Where can I get Frost 1; Power?

Frost 1; Power is available on z2 as well as playable in browser via Archive.org.
You can also explore the world yourself on the Museum of ZZT Public Beta.

Frost 1; Power

The year is 2003 and ZZT's sun is setting. It was the last year with more than 100 released titles, and new members within the community were becoming less and less common. Despite being the beginning of the end, there were still quality games being released. Frost stands out as one of the most notable titles from ZZT's later years, holding up today as a game that offers unparalleled graphics and attention to detail.

Nadir's Frost was held in high regards after it's release. Already a well established ZZTer and popular community member, Frost became a ZZT must-play overnight and has had a significant impact on the late ZZT community in several ways. The game's graphics are some of the best you'll see in ZZT, and I've often used screenshots from it as a way to illustrate the magnitude of difference between early ZZT games and modern ones. At least one ZZTer began constantly messaging Nadir asking about his "graphical secrets" much to his chagrin.

It's a very iconic ZZT game as we'll shortly see.

Before the game begins, you should take a listen to the game's theme-song, composed by MadTom, a very talented ZZT musician.

It's also a _very_ dialog heavy game. There is far more to read than there is to interact with, so be prepared for that.

Frost opens with a cutscene of a gray figure falling from the sky, screaming. His name is Set, he is not happy with where and when he is, but he is prepared to make the best of it and destroy some folks for reasons currently unknown.

Set will never make another appearance in this game again FYI. This board is the last one in the file and may have been added as an afterthought to try and introduce some of the grander things in the Frost universe.

Nadir has a sense of humor along these lines that will show up on occasion.

(Blue Moon was the title of Nadir's first ZZT game)

And there's the rub. Welcome to Zootopia. Frost is a game that features a cast entirely of anthropomorphic animals. ZZT's limited graphics make it so that you're not really getting anything out of being told the white on blue smiley face the player controls is a fox. The world of Frost wasn't designed specifically for the medium of ZZT, so outside of art boards there's no real difference in the characters being anthropomorphic or not.

Again we're dealing with something made in 2003. So we get a good look at attitudes towards furries as well. In short, the prevailing wisdom of the time was: they're bad and gross. I obviously can't speak for Nadir's thoughts on himself, his work, and the furry fandom for the time, but the quick attempt to distance Frost from furry come off as being afraid of being marked with the label. Frost wants its audience to enjoy it on its own merits, not because it has foxes in it. At the time, "furries like this" was a mark against something for a lot of people, and trying to push away that audience to better court others wasn't all that uncommon.

Here we get a good look at our protagonist, Penny Shaïwell, and wow. It is incredibly difficult to portray people in ZZT, and frankly prior to my first playing this game, I would've thought a decent animal person would be beyond what ZZT could do. For ZZT, this is an incredibly complex pose! Again, these characters weren't created with ZZT in mind, but Nadir doesn't look to have made sacrifices for the sake of ZZT. Just the fact that she's been crammed head to toe in a 25 tile high screen is accomplishment enough.

Frost is packed with little details to bring the world to life. This cutscene consists solely of Penny talking with her friend Melissa, and could have been very rigid. Instead, other objects walk into the school, and an object on the basketball court is animated repeatedly practicing their shots.

Melissa likes sword fighting and comics. We have no idea what species she is though. (An unused art board reveals her as a dog.) The bell rings (actually, via #play sound effects), and the two rush off for class.

The world is built up, but unlike most ZZT games which have to rely on telling you, Frost is capable of showing as well. Negative space is used to create a nice mountain range in the background. It's a very pretty game.

This is the first bit of player interaction the game gives. Ms. Feris calls out a move at random, and the player has to press the appropriate direction to perform the action. Each move has the class perform the action, slashing vertically, parrying downward, of thrusting their swords forward. The timing is generous enough (though if you struggle the sequence starts over), and it's pretty satisfying when you time it perfectly so that your sword stays in sync with all the other students' swords.

After the refresher lesson, the class breaks into pairs. Melissa's annoyance kind of goes against her talking up how she actually enjoyed swordfighting in the previous scene. It may have been more true to what's been established about the characters to swap the dialog.

The students are paired up in the next scene, and a helpful arrow points out Melissa and Penny among the crowd. Pointless fact: There are two fewer students in this scene than the previous one. Maybe they're behind the tree in the corner. All the students are practicing their swordfighting skills and are animated like the previous board.

And so Penny kills a girl.

Well, no, they're wooden swords.

Penny's sword hits Onyx, who apparently already has issues with her.

The three minutes line is great and is very much a PE teacher thing to say. The teacher breaks things up before they get heated, and the swordplay resumes. Onyx vows revenge, and leaves.

Looks like the whole thing started due to some teenage prank war. Onyx is presented as somebody who tends to take things way too far. The bad blood is old news to Penny though, who hardly sees any reason Onyx should still be upset.

The player is taken to another beautiful board with a sun just starting to set, and again using negative space to portray a background of the city and the mountain range. The house on the left appears to have ivy growing on it, a detail that's completely unnecessary but shows the amount of effort that was put into making these scenes look at good as they do. Speaking of detail, the brown clubs on the left are named "garden lemur gnome things".

Penny and Melissa promptly appear and begin walking down the street. They don't just walk, they walk _diagonally_, which is a pretty big deal for ZZT which has no concept of diagonal movement!

Without using the trick for diagonal movement, given the perspective on this board, the objects would be walking at a funny angle down the sidewalk, or have to zig-zag their way down, alternating between moving east and south. So how does it work?

ZZT's movement is typically handled with /[dir]. This makes an object move once per active cycle. Tim Sweeney was kind enough to realize that long repetitive lines like /e/e/e/e/e/e/e/e/e/e are a bit clunky for extended movement, and added a #walk [dir] command as well. When an object is walking, they will move in that direction every active cycle until they are told to stop walking. (They can also jump to a :thud label when they hit a wall.) Unlike regular movement, walking doesn't end a cycle and ZZT-OOP code is still processed, which includes a regular movement command. By walking south, and also moving east, the end result is that the object can take two steps in a single cycle! Note that it's two steps and not a single diagonal step. The object can't be blocked to the south and the east, and then move diagonally southeast.

This technique never got used all that often, so it does stand out here. It can also be used with the same direction for walking and regular movement to move in a cardinal direction at speeds faster than anything else in ZZT.

Sure enough, the bushes rustle and Onyx and another character jump out in ambush.

The girls get into a fight, and Penny loses control.

And so Penny kills a girl. For real this time. This game has magic in it, you had no idea, and this scene probably caught you off guard! Magic and its role in this world, is a major component of Frost. We're only just now getting to what the game is actually about.

A stranger shows up, discovers the grisly scene, and promptly runs off.

The writing in this game is generally good enough, but I can't get over how lax Penny is about killing somebody. You could argue that she's in a bit of a stupor now, having blacked out like that, but her immediate concern being "oops I killed a girl in broad daylight" comes off really poorly for an otherwise likable character.

I'm condensing this dialog into single text boxes here, but don't forget that all this dialog is happening one line at a time, and the characters are moving around and interacting with each other, approaching and disengaging all the while. These scenes are not static, and the constant movement makes these scenes into proper cinematics and not just a slow feed of dialog while some objects sit in place.

This dialog was probably written multiple times with that object name. ZZT's default editor has a habit of sometimes deleting an objects code for no apparent reason. Nadir always used the default editor rather than Kev-Edit or ZZTAE.

tl;dr -- Magic has been illegal for 200 years since some war. Penny broke the law and the punishment is exile. She's also been given a tattoo to mark her as a user of magic (the symbol on the game's title screen)

The game's introduction is nearly over. Penny's getting kicked out of the country, and forced to start a new life.

Penny does her best to not make things sadder than they have to be. Melissa has bestowed upon Penny the comic books she borrowed.

Penny's mother is definitely taking the loss of her daughter hard. Mom has bestowed upon Penny the family sword.

Mildred's emotions are much better conveyed compared to Penny's earlier lack of emotions over accidentally killing somebody. This is the family's only appearance and the first impressions are positive.

Mist gets a stereo out of the whole thing, so it's not all bad.

The last family member to speak with is dad, and there's some writing here that really stands out.

One of Frost's reviews on z2 is simply titled "foxes use tampons ahahhaha". The ZZT community at this time being mostly teenage boys, there was nothing more hilarious than a game mentioning tampons! It was the height of comedy.

I don't know what Nadir was thinking when he decided to include this sequence, but it's honestly a completely understandable request! You're getting kicked out of the country, and have to begin a long walk to another city elsewhere, you darn well better have tampons if you need them. I feel like most modern games would still be afraid to bring up any mention of periods, lest the illusion of women as pure creatures who definitely don't have bodily functions be shattered.

Goodbyes mostly said, Penny is now entirely on her own, as ready as she'll ever be to make her way to Alsace.

After many, many cutscenes, the game finally begins in earnest. The player has control of Penny and it is their goal to guide her safely out of the forest to Alsace.

To the east is a haunted swamp. Penny has no reason to go there and will refuse to continue in that direction.

To the west is the proper path forward. Nadir does a nice job conveying a forest here, with the roughly circular shapes of all the different trees. Compare it to something like Deceiving Guidance's forest which tries to draw every individual tree and ends up being much muddier versus the distinct floors and walls of Frost's forest.

The main gameplay of Frost consists of running into creatures to attack them with your sword, while the creatures attempt to run into you and attack before you can. It's fortunate that the game's graphics and storyline bring the game up so high, since the combat is pretty bad. The enemies react fast enough that it's difficult to run into them directly, and just being adjacent for a moment is enough to take 5 damage. The creatures take two hits, and are knocked back from the first hit so if you can't get them against a wall, they'll get away and begin the process anew.

All that blood is from each time I was bit. To be fair to Nadir, this combat would likely go much more smoothly outside of Dosbox where it's possible to run in a straight line and turn on a dime. The emulator's key repeat issues with ZZT make things harder than they should be.

Sandwiches are provided in the chest as a source of healing, under the circumstances, it's not really enough. To make matters worse, there are hidden duplicators that create more enemies, so it's not actually possible to clear out an entire board.

Up ahead is a bridge that's been blocked by a giant rock creature. The stream here is animated to create the effect of flowing water, and there are also plenty of stones and bits of moss on the ground, adding some more detail to the forest than just having trees. The sprinkling of decorative objects again contributes to making these environments feel less sterile.

Poor Stumpy! Penny's only hope is to turn back and enter the haunted swamp.

Just getting back to the split path is an ordeal. Penny is almost out of blood.

There's a pretty clear split here between happy peaceful forest, and spooky haunted swamp. The trees get darker, and it becomes too dark to really see the grass.

Penny isn't exactly one to believe in monsters, and figures whoever is living in a swamp probably just wants to be left alone.

The trees in the swamp are drooping, there are reeds everywhere, as well as a few graves, and you can even see a Rogon. That's called world building.

I like this a lot.

When the player is aligned in certain spots, swamp monsters rise out of the water and begin shooting. It's easy to be caught off guard, but they're spaced far enough away that the player should have ample time to get out of the way. Compared to the forest, the swamp is honestly less dangerous.

At least until the actual undead appear! Penny's dismissal of the swamp being haunted would imply to me that this is a world without ghosts and skeletons as things people believe are real. Her reaction to seeing undead in a world that shouldn't have any is pretty calm. Maybe Ilititoa does have these things, and Penny just disregards them since she was raised in a magic-free environment where such things were essentially non-existent.

Or maybe the reality of the situation doesn't hit her until just now.

This next screen introduces zombies and bloodflies, both of which are easier to deal with the the polliwogs from earlier. The zombies will move straight towards the player once they're aligned with them, which makes it a lot easier to run straight into them without having the enemy move away during the approach. The bloodflies have similar behavior, and also are defeated in a single hit. Since both creatures mostly try to move towards the player, it's easy to get them stuck against a wall which makes avoiding them an option.

Like before, signs guide the player where to go, and like before the player will find the obvious direction blocked, and have to take the "wrong" path in order to proceed.

Heading to the house, once more the tiny details make the most out of the scene. That one window has _curtains_.

The fourth wall is totally broken. Penny knows exactly what's going on here.

Heading east leads to the lake along with the usual assortment of zombies and killer flies. There are also several keys and doors scattered throughout the board. The upbeat sound effects from them stick out. It's not often that built in items get use out of later era ZZT games, but they serve their purpose just fine here.

The zombies here in the corner don't move until the door's been opened. Otherwise, they'd almost certianly be pinned up against the door waiting for Penny to open it.

The path ends here due to the high water levels. Though it's pretty clear that you'll need to investigate the dock.

This effect is SO GOOD. The giant squid is made up of a variety of invisible walls with dark cyan backgrounds which makes them appear to match the surrounding water. A lot of special colored ZZT items are used as well to produce STK colors like the dark purples and white on gray normals. Check out the code to make this beast rise from the waters:

There's even a dark cyan slime used to spread water on the jetty! The attention to detail here is astounding. Shortly after the creature rises, the player is teleported away to the next screen.

Showing, and not just telling, the mysterious woman's hands do animate with a simple glowing effect around them.

"This is the best board ever." - Me, playing Frost in 2003

"This is the best board ever." - Me, playing Frost in 2003, 5 seconds later.

Can I keep gushing about this art? Especially the skunk magicing the giant squid board? The perspective on the squid is so well executed. ZZT's low resolution and and non-square tiles make doing anything at an angle a pain to look half decent. Nadir's artwork is really unmatched. The same limitations also make curves frustrating to draw as well, but that tentacle doesn't look angular in the least.

This sequence plays out like a comic book, with each board as a new panel. There's clear thought to the composition of each board. Compare the trees on the board where the squid is being attacked to the board with Penny being pulled out of the lake. There's a level of consistency here that's really unmatched among ZZT games excluding straight up copying and pasting boards.

The screen actually fades to blackness as Penny blacks out.

Penny awakens in the house she saw earlier, with Henna taking care of her injuries. Apparently the swamp actually being haunted is a new thing, and Henna's mentor is dead from the whole zombies craving flesh epidemic that's going around.

The player is transported to this board, depicting Silver's recent demise. He kind of looks like Sly Cooper, but wearing pants.

Concussions be damned, it's time to save Stumpy. The player is given control again and gets to collect Penny's things.

No chance to explore the rest of the house, the player needs to exit entirely once they leave the bedroom.

Penny meets up with Henna and they begin traveling together. For those of you in the audience wishing to ship these two, Nadir kindly provided the name for said ship.

You do have to backtrack to Stumpy, which means running away from enemies as much as possible.

Skeletons annihilated, it's now safe to leave the swamp. Although, the swamp creatures that pop up and shoot at you are alive and well, so do be careful of them.

The rest of the trip goes without event, until you reach the board with Stumpy, which triggers a warp to another art board.

Henna patches Stumpy up, and the two decide to made the trip to Alssace together. "My map says there's a pretty low pass through 'em. We'll be fine." is a line to note, because ZZT doesn't actually display it correctly! Since one of the lines starts with an apostrophe, ZZT treats it as a comment (or pre-#zapped label, same difference), so the sentence just ends. It's not noticeable at all since the sentence still work without it, and at worst looks like it's just missing punctuation.

And so the game ends, with Penny having gained a new friend and traveling companion, and the player stuck waiting for a sequel. Alas, the sequel was never completed, though an incomplete version was released by Nadir in 2007 with author commentary sprinkled throughout.

There was also a period where Nadir tried his hand at telling the Frost story via a webcomic. The comic has about 30 pages, covers everything shown here up to Penny arriving in the woods, and cleans up the writing enough that going from the comic to the ZZT game, there's a noticeable difference. It'll be posted on the Museum beta site (both public and private) later this month, so be sure to check that out!

Final Thoughts

This game extremely captivating. Its world is clearly one that was thought out and whose surface was barely scratched in the first game. I keep repeating myself, but the game's graphics, both in the dedicated art boards as well as those with player control are without a doubt some of the best seen in ZZT.

The writing is pretty solid. Nadir seems a bit afraid of creating a dead serious world and the writing definitely imparts a bit of lightheartedness even when the situations can be pretty grim. Penny's reactions can be a bit underwhelming, but overall there's nothing eyerolling here. Some plot threads aren't really explored, like the whole Set character, and the exact mixture of fantasy/sci-fi/reality that's blended together isn't really defined. It's a bit like the blend of magic and technology you'd see out of a Final Fantasy game, but the world isn't really developed to the point where you could confidently guess whether something like computers or guns exist. Exactly what can and can't be done with magic isn't explored either.

Such criticisms about the unknowns of the world would likely not apply had the series been completed of course. Frost includes the "1" in its own title. Of course the first chapter wouldn't have all the answers.

As for the gameplay, it feels a bit tacked on. I'm not surprised Nadir later tried to tell the story through comics, since it seems like a better fit. The combat seems to be there for the sake of having more traditional ZZT gameplay, and not just calling the ZZT world a cinema. Playing under Dosbox, you'll probably need to cheat for health, but while it's a bit harsh on the player, it's not the sort of thing that makes you wonder how it was supposed to be enjoyable.

It's a shame the series was never completed, but even the brief foray into the world of Ilititoa offered by Frost 1; Power is a trip worth taking.