"A bit too drab, a bit too obscure, and decidedly too tough."

In this game by SSI a demon, Malifon, has escaped and is terrorizing the land, throwing it into a wintry state (and, like Narnia, it's never Christmas. Well, they never _mention_ Christmas in the perhaps overlong history that comes with the manual!) You must stop him with a piece of the Shard of Spring that has kept peace for so long, but there's the usual re- and mis-direction to dungeons in all sorts of different climates. This story picks up many years after Shard of Spring left off in the internal chronology, but, in the spirit of most sequels attempting to be bigger and better, it has three times as many disks and many more dungeons and character options, etc. The original continent is similar to Shard, down to town names and most land masses. However, the world is huge for three disks. The writers used a compression technique--if a byte had 0x80 in it, the next one indicated how many times to repeat it--that allowed the programmers to pack in a 400x400 world. That's bigger than Ultima, and it had different terrains, too; it's hard not to like the purple kudzu, but there are deserts and forests and ice too. But the only problem may be that you can never find these distant lands, as Demon's Winter is a bit on the tough side. Even the copy-protection(you had to refer to the manual to answer a question to start the game, and you often had to search for it. Couldn't they have put all the answers on one page?) is daunting. That checking your inventory leaves the screen looking garbled also leaves a bad initial impression.

Operating your characters is very much like its prequel, except there's a lot more detail for the characters, which often isn't very good or relevant at all. Granted, the ten classes are neat, and each one requires different intelligence to learn one of many skills(you can have a set of skills that you ''spend'' intelligence points on. For instance, swords might cost a magic user the maximum ten points, but that would be less for a paladin.) There are many more items; you can enchant items or even find well made items or things with spells. Merchants that cross your paths in adventures may even sell them to you, but you need to bear in mind that they could be lying. More importantly, the combat, which may take up most of the time, is still slow, and the view is still on a 2-d grid with forward/left/right instead of the usual cardinal directions. Although the combat field nicely echoes the terrain, there's not much else to be said about it.

As another example of an attempted augmentation, that the characters can have different religions is interesting, but it's too hard to find the gods' respective shrines to take advantage of this. The different skills your characters possess are fun, but it may be too long before you realize an expensive skill just doesn't cut it--you may even need to restart your party(you can't unlearn skills,) and again, it's easy to overlook a certain shrine. Once I'd seen how the game was laid out, I found that the shrine and university(you need to find a university specific to each skill to improve it) locations were neat, but I don't know who would get that far.

Add this to the fact that the scales are in the monsters' favor(i.e. you have to restart the game continually because you keep getting killed--often due to a typo in combat, as there are no take-backs) and that the game is slow to load, and you have one uphill battle to face. A pity, as it starts well with a reasonable quest to get your feet wet, but after that, the learning and level-gaining curve is too steep. The dungeons, if solvable, are imaginative, too, and the ending is very dramatic. Let's just say that, once you find out some ancient history, the landscape changes considerably. There's also a nice set of class-specific puzzles which may be too easy, but they show flair. If you ever figure out a way to burst through the game quickly(or byte-edit) it's a neat part of the game. But I haven't found a sanctioned way to play through the game quickly, and I'm not going to spend time trying.

Demon's Winter has some clever technical implications, but the game falls rather flat. For example, despite interesting narratives, many monsters are ''Lvl 14 mage'' or ''ghoul'' or something like that. Having the items like that is acceptable as there are many different descriptions, but the monster names weren't improved from Shard of Spring. Even spells are awkward to cast, and it's too easy to come back to the monsters as a source of annoyance. This causes you to overlook the neat month names and the like.

The game I'd say is closest to Demon's Winter is Deathlord. I loved Deathlord but Demon's Winter was only okay. Deathlord sprawled even more than Demon's Winter, but perhaps I found Deathlord's more-than-a-menu towns(even the towns had puzzles) and wonderful icons more appealing, along with challenging, lively dungeons(Demon's Winter dungeons are impressive but, until the end, pretty monochrome. For instance, monsters aren't shown on the screen, you're just suddenly informed there's an encounter every so often) and hints more freely given to be a plus. Besides the Pirate's Cove, you don't get the feeling that the world of Demon's Winter is lively. Even the ''help'' features are disturbing; Deathlord allowed a one-point spell to determine land's direction, and although a Demon's Winter skill(land view) can help you find land in any direction, it's time-consuming, you don't get it until late in the game, and you may still get lost. You can't even go around the world as in other games, which would have been easy.

In an effort to bring ''reality'' to RPG's SSI sometimes went overboard in re-enforcing the fact that an adventure probably always isn't a party-but I knew that from reading Lloyd Alexander and C.S. Lewis(who are considerably cheerier and more philosophical and may well, despite several re-readings, have wasted less of my time, too.) Unfortunately the game stayed true to its title by an overall sterile feel I gave this game up after my ship, which I was so pleased to have finally bought, kept getting sunk as I futilely tried to map out what lay beyond(you get no maps with the game and few hints about exploring, and there are pirate ships all over, whose attacks force you to spend constantly to repair your hull) but was able to return to it once I could, ahem, tweak my characters. When I did, it was quite good--I can say that combat was less of a hassle, too! The ending had some neat class-specific comments, and the final dungeon was, for lack of a better term, ''far out.'' There was a realistic chain of command of bad guys that you'd see unfold, and at the end you had to be vigilant. I doubt many people got that far, though.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/16/00, Updated 07/05/01