Wilderness: A Survival Adventure is a text commanded adventure game. It is a lot like the games I played in elementary school such as ‘cross country Canada’.
Your small plane has crashed in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and you are stuck out in the delightfully cold snow. Thankfully you have your map, pulled from the plane, and the map has the location of a ranger outpost. The goal of this game is to get to that ranger’s outpost.
You have to know how to read a topographic map, because that’s what you’re stuck with in the game.
Wilderness: A Survival Adventure is a text commanded adventure game. It is a lot like the games I played in elementary school such as ‘cross country Canada’.
Your small plane has crashed in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and you are stuck out in the delightfully cold snow. Thankfully you have your map, pulled from the plane, and the map has the location of a ranger outpost. The goal of this game is to get to that ranger’s outpost.
You have to know how to read a topographic map, because that’s what you’re stuck with in the game. You have no idea where you are on the map and you have to figure out where you are by your surroundings by using the command ‘look left’ or ‘look right’ and
putting the command ‘pan’ in the place of ‘look’. Once you’re guessed where you are its best to look in your pack to see what you have, what you’re holding, and what’s on the ground. It’s best to check and arrange your inventory before leaving the crash site since a lot of useful items are lying on the ground around you and you can only carry and pack a certain amount.
The game is confusing at first because it doesn’t come with any instructions but the game recognizes over 300 different nouns and verbs that I had to guess at for a while but once you get the first few down it’s easy to figure out most of the rest. The most basic commands are ‘use’, ‘make’, ‘eat’, ‘drink’, ‘carry’, ‘pack’, ‘drop’, ‘inventory’, ‘status’, ‘go’ (then type a number for distance), ‘walk __ minutes’ and ‘sleep’. Sometimes one word it won’t understand but then another that means exactly the same thing it will understand. Using these commands you are to try and survive in the wild. Animals can come and steal your food, which I learned the hard way when a cougar came and stole all of mine. Or if they come around you can kill and eat them if you have a gun or some other weapon to kill them with, of course you have to make a fire and cook the meat after skinning the kill with your knife with the command ‘skin’ and then type animal you killed. You can type multiple commands by putting a ‘/’ after each command, such as if you have a gun and want to kill a bear that you have come across you’d type ‘use gun/kill bear/use knife/skin bear’ as long as the commands are related to each other type as many in one sentence as you wish.
There is a second scenario in the game where you are an archeologist in search of the lost city of gold, a.k.a. El Dorado, and you have a long-forgotten map and several clues. I haven’t tried out that scenario for very long as it took forever for me just to figure out the basic commands for the game. I suggest to keep a piece of paper or notebook nearby to write down any commands that you want to remember, clues, or help hints that you get by typing ‘help’ or in the lost city mode ‘clue’. To quit the game at any time type ‘quit’ or ‘save’ to save it first.
It’s interesting and fun if you are into survival scenarios but requires a lot of thought and trail and error when it comes to the commands and would be nice if it came with basic instructions. What’s best about this game is that it runs on regular windows and you don’t have to use a DOS emulator, simply extract the files in it and run the one called ‘wild’.
