Demon's Winter - final views
                         (RPG)

I'm feeling really pleased with myself - I've just finished my
first RPG!  I've bought quite a few of them in the past and given
up on all the ones I tried, mainly because they were just too
flippin' hard. Despite spending ages setting up a balanced party,
they always seemed to get killed off far too easily. But then I
discovered Demon's Winter - first reviewed in Issue 2.

One thing that I liked about the game was that, right from the
start, it seemed to be biased ever so slightly towards the party,
not (as often seems to be the case) towards the monsters. It's
very disheartening to have your party die time and time again and
having to keep restarting. But for about the first three-quarters
of the game, "the lads" managed to survive a fair proportion of
their fights and frequent saving took care of the results of any
disastrous bloodbaths! The only frustration was that you couldn't
actually restore the game. You had to kill the whole party off
and restart at the prompt or, often quicker, quit and reload.

Another really nice aspect of the game was the sense of
involvement I got with it. Although I didn't play Demon's Winter
continually from the time I started it, I usually had several
long sessions on it each week and it took around eight months to
complete. That's a long time to keep playing with the same group
of characters and in the end, crazy as it may sound, they did
seem to develop their own personalities which I have tried to
express in my serialised solution of the game. At first, Fidget
the Thief often ended up at the rear of any fight, well out of
harm's way, and yet he'd be the one who got zapped by a powerful
spell and killed. In the end, he graduated to the front of the
party and did much better. Clarence the Cleric, on the other
hand, despite being a man of the cloth, turned out to be a terror
with the mace so it was natural that he should be one of the best
fighters.

The graphics in Demon's Winter may be pretty basic but they are
nice and colourful and certainly do their job. The passages of
text and location descriptions that turn up from time to time are
of good length and very atmospheric though the spelling, grammar
and punctuation are often a bit suspect. Mostly, the puzzles
aren't too taxing but they are sufficient to keep your interest.

As I've said before, I'm a sucker for a game that needs a lot of
mapping and many was the evening I spent surrounded by crayons,
pieces of paper, notes and graph paper sellotaped together into
huge sheets (often with the cat, Lucy, sitting in the middle...)
while Alan shook his head and wondered about my sanity as I tried
in vain to get the coastlines of the multitude of islands to line
up.

Towards the end, the pace of the game certainly livened up as the
lads got attacked by groups of dragons, mountain giants,
salamanders and highwaymen. The grand finale was nail-biting
stuff - sometimes I thought I was never going to complete it -
and well worth waiting for. If you haven't tried a RPG and want
to have a go at just one, I'd say, try Demon's Winter.

                                              Sue