Due to the poor English displayed on the store page for Your Little Story: Winter, my outlook for the game started from a handicapped position even before I had installed it. First impressions [i]do[/i] count, and for me, nothing breaks story immersion more than failings in the text or language. So it was that I opened it up for the first time with some trepidation. How did it fare? Let's find out.
At its core, this short story is about meeting someone at a special time of year and developing a bond that may go on to become a romantic attachment. You play the part of Alex, whose gender defaults to the opposite of whomever you select from the two routes available. The game starts with Alex decorating the Christmas tree, slipping on a box whilst doing so, and falling unconscious as a result. (S)he then awakes to find a very attractive stranger in the apartment looking down with concern. This stranger claims to be a spirit sent to help decorate and ensure that Alex does not wind up spending the advent of New Year alone. From this point the story then follows repair or replacement of the decorations broken in the fall by the unfamiliar pair, and any developing warmth between them; dependant upon player choices.
Graphically, the game performs quite well. Backgrounds are clean and crisp. Without needing to be elaborately detailed, each room depicts its representation very nicely; and this quality is maintained with both of the potential love interests' sprites, which are expressive enough to be believable as characterisations of actual people. We do not get to see the protagonist, although with the auto-gender-change and ambiguous name, this is perhaps just as well, as it allows us to conjure an image of our own.
There are a few choices to be made – I wasn't counting but it's around half dozen – which isn't bad for the size of the game, and they do make a marked difference either to how the tale progresses or how it ends; and also behave in a reasonably predictable fashion, so that you should be able to achievement hunt without aggravation if that is your desire. The good ending has a nice little twist in store, even if it is so obvious that you'll have figured it from the start. It still gave me a satisfied little smile nonetheless.
Having said the above, however, the rest of the package falls down. I suspect that if you're playing the game in Russian, you are going to have a very nice little Christmas tale that will warm the cockles of your heart and leave you feeling good when you reach the best conclusion.
Sadly, I cannot apply the same sentiment beyond this. Unlike the reviewers who published before me, I [b]am[/b] English, and the translation failings frustrated me initially, before finally driving me up the wall altogether; completely spoiling any hope I had of enjoying the game and thoroughly justifying my pre-installation concerns.
The writer has clearly used an excellent spellchecker, which is a positive. I spotted one typo only and no clear spelling errors; but the text – I would guess – has been literally translated word-for-word, and the result is clunky, awkward, and sometimes so long-winded that the meaning is lost altogether. Sadly the Steam screenshot F12 facility is not supported so I cannot post a graphic example, but here is a typical line which demonstrates the problem perfectly:
[i]”The main worry is for it to not turn out to be a tie for an article in the criminal chronicle.”[/i]
[b]Umm.. [i]what?![/i][/b]
Honestly, sometimes I spent so long trying to unravel what on earth the writer was trying to say, that I forgot what the previous entry had been, and thus lost the thread of what was going on altogether.
Here's another cracker. As anyone who has learned English knows, you should never use a double-negative. Well, the author/translator went one better with this:
[i]”I'm not sure I didn't put it somewhere I won't be able to reach by myself.”[/i]
Good luck interpreting that one.
Even if you can get by the translation quality sufficiently to be able to enjoy the story regardless, then the UI pops up and provides its own annoyances. Initially, there is no BACK button. Surely this really is an essential in a visual novel? It is [i]so[/i] easy to accidentally miss one text entry with an inadvertent button tap, the player should [i]always[/i] be able to back-step.
The game does provide a history log, so you can catch up on anything you missed or need to re-read to make sense of, but it falls into the trap of starting with the oldest entry rather than the last one. You can mouse-wheel scroll down to find the text you want, but doing so is painfully slow. Alternatively, just press and hold the mouse button, and drag the slider.. but [b]don't release the button[/b] until you have finished reading, else the log will disappear, and you'll have to go through the procedure over again. An infuriating design decision.
Visual presentation really is lovely throughout, quite clearly the game's main selling point; but even that has created its own avoidable issues. The text box is a delightful wintry snowflake scene upon a light grey background; with the text a particularly attractive font of black lettering with white outline. I'm sure you can already see the problem: if the text is just one line long, it's not too bad; but when there are several lines, the text begins to merge with the background and it becomes a bit of a challenge to read (made worse of course when the sentence phrasing is so confused). If you're 17 years old with perfect vision, it probably isn't going to bother you. For everybody else, it's going to be less than ideal.
Overall, the pleasure gained from the simple story is only a fraction of the irritation endured in a number of places during the battle to get to the end of the game. For this, my verdict has to be a clear thumbs down, though I would emphasise that this assessment is based solely on the English version of the game. If you can read Russian, you'd be well advised to read reviews written in the language and make your decision based more around those.
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Choice of romantic interest: a cute and cheerful girl or a cold and detached guy