ for Windows on its project page on Itch.

Spoilers below!

Maps

Full map (9216 x 7840 px, 2.2 MB)

Half-size map (4608 x 3920 px, 1.1 MB)

Walkthrough

This walkthrough is pretty terse, as the game is good at explaining itself. Be aware that while the interface mentions saving and loading your game, this feature was ultimately not implemented. The game can be completed in roughly half an hour.

Like Town of ZZT, you start on a hub screen with a few different paths. The routes to the north and west both have locked doors in the way, and the eastern path requires an item that is obtained from the south-west path. The two southern routes can be played in any order.

Sixteen question mark items can be found throughout the game. When all are collected, they reveal a secret at the end of the northern path.

Phase I

South-West Path

• Following the South-West path to its end will provide you with a blue key.

South-East Path

• Navigate the four-screen maze to speak to the Deku tree in the upper-right. Be sure to take both the green key and old stump that's offered before heading back.

East Path

• With the stump item, speak to the lifeguard in the north-west area. A surfboard item will be offered, which will allow you to travel over the water to the east. Beware: if you touch any of the sand dunes before taking the surfboard, a bug will cause this screen to reset to its original state, wiping out the surfboard, and making the conventional path through the game impossible to complete.

• A yellow key can be found in an interior board located in the south-east area.

Phase II

North Path

• The blue, green and yellow keys unlock the northern route, which contains several falling boulder sequences. When you reach the checkpoint, you will be rewarded with a red key that unlocks the western route. Several more screens are locked behind a purple key here, which is collected in the western area. You can optionally return to this section to unlock a secret related to the question mark items scattered throughout the game.

West Path

• Four drawbridges must be lowered in order to open up a path to the castle. Pathways to the north and south provide buttons that will lower two of the drawbridges each.

• Once all drawbridges are lowered, proceed west to meet the King of XYZ and wrap up the game.

Anomalies and Out-of-Bounds Points

• As mentioned above, the Deku Tree in the forest maze (South, East from start) will give you an old stump that the lifeguard (East from start) will turn into a surf board. This allows you to travel across water along the beach area. When this item has spawned, it's important to grab it as soon as possible. If you touch any of the sand dunes on this screen, it will cause the item to disappear, making it impossible to finish the game without out-of-bounds exploits.

• Due to how object movement is handled in the game, it's possible for two moving things to pass through each other without making contact. It seems that all object movement is processed in bulk, separate from other game logic like bullet-to-creature collision checks. In some cases, this allows you to run straight through bullets if you are synced up just right.

• When pushing against an obstacle, the origin of the player's bullets is displaced in that direction. You can take advantage of this to shoot through walls.

• You can shoot in all directions simultaneously if you can hit W, A, S and D all together.

• You can disable the Spinning Gun turrets by touching them. One exception to be careful of: on the board north of the red door, this causes the turrets to pile up in the upper-left corner of the screen. When this happens, the turrets end up shooting many bullets occupying the same space. If you touch one of these groups of bullets, they will all hurt you at the same time.

• You can move diagonally, leading to some interesting out-of-bounds situations that allow you to skip several areas of the game, and to chill out in the status bar. This can also lead to situations where you are unable to move, so it's best to experiment with this only after you've finished the game proper.
  • The best skip I have found so far: On the starting board, there is one light-green tile in the lower-left quadrant that you can step onto diagonally. From here, you can travel to other boards while still out-of-bounds by walking along the edges of paths that are linked. It's hard to explain in writing, but this basically allows you to get past the red door to the west from the start of the game.
  • It's also possible to go out of bounds on the castle exterior screen (the dark grey cells are walkable), and also at the base of the mountain at the end of the northern route.