Christmas Tale, unluckily, is a small visual novel that presents lots of problems and issues from its launch.
First of all, it starts windowed and loads some kind of engine before getting the full name in tray (Christmas_Tale); it features no main menu at all and the only thing you can click is a Christmas tree blue ball on the lower right part of the screen.
The game though opens without a single click - you'll start your journey in a snowy environment with the text flowing down. If you click on "return to main menu".. you'll return back to that screen, meaning that actually the game has no menu at all.
And no settings too - the full-screen (still windowed) mode will have to be selected manually, and on clicking that blue ball you'll only be able to restart the visual novel, save or skip the text.
In my playthroughs everything was bugged, the skip option won't function, the text was lagging here and there and so on..
Of course, the most annoying things were the extremely badly drawn pictures and overall backgrounds and such and, above all, the dialogues - the script is full of spelling and grammar errors, and although it is a short game (which takes about 30 minutes overall to finish) it's still a boring and annoying experience given the load of errors and the shallow story.
I'll pass over the soundtrack, since it consists just of random ambient instrumental tracks taken from who knows where.
The graphics are awful, really. The backgrounds are totally different from the characters, and the characters are nowhere nearly drawn as the usual anime/manga things.. they look like MS Paint trials made by a kid, everything's colored with the same hue, there's really nothing beautiful about any single character. The backgrounds drawn in the same style are well, even more awful to see while here and there there are some more beautiful wallpaper-like backgrounds that add nothing to the game though, apart from some Christmas atmosphere.
We're lucky not to have any option to see again wallpapers, characters, pic galleries and so on given the poor quality of it all..
The story and the dialogues, even without talking about the game issues like the lag and the bugs, aren't really worth it, trust me.
I'm no native English speaker and I've never studied English, I don't even like Germanic languages that much, but I found it so so difficult to follow this visual novel. It's literally full of errors, both in grammar and in spelling, and the story itself is very shallow.
It revolves around the usual romance things, depression, darkness, gloom, sudden choices, new characters introduced, some choices to make..
And the total lack of an user friendly interface makes it even more difficult to progress - apart from the hidden skip button, actually you're bound to click since no keyboard shortcuts work at all.
The whole point system, which is linked to your choices and will affect a few endings, is never even explained and well, the choices are few and there's really nothing remarkable apart just from the first positive ending I found but yeah, I should be paid for reading through all of this.. xD
The whole game doesn't fit up in a Christmas positive scenario, it's rather a poorly written story set in December.. with a negative vibe going through it all, few characters, few locations, few choices to make, few (three) endings and nothing else.
Though, I found the lack of depth and the bad English two huge mistakes, and at times the dialogues are really, trust me, hard to read. Or they just keep on going through repetitions of the main character's negative attitude and such.
All in all, given that this isn't in early access, it's a visual novel that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Crappy English, crappy storyline and crappy graphics make a crappy short game.
