Black Winter

Name: Black Winter

Developer: Stiven202

Story: A truck driver and his wife are stranded in the middle of nowhere when he runs out of gas. A mysterious stranger leads them to a castle where strange things are afoot. There is a curse on the place and our two heroes have fallen victim to it.

Writing: Yes, those who know my reviews know that whenever I include this section, they're in for a lecture. The writing in this game desperately needs help. The issue has nothing to do with English being a second language. The writing in this game is a mess regardless of language. There are things it does right, and oh, so painfully much it does wrong. I scarcely know where to begin. Well, you know what they say: begin at the beginning.



The game opens with a paragraph written in purple prose. It's just the one, thankfully, so it can be chalked up to artistry. If the purple prose had continued well into the intro, I'd have an issue, but when it's just one or two lines, a bit of purple prose can actually be nice. Here, it's used very nicely. Just a little bit of purple prose can be pleasing.

The setup is fine. A truck driver is on a delivery and has his wife with him. I don't question this. Whenever I was on appointments, I would bring my wife sometimes, too. They arrive at an address that no longer exists, another thing that I know all too well. It happens. It's usually an accident. Then when the truck driver, Matt goes to leave the area, the truck won't start: it's out of gas. No. Absolutely, no. First, when writing a plot device, make sure it's believable. Not only is this guy on a job, he works for a shipping company. No! If this guy actually ran out of gas on his way to a delivery, he absolutely deserves to be fired.

All shipping companies, without exception, have specific routes for all delivery areas, WITH SPECIFIC STOPPING POINTS FOR REFUELING THAT THE DRIVER ABSOLUTELY HAS TO HIT: NO IFS, ANDS, OR BUTS. Failure to do so at the very least can be regarded as incompetent, and at the worst as a criminal act of theft. Drivers are either given a card, or actual cash, and THEY HAVE TO SPEND IT AT THESE STOPPING POINTS AND THEY MUST COLLECT ALL RECEIPTS! The notion of a truck driver running out of gas while on a job does not fly. This now falls under the category of "cheap plot device".

There are plenty of methods of stranding a character that does not call into question his competence or reliability. It could get stuck. There are a myriad of possible causes for engine failure that have nothing to do with gas. Any number of components could fail (but don't blame the spark plugs, because that's just as bad as running out of gas. That's another thing that's specifically maintained by companies.). The vehicle could have an electrical failure. It could drop its transmission fluid. It could break its timing chain (that one will REALLY strand someone). It could blow its heater core (this is a big one that happens during winter as your heater is an essential part of your radiator and once the heater core blows, the vehicle will not run without overheating. Plus it's an excuse I've never seen used, so it'll be fresh! When a heater core blows, it sprays water and antifreeze into the cabin from under the dashboard. If you're in the passenger seat, it sprays all over your legs...it's a mess.).

Be careful of cheap plot devices. One of the characteristics of a cheap plot device is that it sounds like a poor excuse. A little basic common sense is all one needs to tell what an excuse sounds like. Think about it. Look at the plot device being used and ask, "If somebody said this to me, what would I think?" Does it sound reasonable or just like a poor excuse for someone's stupidity? There are plenty of legitimate reasons people run out of gas. This is not one of them. Even if it was, the trope is so tired and overused that it's a legitimate reason to dismiss this game as low grade on its own. Automobiles are temperamental things. Often, one doesn't even need to come up with a reason for a vehicle to stall, unless it's a new vehicle.

You wander and find a mine, entering for legitimate reasons--baby, it's cold outside! Then you light a fire. Okay, before we've even made it to this point, the game has already been annoying me with useless exposition. We've had a lovers quarrel that's gone on much longer than it needed to. We've had Matt and Lily discuss in detail what Matt does for a living. Now, read this very carefully because it's important. Nobody would do this in real life. A game is art, and there are many things in stories that people do that they wouldn't do in real life. This needs to be carefully balanced. There are things people wouldn't do in real life that shouldn't be done in the narrative. Two people who have been married for years would never discuss the details of each other's profession. Think about this: it's like, addressing the dev directly here, your development team inexplicably telling explaining to you that you make games and then enumerating the games you've made. Does it make sense for someone to say that? No. The very notion is ridiculous. It is the height of absurdia. The only reason to do this in a narrative is if you're addressing the audience, and this kind of fourth wall break sticks out like a sore thumb.

I can forgive the camp fire, because not everyone's going to realize the danger of lighting a fire in a mine shaft. Among other things, the chamber could actually explode. Yeah, seriously. You could be near a natural gas pocket. Coal dust could be in the air. There's all kinds of ways mines explode. Shit, when I was a kid, I went into an old mine in Arizona in the Petrified Forest and found a really old pack of dynamite. My mom dragged me out by my shirt collar. Abandoned mines are NOT safe places. Just something to bare in mind when you include them in your games. The dev could use the danger of abandoned mines as a gameplay element.

Now that we're at the campfire, we have another problem with the writing. It gets preachy. Again, we have a scene containing pointlessly expository dialogue. It's a very long winded speech about how veganism is a better way of life. The dialogue also discusses the evils committed by big agro. Again, this is useless exposition that only forces the scene to drag on. Again, the game is not telling a story; it's talking at--not "talking to": "talking at"--the player. If there's a message the dev is trying to send, there are thousands of ways of doing this. The dev has already got a good mechanism in place whereby the player is forced to find vegetables for Lily. The game also portray the evils of factory farming animals through portrayals of cannibalism and using human meat as food as a form of punishment. There's a very good vehicles for this message already in this game. This dialogue is highhanded and unwelcome. It strikes out on all sides, it's exposition fairy (again, the husband and wife, two people who know each other, discuss something as if they've only just met), it's highhanded preaching, and it's dull. The game doesn't need any of this discussion.

Moving on, there's a noise and you go exploring the mine, instead of doing the sensible thing and getting the hell out of Dodge. Here, you meet a mysterious man who invites you to his castle.



Okay. Every single scene up to this point has contained expository dialogue that serves no purpose, and every conversation carries on well past the point of tolerance. In another review thread, Liberty brings up the puppy, which is an excellent example. Matt explains to his wife that his grandparents and dog are dead; EXPLAINS IT TO HER! Then we encounter the puppy trapped in a cage. Oh, there's a reason for this useless exposition! Except, the presence of the puppy doesn't justify it. This should follow the rules of cause and effect. We encounter the puppy, which causes the characters to reminisce about a dead dog; not the other way around (and then when they find the puppy, for good measure, we get MORE exposition about the dead dog, as if we haven't already had enough.). We get exposition about the wife and husband not being able to have children when there's no good reason in the story for this come up. This is not correct or functional character development. Save this angst for Twilight fanfic.

There's no point to this kind of character development. There's better ways to discuss these issues. The game could tie this directly into Emma's storyline. She's a kid that's clearly abused. And it clearly comes up that Matt and Lily are offering her home. Even that's ham-fisted. Offering Emma a home was a bit of story development you got right, but it's very cumbersome and awkward. Matt and Lily blurt things out to other characters and the interaction with Emma is very forced. It would behoove the dev to save the offer of a new home until later in the story. Ease the player into these ideas. Don't just info-dump. Lily's hostility towards Emma is a bit prejudicial. Emma hasn't seen the dog. That doesn't make her an insensitive jerk.

It's when Matt and Lily separate that this nightmare ends. No...I'm not talking about the game being over...the writing! That's the nightmare that ends. As I said before, the bad grammar is the least of the problems with this writing. The grammar isn't atrocious. It's not to the point that it's unreadable, and it's not choppy. There are mistakes in at least every other sentence, but most of them you would miss. If you're OCD about grammar, you'd have a problem with this game, but the grammar isn't absolutely terrible. There are even a lot of points where the grammar isn't actually incorrect, but just oddly used. So, no, the grammar isn't so awful. I mean, don't get me wrong; it's bad, and you'll notice it. No, it is the excessive, repetitive, pointless dialogue that really hurts. If it weren't bad enough that they're incessantly using expository dialogue, in every single conversation, they repeat the same points over and over again.

It uses flashbacks! Okay! I get the point! She's jealous of Jamie (Jessie? Something starting with a J.)! They just had a freaking fight! Don't go back in time just to show us that they're fighting about the SAME. DAMNED. THING!!! It is beyond pointless! That's annoying for the sake of being annoying! Who does that? Yes, I'm yelling! This aggravated me to no end! I've never seen this done before, and now that I have it's damned obvious why nobody does it! Two characters arguing about something and then flashback to them having the same argument... *mumbles grumpily*

As for John and Emma, they're actually developed rather well. We don't get any of these insanely excessive info-dumps about them, and John is the perfect degree of mysterious. Emma is insecure and upbeat, and occasionally, she's a bit abrasively outspoken, and we don't have any ridiculously expository dialogue explaining that to us. The dev should use these two characters as an example for writing characters. The main characters should be treated no differently from the other characters. The secret is to tell the story while only writing only what is needed to drive the story forward and to explain the characters. 90 percent of what has been written is absolutely unnecessary.



Gameplay: If you're expecting the game to get better when you actually get to the game play, you're mistaken. Let's start with the good. The puzzles are well conceived and very nicely evented. As far as puzzlers go, this game actually does better than most. There's maybe one puzzle that could use an extra clue, namely the double switch puzzle, but it's easy enough to figure out what you're doing wrong as long as you remember that the previous room had a puzzle element that didn't seem to have a use.

Now for the bad: the puzzles redeem the gameplay a bit, but I still have to give the game a fail on game play. It has two major problems. First is combat. It uses combat script that lets you perform action on the map instead of a battle encounter. You have a gun with ammunition and a life bar. If a creature gets close, you have the option to shoot it by pressing the S button. Operative word here is "close". This is very poorly done. Your very first encounter is in a darkened room with pitch black cover and a black monster that takes four or five shots to kill. Second, the monster has to be within four or five tiles. Third, the monster approaches at high speed so that you can't get away from it. This makes your very first encounter ridiculously hard. You do not get sufficient warning. As you walk up to the corridor with the monster, you hear a roar then an exclamation bubble appears over your head. You can't see the monster...and he's not in attack range nor is he approaching, but you have to go that way. The monster doesn't approach until you are in absolute blindness. You have to flee to the light and you can't shoot him if you don't see him. If he's not right on top of you, most of your shots will miss. If he's close enough to shoot, most of your shots will still miss and he'll kill you with little you can do about it. This is ridiculously punishing to the player. As a first encounter, it's unfairly abusive to the player. The creature is hard to kill, you can't get away from it, and you can't see it, and you have no idea what you're doing. It's a guaranteed game over on the first attempt. There's simply no way to beat this beast unless you've fought him before and have developed a procedure. The miss ratio is too high. Making a battle system that requires you to point right at an enemy, be precisely in line, with an enemy that has high evasion (or a PC that has low hit percentage) is one thing. To make that enemy impossible to see in a scenario you can't get away from is ridiculously unfair. To make it the game's first combat encounter is flat out inexcusable. There's a difference between making an enemy difficult and making it underhanded. This was really unsporting. Nearly all players who aren't writing a review will drop the game on the spot and never pick it up again, and you know what? That's just how it is. When making a good game, this should be rule one of what not to do. Even enemies in the light that you can specifically see aren't so easy to kill. Three steps away and you miss a rat? AND it takes two shots to kill it? That's a hearty freaking rat!

Another thing this game does is the most idiotic of insta-deaths. Early, you're walking down a corridor and there's a note pinned to the wall. If you read it, the walls close and crush you. There are several more insta-deaths, but the switch deaths are the most irritating. Flip a switch, get crushed by a boulder. Flip a switch, get speared. Then if you don't flip a switch, you can't advance the game. Now there are insta-deaths that you have to turn off to avoid them. That's one thing, but luring players with the game mechanics is annoying. It works when used sparingly, but this game has insta-deaths like this all over the place. It's not challenging. It's just frustrating. I'm sorry. The story just isn't good enough to warrant putting up with this abuse. Why would I want to play this game when I can play a professionally made title that doesn't abuse me nearly this much?

Graphics: Before I get going with this one, this game suffers from a severe case of dark room syndrome. One, it hurts your eyes. Two, all it does is make navigation frustrating and difficult. Three, it is not effective with VX Ace's graphics. I've said it before and I'll say it again. There are a lot of systems where darkened maps can work, but VX Ace is not one of them. Also, games that use dark lighting don't blanket their games in perpetual darkness. It really is painful for the eyes and damaging, and this alone is more than sufficient reason not to play this game. This goes way too far. It's so dark that lighting is ineffective.

Beyond that, the graphics are very good. There's plenty of custom stuff in addition to the borrowed resources. I see some Mack and Blu and some Celianna. I do feel that the passability is too close to the kitchen counters, but that's a minor gripe. I see no mapping errors, but for the sewers and the winding passages of the basement, a few curious decisions were made, such as using stair tiles for bridges on the sewer maps, and odd widening and narrowing of hallways in the winding passages with no seeming logic. Other than that, the graphics are very nicely done.

There is an issue with the camp fire. I can't imagine why it would flicker blue. That's the only other thing that draws my attention to the graphics.

Music: I recognize most of it, not sure from where. It really does help to create the atmosphere. I have noticed some complaints about the scenes that are silent, but I personally don't feel that way. I thought the sound helped the game very nicely and where there was no sound, no sound was really necessary. The dev made some very good choices in sound development for this game.

Conclusion: When you strip away the actual writing, there's a compelling story lost in the debris. It has some genuinely good scares and all the elements come together to create a well-formed, genuinely creepy atmosphere. Unfortunately, this just isn't enough. The game needs significant polish to writing and gameplay is in desperate need of balancing. Some of the script, and even some of the exposition can probably stay, but in order to make it work, most of the dialogue really needs to be stripped away and the script needs to be reorganized. This was clearly a first draft and really wasn't presentable to an audience. When you get to the gameplay, it's frustrating and discouraging even if it's not unwinnable. On no level can I recommend this game. It's true that it has it's good points, but there are dozens of other games just like it that are much better.