A comedic audio game for blind and visually impaired players, set on the streets of a Polish town.
- What is this?
- What you need
- Downloading and installing
- Starting to play
- The controls
- Updating
- If your antivirus complains
- Languages
- Saving
- Reporting bugs
- Parental advisory
- Credits
A żul (roughly, "zhool") is a Polish word for a street drinker. One of the men you walk past on your way to work, sitting on a bench with a carrier bag of empties, who has a whole life going on that you never see.
Zul Simulator is a game about being one of them for a while. You wake up on ulica Wesoła, which translates as Cheerful Street and is not, and you get on with your day. You collect bottles and cash them in at the deposit machine. You cadge change off passers-by, some of whom are kind and some of whom are not. You buy food you should eat and drink you should not. You keep an eye on the police, who keep an eye on you. You try to get to a bed by nightfall, and if you cannot, you find a bench.
There are people out there with lives of their own, in the same places at the same times each day, who form opinions about you based on how you behave. There is a bar, a church, a park, a station and a police station. There is a line you can cross that the town will not forgive.
It is funny, it is fairly rude, and it is played entirely by ear. There is nothing on the screen worth looking at.
You can play as one of four men, and it genuinely changes the game: how people treat you, what you are good at, and what you do when you have had too much.
A Windows PC and a screen reader. NVDA, JAWS and the built-in Windows voice all work. Headphones are strongly recommended, because the game tells you where things are by where the sound comes from, and that does not work through a laptop speaker.
You do not need to install anything else. Everything the game needs comes in the download.
There is no installer. You unzip it and run it.
Download Zul Simulator — that link always gives you the newest version, and starts the download straight away rather than taking you to a page.
If you would rather see what is in the release first:
- Go to the latest release.
- Under "Assets", download ZulSimulator.zip. It is about 43 MB. Ignore the
one that says
DEV_source_snapshot, that is for development and is not the game. - Unzip it somewhere you can write to. Your Documents folder is ideal. Do not unzip it into Program Files, because Windows protects that folder and the game will not be able to update itself later.
- You will get a folder called Zul Simulator. Open it and run zul.exe.
That is it. Nothing to install and nothing to configure.
The first thing it asks is which language you want, English or Polish. After that you pick a character, and it reads you a short piece about who he is before you commit.
Then press H for how to play. It is written for someone who has never played this before, and it covers a good deal more than this page does.
The full list is under H in the game. The essentials:
- Arrow keys walk you around.
- Enter interacts with whatever you are standing at or beside.
- T picks somewhere to track, and the game beeps towards it until you arrive.
- P lists the people nearby.
- C, R and H read out your cash, your standing and your health.
- Escape backs out of anything.
Sounds behind you play slightly lower than sounds ahead of you, which is how you tell what you have already walked past.
The game looks after this itself. When you start it, it quietly checks whether anything is new. If there is, it reads out what has changed and asks whether you want it. Say yes and it downloads only the parts that actually changed, which is usually a few megabytes rather than the whole thing.
If you are offline, it says nothing at all and simply starts.
You can also read what's new here at any time.
Because the game updates itself, it needs to live somewhere it can write to. That is the reason for not putting it in Program Files.
It might, and it is a false alarm.
Antivirus software partly judges a program by how many people have run it before. A newly built game that almost nobody has downloaded yet has no such history, so it sometimes gets flagged purely for being new. This happens to plenty of small games and to some large commercial ones too.
If Windows Defender blocks it, open Windows Security, go to Protection history, find the item and choose to allow it. You can also add the game's folder to the exclusion list.
If you would rather satisfy yourself first, upload the file to virustotal.com, which checks it against about seventy scanners at once.
Please do not switch your antivirus off altogether. Allowing this one folder is enough.
The game is fully playable in English and Polish, and you choose when it starts. The Polish is written by a Polish speaker, not run through a machine.
The game saves automatically, and your saves live in your AppData folder rather than the game folder. Updating the game, or even deleting it and unzipping a fresh copy, will not lose your progress.
Please open an issue on the issues page, or send them to whoever gave you the game.
The more specific the better: what you were doing, what you expected, and what happened instead. If something sounded wrong, say what it sounded like. The game can also write a log file from the test menu, which is genuinely useful.
Zul Simulator is about drinking, poverty and the police, and the language is what you would actually hear on that street. There is a great deal of swearing. It is not suitable for children.
Nothing in it encourages drinking. If anything it is fairly clear-eyed about where that road goes.
Built with NVGT, the Nonvisual Gaming Toolkit.
Polish translation and a great deal of steering by Longshoot. Testing by Kevin and the lads, who find things nobody meant to leave in.