Interactive fiction
Setting: Adventure
Year: 1986
Studio: Incentive Software
Publisher: Incentive Software
Designer: Tim Walsha, Simon Lipscomb
Engine: Graphic Adventure Creator (GAC)
Platforms: Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum
Rating: 36 %
Story: 2
Writing: 4
Puzzles: 4
Graphics: 4
Implementation: 3
Packaging: 3
Fun: 5
The cover
Winter Wonderland is one of these obscure little British home computer budget adventures of the 80's. Available for two pounds on tape only, often patched together with adventure generator tools, little to no marketing. This one, published by Incentive Software, has a back story at least, and it's not even bad: You're an anthropologist getting a telex (the game was published in 1986...) from a friend who claims to have found an unknown civilization in Tibet. You immediately head out to meet him but crash land your plane on a plateau somewhere in the Himalayas. That's where your adventure starts. Your crashed plane, and rough nature around you. Not exactly a brand new setting, but admitted, you can make something out of it, so let's see what's in for us.
The Story
The beginning is not very promising. Sure, it has mountain vibes, The landscape is described in brief but effective words. The gameplay is a but dull though - a labyrinthic snowfield, not much to find or do, a wrong step can mean death. Finally an exit, a first easy puzzle. Then, more empty rooms, a first obscure puzzle. A few more rooms and then all of a sudden -
Sorry for the spoiler, but this has to be mentioned. Let's use the background colour, so mark the text with your mouse to see it: The lost civilization that you probably hoped to find is actually a busy (and rather cheap) ski resort, and while there's plenty residents and tourists, there's no means into or out of the resort, and getting out of it is your ultimate goal. What a bummer. At least you get to spend some fun time there. The game world, once you've sorted out the first two puzzles, is sort of open world. That's a nice move in general, giving you the opportunity to explore the game world on your own instead of being on rails with just a few rooms to explore at once. Unfortunately, due to the lack of a proper story, it also leaves you somewhat puzzled what to do next. The end comes without much warning: You expect the game to continue, but hey, you solved it, congratulations. Like a meal during which you look forward to the dessert, but there is none. Leaves a somewhat bitter taste.
The Writing
GAC games have memory issues. Always. Without the option to store data to disk the GAC games were bound to the home computers' limited RAM, minus the GAC itself. It shows in the writing. Sure, there's proper room descriptions ("proper" for the 8-bit era at least), and descriptions of NPCs/items and reactions to input are on a higher level than in those notorious Scott Adams games. Expect a lot of generic responses though, and lot of very brief descriptions. The briefness prevents the game from providing atmosphere, or vibes. The incoherent game world doesn't make it better.
Summary: The basics are there, but pleasant prose is something completely different.
The Puzzles
There are puzzles. Quite a lot, actually. There are fetch quests, but given there's more than 15 NPCs that's to be expected. Often you need to carry object X to be able to pass somewhere. Some puzzles are illogical, which was pretty much standard in e.g. Scott Adams' adventures in around 1980, but it was not the rule in 1986. As an example, the hotel receptionist has chained a key to the wall so that you can't have it, but doesn't mind you making an impression while standing right next to you. There's dead ends. Not those announced sudden deaths where you save after every move and in case of death reload and retry. No, it's the worst case dead ends: You did something wrong 50 turns ago and all of the sudden the game doesn't continue. In fact there's one "puzzle" that has you bang your head on the table: An item you simply find quite at the very beginning, the gets destroyed at various locations throughout the game (starting early on) until you know how to avoid that, and that you need at the very end of the game. I can picture an angry mob armed with forks and torches assembling in front of the Incentive Software office - back then save games were stored on tape, a tedious process that one tried to procrastinate until really necessary. Well, at least most puzzles are pretty easy, so there's plenty of those "Oh boy am I clever!" moments that make adventures fun.
One "puzzle" is a typical endemite of the 1980's. You plough through the game map minding your own business, picking up everything that's not nailed to the ground, and all of a sudden: "Your hands are full." Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the inventory limit. While at first it seems realistic to limit what you can carry, it brings two disadvantages with it. First, there's no complex system of what fits where. Instead, your inventory limit is eight. Eight items is what you may carry with you, be it a collection of eight tiny objects such as keys or marbles or whatever, or huge objects that wouldn't even fit in your pockets such as (actual example) a vacuum cleaner. Well, you could turn that into something funny - remember Simon the Sorcerer squeezing an entire ladder into his hat? Well, that's the second thing then - an inventory limit is not funny. It simply improves your fitness level as it forces you to drop stuff somewhere on the map and return to it later to pick it up. There's no "I'm so clever!" effect, it's only "Where did I leave that shit again?". Inventory limits suck.
One major issue only occured to me after reading reviews for the background chapter below. Once you reach Shangri-La Winter Wonderland more or less turns from a hose-like game into an open world game, which sounds good at first. But one puzzle I didn't have problems with is actually quite complicated, and you can easily miss it, namely obtaining a source of money (which I, perhaps by luck, managed without much struggle, so I took it for granted). And if you don't have money the whole open world thing just sucks for you as all the clues on how to solve certain puzzles are right in front of your eyes but you can't have them because you don't have money. That puzzles quite some reviewers, and it would have totally f**ked me off if I had been in that situation. So, another issue with puzzle design. Nothing wrong about complicated puzzles, but they a) should rather pile up towards the end of the game and they should b) not block you from most of the content.
The Graphics
Am I a joke to you?
Let's not talk about the graphics.
Well, maybe a short explanation for people unfamiliar with home computers in general and GAC games in particular. At the time of the writing of this article a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels was standard. The Commodore 64 (the machine I used to play the game on back then) had a resolution of 160x200 pixels für multicolour graphics, and 16 colours to choose from. One single full screen picture would have taken up 9.5 KB of the 23 KB of free RAM that the C64 GAC offered. You can picture the consequences, and if not, look at the screenshot. That's what you get. Rubbish even for C64 standards, but pretty cool if you consider how little memory the machine had and how much of that graphics use. We're here for the adventure part after all, aren't we? So, let's simply not talk about the graphics.
The Implementation
GAC games usually used a two-word parser. The engine can handle a verb and two objects (e.g. USE X WITH Y), so complex puzzles are possible. The GAC games I remember didn't make use of the GAC's range of functions very often. I never used the GAC so I have no idea how complicated it is to handle two objects, but what I do know is that the authors of GAC games were usually amateurs, neither trained in writing (for coming up with clever puzzles) nor in coding (for implementing them). A lackluster implementation is thus standard for GAC games, but it must be allowed to criticize it because the preconditions were all set.
Most of the time Winter Wonderland is limited to VERB OBJECT. Going through my notes I count seven VERB OBJECT OBJECT situations, two of them GIVE NPC OBJECT ones. That's not bad. Given the game takes roughly about 250 turns to finish it's not good either.
An important aspect of implementation is synonyms. Like, an envelope is missing a stamp. You have an envelope, and a stamp. You could try to stick the stamp to the envelope, glue it to the envelope, affix it to the envelope, put it on the envelope - you get the picture. Winter Wonderland wants you to use one specifix verb, others will fail. The GAC lets you implement 256 verbs max, so the only excuse for not using synonyms is - memory. Unfortunately, that's a good excuse. For a few situations sizing down the game to implement some synonyms would have been very helpful though - I'd rather have an empty room less instead of being stuck somewhere because I can't come up with the one allowed word to use.
"Implementation" also means to implement as much detail of the game world as possible. Like, the room description says there's a picture on the wall. I want to examine it, maybe look behind it (Is there a safe?), and for sure I want to examine details of it (Does it reveal game-relevant information? Is there a hidden button?). Well, Winter Wonderland doesn't even let you examine the picture as a whole, it's just scenery. So sad. But then, memory issues. The GAC gives you around 23.500 Bytes to work with. If it's not relevant for a puzzle, it's not there.
The Packaging
Winter Wonderland came on tape. Or on "cassette", to be less colloquial. For everyone under 50, here's a picture of a tape in its case. That's the standard case btw., and all cheap games came in one like that. Winter Wonderland came in a non-standard case which was slightly bigger - photo on the right. Maybe it should justify the price tag - see chapter "Background" below. The bigger format didn't bring any extras - no feelies as in the Infocom games. Just the background story and some brief instructions on the backside of the cover, on a plane smaller than A5. Well, that's what you got for small money back then. As a collector I hold this box dearly, but objectively, it's the bare minimum. The design ain't great either - a mediocre drawing on the front cover and no screenshot or other graphic elements on the back, just text. Meh.
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The Verdict
It's not easy to find something good in Winter Wonderland. On shouldn't judge it by today's standards but rather evaluate it by comparison to what was available back then in the pleistocene of adventure gaming. But still... The story is horrible, the puzzles are unimaginative, the parser is slow and stubborn, the prose is minimalistic and the best thing one can say about the graphics is that they exist. So, what to like about Winter Wonderland?
Winter Wonderland is a GAC game. A lot of GAC games came out back then, usually on tape and as budget titles, at 5 to 10 British pounds. In the same year that the GAC and Winter Wonderland came out there was also Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Tass Times in Tonetown or Uninvited which were a completely different league but also costed much more. Within the small GAC bubble, Winter Wonderland was a) one of the first and b) one of the best. It stood out when you compared it to the other GAC games, not a lot, but it stood out.
So, as a verdict - Winter Wonderland is not a good game by today's standards, not at all. But it has... a certain historical value, and it oozes the vibes of those times. That makes it a welcome addition to any adventure collection, but one wouldn't necessarily want to actually play it. Like a seminal record that noone actually listens to or a movie loved by critics but despised by the audience. Sort of. Get it, stash it away, delight in owning it, but don't play it. You have been warned.
Other games by Incentive Software
1983: Mountains of Ket
1984: Temple of Vran
1984: The Final Mission
In 1985 British software house Incentive Software was working on an adventure creation tool called GAC or Graphic Adventure Creator. It was an attempt to build something like The Quill (which was published in 1983) but with a more sophisticated parser. During the production process the Incentive Software office in Reading got visited by two young programmers: Simon Lipscomb and Tim Walsha. After some chatting it was agreed that Lipscomb and Walsha would write an adventure using the upcoming GAC in its current state. A little bit later a guy called Peter Torrance started working on another one (Apache Gold), so that would make two games for Incentive to release with the actual release of the GAC. Winter Wonderland was ready first but the manufacturing process took a little longer so Apache Gold was the first one to hit the shelves.
1983: Mountains of Ket
1984: Temple of Vran
1984: The Final Mission
The Wompa, a creature within the game, is based on the Wampa, a creature from the Star Wars universe as well as on a school friend of Walsha and Lipscomb who was known for his clumsiness.
The GAC had initially been developed for the Amstrad CPC which had quiet a market share in Britain by then. So had the ZX Spectrum and the (already quite old) BBC Micro, while the Commodore 64 was way more popular on the mainland. The GAC was ported to those three home computers, and so was Winter Wonderland, which was pretty easy except for the BBC Micro version. The BBC Micro B had just 32 KB of memory, and thus the game had to be compressed.
Winter Wonderland was marketed as part of a Medallion Graphic Adventure series, which was a series to feature "only the best" adventures created with the GAC. Other games in this series include Apache Gold and Karyssia: Queen of Diamonds.
Some Winter Wonderland reviews weren't bad after all. British Crash magazine gave it a stunning 89 %, praising the "well-proportioned story" (Which story? .ed) and the "reasonably intelligent" parser that only had a few inconsistencies. Crash also noted the "popularist" difficulty level that would make the game appeal to beginners and devotees alike. Your >Sinclair lauded the "terrific" setting, scratched their heads about the sudden change once you reach Shangri-La and critizised the price of the game. British Zzap!64 magazine gave the game 59 % only. The main point of critisism was the cost-benefit ratio: The price tag was 7.95 £ in Britain, but reviewer "The Wiz" only wanted to pay 4.95 £. Well, 8 £ in 1987 would be 28 £ in 2024, so maybe the Wiz wasn't all wrong. He also criticized the graphics as "not so hot" and the storyline (...) as "didn't come off so well". Fair enough. ZX Computing slated the game. Quotes: The graphics are "poor and repetitive" and worse than the ones in 1982's The Hobbit. The output suffers from "sluggish printing times", the parser is "fairly primitive by today's standards", the room descriptions are "below par (and) dull", it features "fairly traditional puzzle solving", and the sudden death situations are "a dumb idea which should have died out aeons ago". The parser has a "limited vocabulary and a disappointing lack of responses". All in all the magazine slated Winter Wonderland as an "unremarkable adventure which could have been written a year or two ago" and condemned its high price. While I partially agree with all this criticism, I have a vague feeling that in 2024 a review like this would have sent an army of lawyers on their way to sue the magazine. Good times.
From the sideline: Sean Ellis, author of the Graphic Adventure Creator that Winter Wonderland was written with, remembers the game as the outstanding GAC title, showing "good use of the graphics, a decent plot and some nice puzzles". He said so during a 2016 interview, and according to my review above, it is not completely unlikely that he was drunk, stoned or both when stating this. Or he was biased. Very heavily biased.
Simon Lipscomb (ca. 2023)
Unlike many of the home computer creatives from back then, Walsha and Lipscomb seem to have carved out a career after their home computer time. They didn't produce any more games and vanished from stage, but a 2023 Google search of their names brings up a Tim Walsha in Marlow, England and a Simon Lipscomb in Marlow, England. I suppose that's them. Walsha is a leading tech specialist at Jaguar Land Rover, Lipscomb is vice president of a procurement consulting company. Two thumbs up. Probably they won't write another text adventure together, and given the flaws Winter Wonderland had, it's maybe better that way.
Sources:
- Crash #38, March 1987, p. 92
- Your Sinclair #16, April 1987, p. 84
- Zzap!64 #23, March 1987, p. 65
- ZX Computing #35, March 1987, p. 78
- Winter Wonderland solution at CASA
- Sean Ellis interview
At the game start we're in a pretty desperate situation: The plane's wrecked beyond repair, and our surroundings are pretty hostile to life - it's cold, and there's no sign of civilization in sight. Good thing there's at least a fur coat here from the wreck, which we immediately snatch and wear. There's also a pair of snow shoes which of course looks useful to us, but to my knowledge it's just a red herring.
The snowfield is a grid with some labyrinthic exits attached to it, so don't wander off too far. From the starting point, walk north, west and west again to reach the exit. You'll find a flare on the way which immediately comes in handy when you encounter a huge grizzly bear. A grizzly bear. In Tibet. Oh boy. Anyway, fire the flare and you've solved your first puzzle. Well, the second, for if you hadn't worn the coat you'd be dead by now.
After a short while you arrive at an intersection. Go south for now. In a cave we stumble across an unlucky potholer who stopped potting holes quite a while ago but was so nice as to provide us with a rope and an ice pick, typically very handy items when found in adventure games. Back up to the north we're stopped by a snowdrift. Simply dig in the snowdrift to remove the obstacle. No hints that you can simply dig using your hands - not a good puzzle so close to the start.
There's another cave north of the snowdrift. In the western part we find an icicle. If we have the ice pick from the southern cave with us we can climb a wall in the main chamber, and on the ledge on top there's a nest with an egg which we pocket and examine. Hm, might be valuable. Anyway, we now take the northern cave exit and suddenly...
Wow. Okay, that place is a game changer, whether in a good or bad way. So we're in a remote yet busy ski resort called Shangri-La. First step, as always: Save the game, map everything accessible, and reload. Quite a resort eh? Well, let's find ourselves a place to stay then, shall we? Luckily there's a hotel right around the (left) corner. Save the game before you enter it, notice that the icicle melts when you enter the hotel, and load the saved game. 'Tis a good time to mention that there's an inventory limit - you can only carry eight items around, and if you try to pick up a ninth one the game won't let you. Nice, eh? Game design in 1986... Anyway after having played through the game I can advise on what to drop here coz won't need it for a while or even never again: Drop the coat, the ice pick, the gun and (if you picked them up against my advice) the snowshoes (all those are never needed again), and drop the icicle as well, but that one we'll need to pick up again later as it's needed for the end game. On with the game and into the hotel.
So I've been expected? Well, nothing here surprises me anymore by now. The master key behind the reception looks tempting, but we can't have it... for now. But we got a room key. Go north to the rooms, and all the way down the corridor, ignoring the maid. Our room is west of the third corridor room. Will we be able to safely store our stuff there? Can we find means of communication? None of these but the room contains... a vacuum cleaner. Exciting. Well', we're adventurers, so we grab it. There's a small enterable cupboard at the northern end of the corridor that contains a cleaning fluid that of course also comes to papa. Now, what to to with that cleaning lady in the middle corridor? She's not very talkative, but after trying to give her various stuff she accepts the vacuum cleaner that she obviously forgot in my room, and gives me... a piece of soap in exchange. We've seen enough text adventures to know that that'll be important sooner or later. In fact, sooner. Back to the lobby. Since we can't take the master key, we instead press the key into the soap right under the eyes of the receptionist and receive an imprint of the master key. Nice! Just needs a fill with something that hardens. If, by the way, the parser has problems to understand that you want an imprint of the master key and not of your room key, drop the latter one somewhere else - you won't need it again.
Now off for some exploring. Leave the hotel, and pick up your icicle again for a later use. Back to the crossroads, and north two times to a frozen lake. There's a ski pass embedded in the ice. Well, things like that happen. How to obtain it? The ice pick seems natural, but actually it's the cleaning fluid that helps us here. Pour it onto the ice (POUR FLUID) and the ski pass is yours. We're in a ski resort, so that one will come in handy for sure. Some legwork's coming up next - we want that master key, remember?
Go east, north and north again to cross the frozen river. There's plenty rooms on the northern bank of the river so let's once more make a hub here by dropping stuff we don't immediately need: The rope and the icicle. Now back to the key. West, north and north will take you to a small shopping mall. First shop on the left (west) is a locksmith who without any hassle prepares a forged key for us. Convenient!
Now back to the hotel. It's a long walk (east, south, south, east, south, south, west, south, south, west, west), but we're rewarded with a load of cash we'll need later on: North into the hotel corridor, west into the first room (thanks to the master key), and voilà - a cash card with (examine it) 100 credits on it. All other rooms are empty, so we don't need that forged key and more and drop it right here. Some more credits are available on behalf of that egg we found earlier on. The only hint it might come in handy once is the description: "It's rare." Well, then let's go find a buyer for it. First go back to the north side of the river: East, south, east, east, north, north, east, north and north again. Then north once more and there's a professor of ornithology. Ornothology - egg. Does it click? SELL EGG does the trick and yields you 50 more credits (which you'll need). Do not GIVE the man the egg - that's actually a bug in the game, he'll take it but doesn't pay you, and you'll miss that money dearly later on.
Now back to the Milton Walk shopping centre where we obtained that forged key. South, west, north, north and we're back in. Let's spend those credits we "found"! North and north again takes us to the upper level of the mall. East is a book shop that we enter. The selection includes the enormous amount of one book and one manual, so we buy the book and read it. And drop it immediately to save on inventory space. The information obtained (Wompas don't like hamsters) is necessary for one puzzle, but if you know that already (e.g. from reading this very sentence) you can save on the money and simply skip the purchase. We'll need the manual later, but for the sake of our inventory space we'll leave it be for now.
West, down and west again takes us to a food shop where we can buy some... food! Which we do. On the opposite side of the hallway (east twice) is a pet shop where we can obtain a hamster. In case you're experimenting around instead of strictly following this walkthrough: You need to hold the food before you buy the hamster, for it will run off otherwise, and you've reached another dead end. Remember that book you bought - "Wompas don't like hamsters"? Looks like that hamster might come in handy later on. One more thing on the shopping list: West, south and east takes us to the stationer's where we can purchase a pen. Next up is a little walk to stretch our legs.
I buy skis in a ski hire shop while a kid throws snowballs at me
Seconds later, that is. Exit the shop to the south and go east to the ski lift. If you have the skis and the boots and the ski pass from earlier, you're good to go and you're automatically relocated to... the top of the black run, the most dangerous downhill run around. Great. "Go" east and you'll be at the foot of that run. Drop the skis and boots to ease the inventory limit situation. Next, go north.
A wompa. It lacks a proper description, and a reason to be here, but it blocks your path, so here's a puzzle to solve. Remember that book on mythology you (maybe) bought in the bookshop? "Wompas don't like hamsters". Entices one to give the hamster to the wompa, but that'd be another dead end. Drop the hamster instead, and the wompa will... I'm starting to numb a little over all these incoherent events. Well, the wompa is out of the way. We don't go north yet, but in case you care, there's your way back to the part of town where we came from - the black run is a one-way road.
Coming up: Another shopping trip. Go south, east (note the postman loitering about there), north, east, north and north and you'll find yourself south of a bank building. Go north once more to enter it. You'll automatically receive an additional 100 credits - very convenient. East and south, and we're at a travel agency. As always, the sparse room description indicates what to do here. The only thing on sale is monorail tickets, so we buy one. Sounds mediocrely exciting, but doesn't sound like a red herring either. West, south and west sees us in a news agency where there's only one available item again - a magazine. We don't even get to know what kind of magazine, but we buy it anyway. Aha, there's an unspecified "form" in it which we need to remove from the magazine. It takes a bit of guessing since the parser ain't so bright - RIP MAGAZINE is the correct command. Let's see... So we need to fill out the form, a stamp, and we need to "send it away" somehow. Well, the solution to the latter one might be the postman we stumbled across earlier. Off we go.
For the statistics nerds among us - here's a comprehensive list of all score and money changes throughtout the game. Might come in handy if you're stuck somewhere.
| No. | Room | Points | Score | Credits | Action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Foot of a Mountain Path | 4 % | 4 % | 0 | Fire the gun to get rid of the grizzly. |
| 2 | Rocky Gully | 4 % | 8 % | 0 | Dig in the snow. |
| 3 | Hotel Foyer | 2 % | 10 % | 0 | Reach the hotel in Shangri-La |