Winter With You Reviews

Kinetic novella about love and Christmas. Decent read.

Winter With You is a quaint novel. It was really short and is fully kinetic. I thought the artwork looked nice and the minor animations in the sprites was a nice touch. I especially loved the Russian voice acting which was fun to listen to. The English was a fair bit botch but not so bad that it doesnt convey what the dev was trying to say. I look forward to seeing how the dev improves in their later novels. Overall its a nice short read that I feel people should give a chance.

This was a nice wholesome experience and a perfect break between other major visual novels. The game is about 3 hours long and has a very cozy and relaxing Christmas atmosphere. It's mostly slice of life and romance. There are some moments of drama in here but it's relatively minor and resolved pretty quickly every time. There are no choices, but I would have liked separate routes for the two heroines. The visuals are the highlight of this VN, the quality on display here is way better than what I typically see for indie non-Japanese VNs. The backgrounds in particular are really good and some of them are gorgeous enough to be in top-tier Japanese VNs. The main characters' sprites are all well-animated, which is even more striking to see in an indie VN. The Russian voice acting is decent enough and the music fits the atmosphere. There are some issues with the game, however. The translation is rather mediocre, with occasional grammar errors and janky sentences, plus a few typos. A few times it was a bit hard to figure out what was happening. Overall, it's readable enough if you're willing to overlook these problems, since the story isn't too complex. There's also a calendar in the game that's displayed occasionally, but it displays the wrong month (January instead of December) and conflicts with the text. The ending was rather abrupt and I almost expected an epilogue. The game also just froze on the final image, and even after the credits were mentioned and the final song was played, it doesn't send you back to the title screen automatically. There are also a number of technical shortcomings. This was built on a custom engine instead of Renpy or one of the other established engines, so it's missing a bunch of important features that I'm very accustomed to in VNs. The options menu is very barebones here. These are some of the missing features: 1. There's no gallery to view the CGs after you finish the VN. 2. There's no "Do not cut voice after clicking" option like most other VNs. So if you move from a voiced line to a non-voiced one, the voice gets cut off immediately instead of continuing to play. 3. There's no backlog to view previous text. 4. There no voice replay button to repeat the current voice. 5. There's only one save slot. This combined with the previous issues mean that it's really annoying to view any previous text that you may have accidentally clicked through, or a voice that you want to hear again, since you only have one previous save to rely on. 6. There are no options to adjust text speed or transparency, so you're stuck with the default speed. Final conclusion: The excellent visuals, voice acting and the cozy Christmas atmosphere are the main draws of this VN. However, the translation could be improved quite a bit, and there a number of essential technical features that are missing here which hampers the experience.

Very Nice! Very Romantic! Art very good! Voice Acting also very great! Very great! 10/10