Winter With You

Let's get this out of the way: Winter With You is not a game in any sense of the word. For those of you who might be new or unfamiliar with the Visual Novel genre, this is (as advertised) a kinetic VN. That means there's no interaction beyond clicking the mouse or tapping the enter key to advance text. As such, this is going to be reviewed much more like a book than a game moving forward.

The story follows Naoki, a guy who thinks he just caught his girlfriend cheating on him around Christmas, and his seemingly chance encounter with Yume, a bubbly blonde.

The story itself was written in Russian (or some other Cyrillic language, apologies if I'm wrong – I have very little knowledge on them) and translated to English. I'm inclined to say that this wasn't a machine translation – it's very good, but there's a handful of spelling or syntax errors. They were nothing that I'd call problematic; I had no issues understanding what was going on, or the intention of the speaker, but they were noticeable. The backgrounds are very detailed, and the CG's are lovely. There's a noticeable step down on the character art in non-CG instances, but it's at least at the standard of an average VN at all times, and generally a touch higher. The sound and voice acting are good, particularly when compared to other indie VN's, and are definitely a highlight.

It touches on themes of commitment and growing up, and is very well-done, but again, this is a kinetic novel, so there's no choices to be made, even cosmetic ones. You spend a lot of dramatic time with your girlfriend, and a lot of lighthearted time with the other girl. All of this feels like perhaps it could have worked as a very basic (and more traditional) visual novel, and left me feeling more curious about what it could have been, rather than what it was. I enjoyed the story itself, but it did end a bit abruptly, though really..if the worst thing to be said was “I wish there was more of it,”...that's not really a condemnation, is it?

If you like the kinetic style of VN, this is definitely worth your time.

Winter With You is not a game, it's an e-book that's been dumped on Steam masquerading as a game. As a visual/interactive novel, this doesn't feature any notable gameplay, it's just a lot of clicking through badly written dialogue that would never have been accepted or published in print, which poses the question, "How did something this badly written end up on Steam?". When someone hoping to become an author is unable to get published in print, they spend $100 and dump their high school fan-fiction onto Steam, under the guise of a game.

This one has a "christmas" theme and a bunch of the developers imaginary waifu's that he dates in his fan fiction, or whatever... these things are always written like trash fan fictions, this is no exception. The images are all asset flipped/construction kit hack jobs slapped together with Live2D/cubism, so no actual artistry was conducted by the "author" here.

Visual novels/e-books are tedious at best... imagine the best novel you ever read, be that Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy or 2001: A Space Odyssey or Twilight (if you have terrible taste in literature), but then translate that to a format where the words dribble out and you have to click your mouse every time you wanted to read the next sentence, instead of just turning the pages. You'd think it was garbage.

Now imagine that experience, but with much worse writing (because if these guys could write professionally, they'd be published authors and this would be on shelves in bookstores, and they wouldn't have to pay Valve $100 to self-publish this on Steam), and you have your average Steam e-book.

You can get better quality books and comics for free online or from public libraries, or from bookstores for a fraction of the price of this "game". Steam isn't a comic book store, neither is it Netflix, it's for games. Your gaming rig is not a Kindle. It's impossible for me to recommend things to PC gamers that aren't really games.

Winter With You has the laughable, eye-watering price of around $4 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.

Profile Features Limited!

Valve have marked this E-Book as "Profile Features Limited" at the time of this review. This is usually caused by poor sales figures and low community acceptance for the E-Book (to date). Until this status changes, this E-Book will not give you +1 to your Game Collector badge count, appear in profile achievements or any other Steam meta-accomplishments, nor can it be displayed in some profile showcases. If these factors are important to you, it may be worth holding off before buying this E-Book.

Kinetic novella about love and Christmas. Decent read.