Black Winter

Version reviewed: Final English Version per the included README.

TL;DR summary:
Good - Character art, music, double protag system, you can feel the couple's love
Bad - Poor English, many typing errors apart from the poor English, terrible characters, low narrative quality, terrible pacing and direction
End grade: Strongly not recommended. I really feel like I took a bullet for you guys here.

Spoilers below.

Black Winter is about a trucker and his wife getting stranded in the mountains and being invited to spend the night in a spooky castle. Then bad things happen to them, possibly involving a curse.

The English in Black Winter isn't good enough for a passing mark and it frequently breaks the immersion. There are quite a few typos too. Nobody gets to decide where they are born or what language they're raised with but anyone can request help on forums.

I can't review the game's combat, survival or stealth systems because I dropped it before getting to that point but there are major basic design oversights which weren't covered so I'm not holding high hopes for the more complex ones. The game features 8-directional movement but it's not clear what you can and can't walk on. In the dining room you can't even go adjacent to the table but in the cook's room, you can walk on her dresser. Also, this is a very dialogue-heavy experience but there is no text skip or fast-forward. I'd planned to give direct quotes and examples from the game but I'm unable to now because the dev didn't include the bare-bones basics which should come in any dialogue-heavy game. Replaying from New Game to the mine's 2nd level to verify something was annoying enough.

Graphics-wise the character art is a strong point and the sprites look fine. The game is way too dark, though. This is part of the contradictory nature of the game which will be mentioned a lot in the review. While I've been in a castle at night before and it is indeed very dark the dev needs to consider if it impacts Gameplay. Not all exists are even visible. I wandered lost for more than I should have because of an obscured exit that wasn't even supposed to be a secret. While the darkness of the castle may have been an attempt at realism it quickly falls apart since the one place that is always lit in castles are the exits. Contradictions.

There's also a weird faux-campfire-flickering effect at the start. I can't tell if it's buggy or just poorly implemented.

I'll have to break up my critique of the writing/direction into parts because this aspect is like a giant mammoth carcass. As a disclaimer I read visual novels, I play almost every jRPG to release in the west on console and I absolutely freakin LOVE the Metal Gear series. So no, I'm not adverse to sitting through long dialogue scenes.

Direction (scenario) is one of the game's flaws. The person behind the writing just doesn't seem to pick up on how details or lack of details influence one another. You start out in what's apparently supposed to be a blizzard. The wind is howling but the snow is gently drifting downward. They take refuge in a mine which Lily says they have to find, despite standing right in front of it. Similar to the castle at night I have been in a cave in the deep Canadian winter before and while it is better than being outside it only gets warmer when you go much further in. A measly -10C aside (14F as per the thermometer Matt keeps with him for some weird reason) the dev saw fit to make the entrance area look pretty cozy and the deeper area (which should be warmer) is all frozen over. With limited resources, Matt still decides to light 3 campfires all at once for no reason. They hear a noise which Matt says comes from above, but you need to climb down a ladder to get there. Contradictions.

Hopefully, I've made my point in that area at just how massively poor the planning here is. All of that happens before being even a quarter of the way through the intro and it does not end there.

Writing (character logic) is another gigantic flaw. Although the ability to have characters act logically while still respecting the need for gameplay/puzzles/plot is an acquired skill it's a skill every game developer who's writing dialogue should have full control over BEFORE releasing their game. No trucker would run out of gas going TO his destination. No trucker who has been by this area would drive to a location where the whole place hasn't existed for years. Even though their phone gets reception in a cave they don't think to try calling anyone else? Co-workers? Friends? Maybe the building caught fire so they can't answer. While the plot demands that they are stranded here there's a million ways to do that and a truck running out of gas is likely the worst one. Mechanical troubles, an avalanche, a landslide, the truck just getting its tires stuck... These are all equally generic yet far better reasons to strand them in the mountains and better yet they're real problems that happen to real truckers.

Now I have to discuss the biggest flaw, which is the flaw which made me stop playing, delete the game, tell my friends to avoid it and wish the dev better future projects. I'm talking about the characters. Plain and simple Matt and Lily MAKE ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE!

Lily is a self-righteous completely untrusting over-opinionated vegan. This is made clear because it's hammered into us often. Lily is so adamantly against additives that, despite longing to have children more than anything else she refuses treatment because it's unnatural. Yet she accepts candy of unknown origin. That's odd, right? Well, this candy also TURNS HER SKIN PURPLE! She should completely freak out, right? But the dev decides it's okay for her to admonish the person who gave it to her and walk it off. Wouldn't turning the colour of a sunburned smurf make somebody who doesn't trust chemicals completely terrified?

From that same scene, we learn that the castle's owner employs a 14-year-old girl as the cook and maid. No prodding is done to learn more about her circumstances. Lily just goes into pitchforks-and-torches mode (which isn't too off for her) and informs Matt. I was expecting Matt to want more info since he's already been shown to consider the angle of a situation. No, Matt goes into pitchforks-and-torches mode too. And Lily tries to stop him from going full pitchforks-and-torches. And that's when we get yet another big contradiction. While snooping around Matt finds an odd 4th-wall-breaking fanart of various maker horror greats. He comments on how Aya (of Mad Father) is okay because she doesn't use her chainsaw on people. This image shows several youths and children with weapons. So Matt loses his rationale over a 14-year-old being employed for an unknown amount in unknown circumstances but is completely okay with all these kids toting a bat, club, gun and lots and lots of knives. The har har wink wink joke of saying you know top-tier maker horror games in their maker horror game did nothing but undermine the scene we just had with their concerns over the cook. Contradictions.

Once I got into the game proper (40 minutes of that terrible writing later) and explored the castle it took no time at all before another contradiction arose. In a bathroom blood suddenly splatters along the floor in a cheap scare attempt. But Matt and Lily have absolutely nothing to say about it. You can't even get dialogue from checking the blood. Upon checking a painting in another room it suddenly turns evil. Again, no reaction from the characters. All throughout the room are candies which they say they shouldn't take without permission... and an item that you take without permission. A much better reason to not take Emma's candies would be because THEY TURNED YOUR WIFE PURPLE! You don't need to be polite after that happens.

At this point, I X'd out of the game and deleted it.

The very lengthy, poorly edited build-up constantly undoes anything good that the dialogues would provide. The few times I thought the characters were saying something good it was shot down in the very next scene or two. I'll give proper credit for the nice character art and how Matt and Lily do seem like a married couple. Sure it boggles the mind how these two ever hooked up or how Matt can stay with somebody like her but real love is like that. Real marriage is often like that. But even with this odd glimmer of hope for the writing, it's seriously not worth it.

The game's biggest flaw is player engagement. Lengthy cutscenes only work when they're emotionally or intelligently engaging. While player engagement doesn't require player interaction (visual novels being fantastic proof of this) without engaging the player physically, emotionally or intellectually the overall experience suffers to the point of being insufferable.