• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS

Black Winter is worst winter...

  • Frogge
  • 06/23/2016 12:28 PM
  • 4927 views

Black Winter by stiven202
Length: ~6 hours


Black Winter is a horror rpg which I decided to review mainly because of the developer's behaviour and response to another review on the game. The game had some nice moments... but a lot of bad ones too, as you will see in the review.


That's not a truck, it's just a wall with tires!


First I'd like to talk about the game's graphics. The game was really lacking graphics wise. There were lots of non-matching tiles used together and cut offs. The maps were huge, empty, bland and non-sencial. Rooms also weren't symetric most of the time when they probably should have been. The game was overly dark with your main source of light barely giving out any and lots of black. This was especially annoying because it made the monsters really hard to see(and they looked dark anyway). Speaking of monsters, they looked really out of place since they were more photo-realistic while the rest of the game was more RTP-styled. Oh and there are candy graphics ripped from, get this, CANDY CRUSH. Jfc.


Pixellated grass and path and HD trees and flowers do not go well together.


One other issue I had was that the characters looked blurry. Look at Lily in the picture above, for example. Her sprite has been pinched and blurred which looks really awkward. The text didn't fit properly go all the way across the message windows which was also very annoying. The only thing I liked about the graphics was the art. Characters were well drawn with nice expressions, especially Emma.

One last thing that bothered me was the reference paintins laid throughout the castle. These were most likely supposed to be references to the inspirations of the game but they were pulled off terribly, as most of them were just taken from google without permission.


Do I have to point out how fucking idiotic it is to take someone else's fanart from google images and put it in your game without even asking for permission?


Sound wise, the game was mostly fine. Sound effects for footsteps and all that stuff were used well with also suiting music, except for one part. The final battle with John just used the worst music possible for the battle. It was supposed to be epic with tons of monsters being thrown at you, but guess what? The developer decided to use Battle7 from the RTP instead and it just ruined the mood so much that it was just.... UGH.


Nice way to ruin the whole final battle mood!


Now let's move on to the story. The game's story had tons of plot holes and ''opposed'' itself multiple times. The best way I can explain is just giving you the whole idea.

Through out the entire game you are told that to escape, you must destroy the castle to escape the curse. However, destroying the castle leads to a bad ending, and not destroying it leads to the good ending where you escape. But to escape you need to destroy the castle, and that makes no sense. The monsters are still alive, John is still alive, then how the hell is it possible for you to escape the mansion without destroying it?

There we multiple other plot holes in the story. For example, you never learn who the boy who approached you when you left the castle is. And the game tells you that if you stay in the castle longer than 24 hours you will get cursed. Emma has been there for a long time, so how come she isn't cursed? And even if she is how did she manage to escape in the good ending without the castle being destroyed when the only way to break the curse was to destroy the castle?

Both endings were quite crappy in their own ways. I know there is a third ending and perhaps it is actually better, however from the two endings I have seen, they were crap. In the bad ending Emma dies. Ok, fine, that works I guess. But it was just pulled of so badly.


EMMA IS SHOT! TAKE EMMA TO HOSPITAL! FLASHBACKS TO MOMENTS OF EMMA! EMMA DEAD! RIP EMMA! THE END! Sounds fine but kinda lame when all this happens in just a minute without any actual story development. But all this can be forgiven. Why? Because that truck actually looks like a truck!!


The way the story ended was a shame, because it started out well

The game had some pretty bad characters. Emma was literally the only character I -slightly- cared about. Matt was pretty much non-existant for me, he was just ''the character you play as'' and nothing else, despite all his talking. Lily was annoying and frustrating to me despite all her traits like being a christian vegeterian. John just appeared and disappeared into thin air every once in a while. No one had a backstory I could care enough about. We didn't even properly get to see Morgan in the game so he's also a no no for me.


Oh and you get to battle a giant vagina monster with what I believe to be bloody tampons shooting out from the sides! FANTASTIC!


And lastly, the gameplay. The gameplay was fine for the most part, but still got pretty unresponsive and buggy at times, especially the guns. The gun didn't always hurt the enemy and some of the colissions for the enemies were really weird(like how you had to shoot right below it to hurt that giant turtle thing instead of shooting directly at it). The controls for reloading and taking out your gun were nice, and I had no problems with the controls. However one thing that bothered me was that Enter was the action button. While you could use spacebar for most of the game there were parts which required you to use Enter instead. I would be fine with using Z but since it is easier to reach, I think people should be able to use whatever action button they want. Forcing players to use Enter is pretty bad.


I was stuck trying to send this rock to the next room for a while, because apparently Space Bar doesn't work :<


Those are my thoughts on Black Winter. I think this game needs lots of work. Ok I'm tired from writing now give me the makerscore

I give it 1.5 vagina doors out of 5.

Posts

Pages: 1
This was interesting to read, about the references, maybe Stiven really wanted to add some, but the *original team(including the artist) was disbanded and he had to improvise.

But, personally, even if the image was original and not from Google, I don't think that's a good execution for a reference...

I mean, for example if you want to add a reference to Yume Nikki, you could add an image with Madotsuki's emblem pattern, something subtle.

I also thought something was missing in the end, specially because of Emma.

I don't understand why he would use that BGM for the final battle, he had a good composer.

This hurts because I had high expectations on this game, seriously I want more survival games.

I was dumb, oh well.

* Source: https://www.facebook.com/dysseraentertainment/posts/1266894429992551
Frogge
I wanna marry ALL the boys!! And Donna is a meanc
18536
Thanks for reading :D
I agree with what you said. I also had high hopes for the game and voted for it on greenlight too, but sadly it ended up being really disappointing.
Wait. Vagina Monster? How is this explained in the story?
Frogge
I wanna marry ALL the boys!! And Donna is a meanc
18536
author=djbeardo
Wait. Vagina Monster? How is this explained in the story?


It isn't exactly explained, but it is tied to Lily's inability to have children(later revealed that she can actually have children, which also makes no sense)I think.
InfectionFiles
the world ends in whatever my makerscore currently is
4622
I find the mismatch of resources very strange lol They have the Pioneer Valley high fantasy stuff with XP and vx ace tiles and other weird stuff.

How does this guy sleep at night?!
I wonder what was the dev thinking while drawing that monster. Like he had to tell the team "I got the perfect idea for a monster guys!"

Maybe the curse had some kind of side effect on Lily's health, given this was a big problem for her...I have nothing to defend this theory, though...
Frogge
I wanna marry ALL the boys!! And Donna is a meanc
18536
At least the reveal wasn't that Matt was cheating on Lily, which is what I expected. I think the twist was pulled off pretty badly. It was interesting and unexpected but also made no sense.

Yeah, I'm also really curious about how the team reacted when they were asked to draw a giant vagina with an angry face :P (Though, from the looks of it, it looks like the monster might have actually been taken from google images)
The gun images near the health bar were probably from google as well, along with the Candy Crush sweets, the clitoris image...the best piece of art was adricarras image of various rpg maker horror protagonists. Although...

1. It has zero relevance to the story or the game itself.
2. The ratio of the image is messed out due to stretching it.
3. No sort of communication was made from stiven202 that he can use it within their game from the direct link to the image on deviantart (putting the artists name on the image looks plain unprofessional).
Frogge
I wanna marry ALL the boys!! And Donna is a meanc
18536
Oh, the graphics weren't properly credited either, which also leads me to believe stiven just googled ''rpg maker tilesets'' and added them in without even looking at their terms.
pianotm
The TM is for Totally Magical.
32347
Smdh...there was just so much NO in this game.
Pages: 1