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The First Snows of Winter (Windows exe) *
Contains winter.exe
Can you solve the mystery of the missing sorcerors?
Windows Application (Windows XP and later)
The First Snows of Winter (t3 file) *
Contains winter.t3
Can you solve the mystery of the missing sorcerors?
Requires a TADS interpreter. Visit IFWiki for download links.
Walkthrough and maps
Verbose walkthrough and maps by David Welbourn.
* Compressed with ZIP. Free Unzip tools are available for most systems at www.info-zip.org.

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The First Snows of Winter

by chrisatthestudy

Fantasy
2013

Web Site

(based on 2 ratings)
1 review

About the Story

As a member of the Sorceror's Guild you have been asked to investigate the mysterious silence of the local Guild in a small highland town. The early winter weather proves to be the least of your problems.

A fantasy game with steampunk elements.


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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Cold Heart, September 26, 2013
by Sam Kabo Ashwell (Seattle)

Set in a mildly steampunky high-fantasy world, First Snows establishes a strong opening tone: a grim, dark winter, a town whose inhabitants are curt or suspicious, a sinister mystery, a certain emotional numbness.

As so often, the promise of the initial mood is the best part; the emotional numbness and suspicious inhabitants turn out to be the product of scanty characterisation, and as the mystery unfurls, the prose proves inadequate to render shock and horror. The story does nothing to build on your initial motivation, and the worldbuilding doesn't become any deeper after the early game, so by the endgame - it's about medium comp-sized - you're still wondering why you should care.

There's a shade of overwriting early on - The clipped, abbreviated sentences were his normal manner of talking, and you responded in kind with a brief “No” - which suggests a more character-oriented plot. This fades rather quickly as you get into the game proper. That's fine; if dialogue's not your strength, avoiding it is a legit approach.

Mechanically, it's pretty old-school: you will get stuck quite early on unless you vigorously search for crucial items, NPCs are stand-offish, there is timed death. There's a nod to the Enchanter scroll-based magic system, but the game isn't long enough for this to become a regular feature, or for it to really qualify as the Thorny Old-School Puzzler that it's drawing on. But it's still difficult enough that you can expect to be stuck quite a lot, and for me it didn't generate anywhere near enough motivation to stay with it long when the going got tough. (I finished with a walkthrough -- hat-tip David Welbourn.)

So to me this felt as though it had at least one foot in the era when people would and did persevere with games even if they were sort of dull, just because they were games. Perhaps that's overly harsh; in the mid-90s, say, this might have earned some quiet praise and a place somewhere near Wearing the Claw. And I'm a long way from being the ideal audience for this. But still, it feels like a piece with the soul missing, lacking an essential Cool Thing to make you stick with it.

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This is version 3 of this page, edited by David Welbourn on 19 June 2015 at 11:21pm. - View Update History - Edit This Page - Add a News Item - Delete This Page