Missed Classic 138: Winter Wonderland (1986)

Written by Michael

The holiday season is all about traditions.  I’m sure many of our readers have rituals involving putting up a tree, or a multi-generation dinner, or the exchange of gifts.  For my family, it’s gathering from all corners of the region to spend slightly too much time together, before we all tire of each other’s company.  But, of course, we enjoy it immensely.

The TAG family has a tradition as well, the yearly Christmas “Missed Classic” of questionable quality; the adventure game equivalent of an ugly Christmas sweater.  We are slightly messing with that tradition this year, because Joe wasn’t able to join us for this year’s installment, but I’m hoping I’ll be a passable substitute.

The title I chose is a bit longer than the ones Joe usually plays; heck, it’s a full-length title for the time, yet priced as a budget title at just £7.95 on cassette.  The title is 1986’s Winter Wonderland, a release from Incentive Software Ltd., a company from the United Kingdom with releases spread over nearly a decade. Our title today was created using their own home-grown Graphic Adventure Creator, an interpreter they sold and distributed.  Our title today was designed on an early, pre-release copy of the language by two designers, Simon Lipscomb and Tim Walsha.  

So, I picked this title based on the themed title only, even though I knew it wasn’t Christmas themed.  But what I should have done is read some reviews or walkthroughs first.  See, this game... isn’t so great.  The Interactive Fiction Wiki, for example, rates games on a cruelty scale, and this game earned the worst rating they have: Nasty.  The honor comes from the amount of dead man walking scenarios you can find yourself in, as well as the amount of learning from being killed off.  Also, the parser, while generally acceptable, isn’t always.

So, I put a lot of time into this title, but ended up referring to a walkthrough a lot towards the end, in order to have this ready in time for the holidays.  Also, the walkthroughs I found (three of them) aren’t entirely correct; I think they were written for a later version released for the BBC Micro.  I played the original Commodore 64 version.  I found a longplay video of the game where they are very obviously following the incorrect walkthroughs, and end up having to edit the video when they splice together multiple sessions to figure out a non-working command.

I wasn’t able to find the C64 instructions (or even the box), but the Amstrad version’s box had the setup published inside the box cover.  In a nutshell, you’re a down on your luck archaeologist who has a frozen career, when your colleague Sergio sends a message from Tibet -- get over here right away.  You head over there, only to find he’s left, likely to a remote dig site on the lower slopes of the Himalayas.  Since you’re a trained pilot, you hop in a plane and fly yourself there.  In your hurry, you didn’t check the weather forecast first, and it really isn’t good flying weather.  

So we begin, having crashed our plane somewhere as a voice on the plane’s radio mockingly tells us, “Welcome to Winter Wonderland.”  Each screen will tell us immediately if there are items around, so I pick up the shoes and coat.  Doing so seems to make me immediately wear them; that’s actually a welcome programming choice.  This screen, you’ll notice, has artwork, but less than half of the screens do, if that. 

Walking around, I find a flare gun, and it’s a good thing I do, because a few screens later, I encounter a grizzly bear that didn’t seem to get the memo about hibernating in the winter, so while I cannot KILL BEAR (that will kill me), I can SHOOT GUN, which scares the beast away.  I continue on and eventually learn a new word on another screen.

So, a potholer is someone who goes exploring in deep-down caves.  Not that I would have guessed from this picture.  Examining the potholer nets us some rope and a pick, and I can climb my way up out of here.  A few screens later, we end up in a snowdrift.  The solution has no clue given at all: use your hands to DIG SNOWDRIFT.  Ugh.

Skipping ahead some more, as I’m trying to fit this in one post: I find an icicle at a frozen waterfall, and climbing to a ledge, I find an egg, which, upon examination, is rare.

Some more travels gets us to Shangri-la.  Unlikely, but okay.  We will not be needing to enter the previous screens again.  There’s a few dozen or so screens we will be able to visit here.  First, the hint from the game (“You feel warmer”) means I can take off that coat and drop it, which will become necessary because we have a limited inventory.  It seems all items, if I DROP them, remain on the screen where I leave them, even if it makes no sense.  For example, at some point in the game, I’m going to forge a copy of a key.  I could drop the item where the owner of the original is, and still return later and pick it up.

Back to Shangri-la, immediately available to us is a hotel, but if we go inside, the icicle melts in our hands.  Restoring from what I confirm later is a dead-end, I drop the icicle first.  Entering the hotel, the receptionist is both “eyeing us suspiciously” but also warmly greets us, says we were expected, and presents us with a key to our room.  Examining the key nets us a generic fail response, so I’m hoping we can find our room.  Walking around the hotel, I meet a woman described as “the daily”.  Another British English item I get to learn today; it is another word for a housekeeper.

I find my room, and the only thing of interest in it is a vacuum cleaner.  I take that, and for no apparent reason, I decide to offer it to the housekeeper.  I say no apparent reason, because I cannot talk with her.  She’s happy I returned it (she left it in there by accident) and gives me some soap, because “you need it more than I do.”  Ouch!

Just for that, I go into her dingy cupboard and take a bottle of cleaning fluid.

Back to the lobby of the hotel, now I am told there’s a master key hanging on the wall near the receptionist.  What did we do in the last Larry game?  I use the soap to make an impression.  In front of the receptionist, who pays me no mind.  

Exploring the land some more, crossing some ice bridges, I find a mall.  One of the stores is a locksmith.  When I walk in, without me doing anything, the game tells me I hand the soap to the clerk, who makes a key from the impression, for free, because I’m the first customer.  Don’t think he’ll be in business long.

Taking the master key to the hotel, I can enter another room and take a cash card that’s just lying there.

More exploring finds me a professor of ornithology, a term I am vaguely familiar with due to the subspecialty oology being prominently featured in an Ernest Cline novel.  Here’s another possibility for a dead man-walking situation: if you give the professor your rare egg.

I don’t know where the clue is, but you need to SELL it to him.  The clue against giving, I suspect, is buried in the manual, where the game, in starting hints, warns me not to be too generous.  If I sell it, I get 50 credits, and I’ll be making multiple purchases later.  If I give it, he’s just grateful.  Either way, that’s the last we will deal with this gentleman or the egg.

Another store in the mall offers ski gear, being sold by the one and only Waldo, it appears.  I was wondering where he was.  It turns out we’ll need the merchandise here, boots and skis, later in our travels.

Other items around in the mall we’ll need to buy, for example, is a book on “Mythology” that tells us that hamsters are a delicacy to Wompas.  Yes, the creature from Star Wars.  So when we go to another store in the mall and find a hamster, it’s obvious we need to buy it.  Then, a couple of screens later, comes a walking dead scenario, as the hamster runs away.  You need to first buy food in the health food store (grains and such) so the hamster will stay with you.

The other item the news agent sells is a DIY pamphlet that turns out to be instructions on how to make a hang-glider.

Eventually I come upon a platform where my path is blocked by a Wompa.  Another dead end?  Follow the book advise and GIVE HAMSTER.  The Wompa gladly eats it, but then still remains a threat.  No, the solution is to DROP HAMSTER instead, so the Wompa chases after it, and then trips and “smashes into a thousand pieces”.

Back to the mall for a while, though.  One of the stores is a bank; when we walk in, we are immediately given a 100 credit loan without asking or applying.  The bank manager then “begins playing with his box of Lego.”

There’s a news agent where I can buy a magazine; reading it tells me there is a form inside.  You need to find the right words for the parser to tear it out.  Another store in the mall sells pens, so you can use one to fill out the order form for a hang-glider kit.  

Across the hall in the mall from the bookseller is a DIY shop.  The hint as to why you need to buy their wares, I suppose, is that you wish to order a hang-glider kit, and the DIY manual in the news agent tells you how, so the common theme of DIY follows here.  The store sells supa-glu, so I buy it.  The store also sells scissors, but if you buy them, you will be dead-man-walking yet again, because you will not have enough money to finish the game.  (If you replay, and skip buying the book, you could buy the scissors to cut the form out of the magazine instead of ripping, but then you will finish the game with an imperfect score.)

Good thing I eventually find a post office, where I can buy a stamp to mail that form.  But, I cannot mail the form here; that confuses the game parser immensely.  No, I have to explore the other screens until I happen upon a mailman, and give him the outgoing letter.  

Another store we find is a joke shop, where we can buy a beard that makes us look older.  This will be useful later.  Yet another store in the mall is a travel agency, where we can buy a ticket for the monorail system in town.  This is what is above the platform the Wompa was blocking me from.

On the other side of town some of the merchants we visit include an off-license (for us Americans, a liquor store or, in some regions, a package store) where we can buy a drink, which turns out to be a dry martini.  There’s a florist that has a sign that says they sell ROSES.  Buying roses fails, but leave off the S and it works.

Here’s where the online walkthroughs and videos fail: the next place to go is to find a fertile valley to plant a rose.  Why you need to do this, there’s no real hints or clues provided.  And, this will be in a stream of actions with no rhyme or reason.  But, we do it, the rose grows “at an astounding rate” and we get showered with pollen, which is automatically added to our inventory.  

I wonder what would have happened if my inventory was full?

Well, we can rent skates from a skate shop (or hire them, as in the lingo of UK English), we can somehow use these skates to glide over some areas of thin ice that we couldn’t walk over, because, well known facts, skates take ten pounds off, and we arrive at a small island with a banana and a bee.

We can take the banana, but if we try to leave, we get stung -- if we don’t have the pollen.  If we give that to the bee, it “flies away humming merrily to itself.”

If we eat the banana (no indication that we are hungry), we are satisfied and also keep the banana peel in our inventory.

Back to our hotel room, much like in Maniac Mansion, our order form was answered quickly!  There’s a parcel here.  If we open it, we find a hang-glider kit.

If we “MAKE KIT” and we also have the supa-glu, and have read the manual from the bookstore, then it will get built. 

One location we haven’t talked about yet is an igloo.  

There’s an igloo in our travels that contains both an irate homeowner and a mallet.  If I try to take the mallet, the homeowner doesn’t let me.  But, if I drop the banana peel, the homeowner slips and falls on the banana peel and gets knocked out, allowing us to steal his only apparent belonging.

No, this is not the goofiest puzzle solution in the game.  It’s coming up soon.

Remember that forest we were in?  Off to one side is a ledge.  I never, ever would have solved this one without hints or a walkthrough.  I needed to take the icicle, hammer it into the ground with the mallet, and tie the rope to it to use it to climb down.

An icicle as a stake in the ground.  Okay.  Still not the goofiest puzzle in the game, although we’re almost done.

Here it is.  As we go down the ledge, we come across a wet marshland caused by melted snow, so wet, we cannot cross it.

This solution would make Joe happy with his experience with some wordplay puzzles in the past:  You need to pour the DRY martini on the ground to remove the moisture.

From here, we make our way to the “edge of an unbelievably high cliff.”  Below us “is a sheer drop of immeasurable depths.”

So, from here, we can use the hang glider to soar away and I suppose live our best lives.

Final Rating

I suspect I should be hitting the eggnog before I do this, but I’ll keep a clean mind for now.

Enigmas and Solution-Findability

Well... ugh.  No hints, no rationale for many of the things you need to do.  Why do I need to give the vacuum to the cleaner?  I can’t talk to her, so I’m never told of a need.  Why do I need to plant a rose?  What hint do I get that I should explore a random forest and expect immediate plant growth?  Almost nothing makes sense.  

Or, how about the real-life one?  How come I can’t send the letter from the post office, I have to find a random post man?

A generous 2, because I got a kick out of the dry martini.

Game UI and Items

It’s a text adventure with occasional pictures.  It’s serviceable.  The game has a save/restore interface, and I can ask for the score or inventory.  I’m told the game engine itself handles complex sentences with the use of the word IT, but since I couldn’t TALK to people (they never found me interesting) and I could not LOOK at items, it would just ignore the name of the item and describe the room, I wasn’t much impressed.  But, there’s been worse, I suppose.  Score 2.

Gameworld and Story

This is a strength of the game, I suppose.  Lots of places to explore, most of them can be revisited.  Two halves of the town are separated by a forest that cannot be traversed, but they put in a monorail mechanic to handle that.  They tried to make the world seem alive by inserting random messages on most screens, based on your location.  For example, near the ski hill, they would tell me some skiers just passed by.  Shoppers walk past me in the mall.  Sometimes, I get a snowball thrown at me by a kid.  Other times, I just sneeze, which I first thought was a hint to wear my jacket, but instead is just a random occurrence.

The story?  Kind of gets ignored.  You’re meeting a fellow archaeologist to check out some research, your plane crashes, and you need to continue on your way.  There’s no hint given that you need to fly away.

Still, a generous 3 for an interesting try.

Noises and Pretty Pixels

No sound, and only about a third of the screens have artwork.  Much of the art is repeated, and low quality for the year.  Still, I did find Waldo, so... 

A score of 1.

Overworld and Environs

Okay, I suppose I really touched on this in Gameworld, but there were a variety of locations, and as best you can do in a text adventure, they made it feel lively. 

A score of 3.

Gregariousness and Thespianism

I couldn’t talk to anyone!  The game understood the verb, it just didn’t care.  You couldn’t look at inventory items, either, except occasionally some needed to be examined.  The room descriptions were basic, budget text adventure quality.  Still, the point got across.  Score 2.

(2 + 2 + 3 + 1 + 3 + 2) ÷ .6 = 21.667, and I don’t feel like messing with that.

So, on behalf of the entire TAG reviewer team, I wish all of you the best of holidays with your families, and I was glad to be able to share another year of playing games along with you.  While I know I am a poor substitute for Joe, one of us looks forward to doing this again next year and keeping our holiday tradition alive.