Snowblind Aces (1Mb)
Snowblind Aces is a splendid romantic text adventure, with an advanced text input engine. Two air aces, one male the other female, Lucas Thane, knight of the air, and Imelda von Strassenbach, the Scarlet Baroness, having fought each other tooth and nail for years, end up sheltering from the snow storm under the wings of a crashed triplane. Romance is inevitable (?), but it is up to you, the player to determine the nature of the romantic outcome, if you dare!
A dark figure strides into the clearing, a smoking flare gun in her hand. She lets it fall to the snow and rests a hand on her hip, surveying you with her one good eye. “So,” she says. “It’s you. I imagine your plane fared as badly as mine.”You smile in spite of the pain. “And it’s you. Aiding and abetting the enemy. What a poor example of patriotism.”
And so the scene is set. Conflict abounds. Conspiracy and ultimately romance with the enemy - or do you both go your own separate ways, to resume your airborne fight and duel to the death? But first you have to survive the harsh environment and some most hostile encounters together. . .
The advantage of text adventures of course is that most imagery is left to your imagination. If you’ve a vivid imagination and can really picture yourself at the scene, then you’ll find text adventures work extremely well for you, like reading an excellent but interactive novel.
You input commands such as ‘examine tree’ (or simply’ x tree’) or ’go north’ (or simply ‘n’) into the text editor. You’ll find that many shortened commands work, so for ‘shoot the bad guy’ you could just type in ‘shoot guy’. If you haven’t played text adventures before, do read the help page linked to below!
The conversation system highlights links, which is a help when the topics aren’t just simple nouns:
We need to get to safety tomorrow, and we need to keep warm.
Anyway, back to the game itself. It’s a comparatively short game, with emphasis on decision making rather than solving puzzles, but it’s anything but tame in nature, being full of action and fighting. It features a state of the art ‘English word’ graphics system. The setting is most likeable being an alternate history full of zeppelins and snowbound mountain-top retreats, with plenty of 1910s/20s style. It’s also in part a costume drama with items like scarves, aviator gloves and goggles, and though these may take a secondary role and may seem to have little active uses, they do compliment the setting admirably and add considerably to the super atmosphere the game has.
You’ll find the main heroine to be a sort of flirty, robust and defiant adventure heroine, which suits the game and gameplay admirably. It’s largely conversationally based, and it is likely you’ll get some repeated dialogue. You may need care over use of ‘you’ and ‘I’ and an example (not necessarily from the game) is ‘are you interested in moving’ might be accepted whereas ’I think you might want to move’ might not be accepted by the game. If you find some of the conversation fractious and the characters difficult to converse with, remember they are/were the fiercest of rivals and it may take some time and effort to get through to them and to get them romantically involved with each other! A lot does depend on the approach you take. There’s an intriguing back-story involved as well, as the two protagonists do know each other, at least in part, from the past.
Some aspects of the game could be tighter, and if conversation peters out, you might struggle to find an ending, without using the hints. But here the game really shines as there is a very comprehensive hints system available, try for instance ‘topics’ if you are really stuck. But to be fair to the author, it was written in a relatively short space of time.
You might also find that some ‘similar’ words may get a different response so ‘tell me’ may get one response while ‘ask me’ might get another completely different response. But so go some great conversations, where nuances matter! If you wait two turns, you might find the mood has suddenly changed or shifted, as in real life. If you act too quickly you might get an immediate rebuff!
It may perhaps in its own way be a little more fun for men to play rather than for women, given the nature of the characters and some endings, but a romantic adventure such as this has to have some gender bias to work properly in the first place, and there are multi-possible endings to the story.
If you like text adventures you should really enjoy Snowblind Aces, and there aren’t too many romantic text adventures around. The conversation aspect works really well, and it is a change to have more decisions to make rather than a plethora of puzzles to solve, though you might still find some aspects of the game a bit of a puzzle.
I deliberately don't want to give too much away with the plot, as you will find more emphasis on the romance side of things rather than the plot itself. However it's a good plot that very much enhances the game settings!
Overall, it’s a very good action-based text adventure, with the advantage of text-based graphic cut scenes to add to the melodrama. Do let us know how it all works out for them!
Download HERE
Help on playing a text adventure HERE
