Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland has been a popular source of inspiration for IF/adventure games since at least the mainframe version of Zork, and for good reason. As Jimmy Maher pointed out in his Digital Antiquarian article on this game, it has a lot of elements begging to be made into puzzles, and it's one of the few books that can be easily adapted into a text adventure because of its mix of surrealism and logic, its lack of conventional narrative structure, and its inclusion of setpiece-puzzle elements like riddles and the knight-and-knave logic puzzle. (When I say "it," I'm conflating Alice in Wonderland with Through the Looking Glass because, as Maher points out, they're not particularly distinct from each other. But this game uses only elements from Alice in Wonderland, probably because they wanted to leave room for a sequel that was never made.)

Having said that, there are a couple of issues that arise when turning Alice into a text adventure, especially one as conventional as this. For one thing, this game's version of Alice is the usual adventure-game kleptomaniac. An of course there's plenty of other adventure game cliches: locks and keys (the room full of locked doors early on was in the book, but that doesn't excuse a certain stale puzzle involving a locked door, which Infocom fans will recognize, later on), a wine cellar, objects hidden in/under/behind furniture, and so forth.

That said, there are also some suitably surreal moments that perfectly capture the whimsy of the books without being directly taken from them: what the Gryphon has to say, an area in the early game with a piano and dancing chairs, and the endgame puzzle.

This game has a vast geography (very impressive for an illustrated text adventure at the time), almost all of which opens up very early in the game. This was probably fine in the original version, but I played this via Magnetic Scrolls Memorial, which doesn't have the clickable map feature. Still, there's a GO TO command, which helps somewhat.

I had to resort to hints for some of the puzzles. In some cases I had the right idea but didn't understand what syntax the game wanted, such as (Spoiler - click to show)collecting the sherbet from the fountain. I don't remember any puzzles that struck me as genuinely unfair for non-syntax reasons, though, unless you count things like (Spoiler - click to show)holding the egg in your mouth, which are logical in themselves but wouldn't be possible in most games. Other puzzles were fun to solve, though (the ones that I mentioned as whimsical above)

There are also a few bugs; I once encountered an issue with (Spoiler - click to show)the card shoe seemingly confusing an object added to it with an object already present that led to me having to restore from an earlier save. Still, in other respects the game seemed reasonably well-implemented (e.g., objects mentioned in room descriptions were generally implemented, if only as scenery).

I was torn between giving this a 3 or a 4. Obviously this game is much better than the median IF game, even the median commercial IF game. But it doesn't quite rise to the level of most of the Infocom games, "canonical" hobbyist-era games, and comp winners; it certainly doesn't innovate much except on the technical/graphical level, for instance. I'd still consider it worth playing.