Traps block my way. I have no means of disarming or circumventing them.
Beyond the traps, a flickering dark Horrifying Memory. Beyond that, a blazing wildfire of an enemy, large enough to engulf every hostile memory I’ve dodged around so far.
I step on two traps. I don’t see any choice. I spawn a Fairy Tale, which is my only means of regenerating energy. It’s not very good.
I face the Horrifying Memory and use my weak push spell to shove it ahead one square.
Nothing happens.
I squint at the square I’m standing on. Why isn’t this working? Is it because there’s a tiny rock on the square? Is this somehow breaking my spell?
Once again, I don’t see any other choice. I step forward. I happen to dodge and absorb the memory (I didn’t know I could do this; it might’ve made other stages “easier” in a hilarious die and reload trial-and-error way).
The giant wildfire enemy immediately wobbles TERROOOOR at me. I’m pushed backward several squares. I land on a trap and die.
Winter Voices is an intensely frustrating game, and that’s too bad, because the premise has promise - everything is about grief. Your skills are about coping. Your enemies are memories and regrets. The gameplay is more about getting across the stage or surviving long enough to move on. It’s also miserably anti-fun.
You have a gigantic skill tree, cool. But it’s possible to screw yourself over in the prologue with the wrong build. Common Internet advice: don’t spend any points until you have a specific problem to solve. I’ve been paging through this walkthrough and it sounds like some abilities may be disabled in certain maps. Or that certain skill trees are really what you want in this stage, etc. In many cases, there seem to be only one solution. For the scenario I described above: the best strategy is apparently to mash the skill that gives you movement points, wait a turn, mash for more movement points, etc, until you can run to the end in a sprint.
Fair enough, if I think that requires a deeper familiarity with and patience for mechanics than most players will have in the prologue. But why doesn’t pushing the weaker memory ahead of you to protect yourself against the wildfire memory work? Why do you have to just walk on the traps? Why do you have to just walk into the lesser memory? The rigidity and obscurity of the stages and the emphasis on withstanding and avoiding pain may have thematic resonance, but I haven’t found a single encounter I enjoyed. And at worst (and quite early), how to progress becomes baffling.
Certainly I was asking for this when I chose the hardest (but purportedly most rewarding) class, but, y’know, I’m gonna be frank here. I have a lot of games. Some of them are easy, and some of them are very easy. I like visual novels. Some of them are hard. Some of them are too hard. Hyper Light Drifter is nothing I’m good at, but I’ll come back to it because I want to. It’s gorgeous and the difficulty is actually part of the draw. My failures seem fair. I’ve played Winter Voices at least as long as Hyper Light Drifter and beating a stage doesn’t feel like an accomplishment. Victory feels like something I stumbled desperately into. I don’t feel like I’m playing avoidance chess. I’m not sure what I’m playing. And if “stumbling desperately into something that works?? somehow???” Is a thematic approximation of grief, I think it leaves something to be desired. I need a reason to keep going, and I stuck as long as I did because I super wanted to like this one.
See, the gameplay is aggravating enough that I’m not sure that the best narrative could save the game. And Winter Voices does have a lot of narrative. It’s largely the narrative that gives Winter Voices its dedicated fans and I’m glad of them, because Winter Voices is certainly interesting. “Let’s make a long-form RPG about dealing with grief” is, wow, ambitious, and I admire that so much.
But the narrative went too quickly into abstract territory for me. I do love philosophical stories and dialogue, I really do, but I’ve been reading densely written lines about regrets and lacks of and what makes a good parent and what makes a good life. Some of it is contextualized and insightful, some of it is very awkward, and some of it, I don’t altogether know who it’s about. Characters show up in dreams. Who are they? And while I can relate to a protagonist who feels like an outsider, I think it would be helpful to have more shreds of concrete relationships. Even the essential relationship with her father is not so much ambiguous as hazy, although it’s the most intriguing thing about Winter Voices, so I don’t want to dig too much against it.
But what’s driving me forward?
Gosh, I want to like Winter Voices. I want to like it so much. I want to wade through all its dense words and find wonderful things, and if this were a book or even a visual novel, I could sit here and justify every stall of plot, every meander, every moment of haziness. But this is a video game, and the video game part is a joyless chore. This is as far as I go.
The Winter Voices complete pack is 19.99 on Steam. The prologue will run you about 4.99.
The Whispering Faces are whispering to us, talking about their life, telling their stories.
But it's not a vocal whispering, it's a visual whispering.
I just translate their voice into images over the paper. All around the faces, there are the things that surround us: the world, the reality, the life that cross around us, flowing like a river,
leaving their marks over our face/identity.
All of us, we have our life's picture history
embedded in our skin.
Our whispering faces are our pictorial journals, tattooed with the radiant ink of time.
