Winter Storm Draco

In my limited experience, works by Ryan Veeder never fail to delight on some level; if nothing else his signature wit is always good for a chuckle and tends to cast a rosy glow around the memory of playing. Winter Storm Draco is no different from any other Veeder work in this respect, and it easily clears the hurdle of "good" in my evaluation.

It's not "great," though. It feels like a piece primarily created as an opportunity for experimentation. The emphasis here is on challenging standard player expectations for interface elements, especially the "opening crawl" of the timed introductory text and status line modification during the unanticipated and delightful (Spoiler - click to show)"swordfight" scene taking place in (Spoiler - click to show)a cemetery. The latter was the apex of the experience, especially coupled with the highly-abbreviated commands and very short responses that lent a videogame-like feel to the action by greatly accelerating its pace.

For an opening act, the PC becomes lost in the woods during heavy snowfall and must use boy scout/junior MacGyver skills to figure out the way home. The interaction is a little fiddly and specific here (as I recall specifically around (Spoiler - click to show)pouring liquids), which is in unwelcome contrast with the solid puzzle design.

Mystical elements begin to intrude on the scenario, which shifts the tone ever more in the direction of survival horror as the PC continues to make progress. At the climax, the PC encounters (Spoiler - click to show)a personification of the storm which may or may not be (Spoiler - click to show)a Mayan god in the vanguard of a 2012 end-of-the-calendar apocalypse. I was thrown out of the story at this point, mostly wondering how much of it was supposed to be real and how much the hallucination of a PC freezing to death. Although that kind of ambiguity can serve a story well, there didn't seem to be much in the way of revelation on the PC's part to lend any drama to the scene, and at the end I was left shrugging my shoulders.

Perhaps there's more to the climax than I experienced, but the entertainment-oriented style of Veeder's prose doesn't invite a very deep analysis, and the work's brevity contributes to its lightweight feel. This game is still definitely worth a playthrough, and I don't hesitate to recommend it as an enjoyable short play experience to the average player or a study in technique for the would-be author of action sequences.