Rose of Winter

So extremely cute! Fun, short routes about climbing a snowy mountain with a cute guy. Rosemary is a delightful, wholesome, and relatable MC and the male leads are all interesting, generally fun, and sometimes amusingly obnoxious (Personal ranking: Tirune > Crow > Kuya > Falkner) Each route is quite short and easy to complete in an evening, the story moves fast, but the pacing is fine given how short it is. Overall a cozy and sweet game, especially for a cold winter evening! I played a couple routes with my partner, and it was fun to laugh at the shenanigans together.

Rosemary, a well-built , beautiful, but inexperienced wannabe knight, has found herself broke in a tavern, that is last stop of civilization for those who wish to cross dangerouns Mount Needle and get to very important Starlight City. Luckily for her, four princes are putting job offers, looking for guide and protector to get them through the dangerous mountain. Why wouldn't they travel together? Because that would go in the way of romance. That's right, Rosemary and her prince of choice (or, in one case, the child prince's adult caretaker) are about to fall in love. Rose of Winter is a very short and very simple visual novel, where you play as Rosemary and get to find love with one of four bachelors, three of which are quite fantastic indeed. The game is simple but charming, relying on your dialogue choices to get eiother good or bad ending. I personally managed to get three good and one bad but even that one was at worst bittersweet. A single route will take around an hour to finish, capping the legth at 8 hours to get all the endings. Tho I was satsified with stories I got so much I felt coming back to see alternatives would "spoil" them. What really sells this game to me is the writing, which gives us very strong and well-developed characters with lot of internal complexities for us to discover, even if they present themselves as archetypes at first. It has an excellent, charming hand-drawn art, accompannied by limited, but well-utilized collection of tracks by Toby Fox himself. What it may lack in legth, it sure wins in charm this combination provides. Short, on point and absolutely lovely, at worst Rose of Winter will be a great palatte cleanser between heavier or darker titles, at best will pull at your heartstrings and make in invested in getting this knight love she deserves. Recommended.