Snow Drop

Reviewed by Craxton (craxton@erols.com)

Publisher: Peach Princess Cost: $29.95 Graphics: Very Good. Music/Sound: Decent. NPCs: Good. Writing: Very Good. Plot: Okay, when you can find it. Interface: Very Good. Sex: Good. Kinkyness: Vanilla, a few lesbian scenes.

So, here's the deal: You're Minoru, average 19-year old guy just out of high school, on your family's annual winter vacation. With you are your next-door neighbor and childhood friend Kyoka, a strong-willed, somewhat pigheaded type, her... outgoing sister, Keika, your own sister Honomi, eighteen but still refering to herself in the third person, and your parents. Whoops, scratch that last one. Mom and Dad bail soon as you arrive, opting for a second honeymoon instead of the cold, icy ski slopes. So, it's you, your sister, and two girls who you've known since you were a kid, on a five-day vacation at a ski resort. Add in Kasumi, the recently widowed lodgekeeper, and Shizuka, the newly-employed maid, and you've got a formula for a week full of fun, romance, and skiing. But wait... what about that strange white flower you found on the way to the lodge? And these odd repressed memories that seem to be intruding on your mind? And just who *is* Shizuka, anyway? And why does she seem so captivated with you? Something's going on here... something very strange indeed...

Snow Drop has a lot of what you look for in a good H-AVG. An involving storyline with compelling characters, well-drawn graphics, a good degree of varience in the events, a decent amount of intrigue and mystery, and, of course, sex. All of which combines to make a solid, if not particularly inventive, digital novel.

All this comes in hindsight, however. I'll tell you my first impression of Snow Drop: I fooled around in a hot spring for a while and the game ended.

Well, not quite. To elaborate: I installed the game, sat through the opening cinematic, spent about thirty minutes reading, listening, and clicking through day one, skiied, went in a hot spring, got a handjob, skiied, hung around the lodge, skiied, got embarrased in a hot spring, revenged myself, screwed Keika... and that was it. End of game. Err... what?

Okay, okay, no big deal. See, Snow Drop works like this: the characters all move through the lodge and slopes, winding up in certain predetermined places at certain predetermined times. At certain points in time, you decide Minoru's next destination, and he goes there. If someone else is there, an event occurs. The first time through, I was just unlucky. I managed to neatly miss almost every single event. The second time, I had better luck finding events, but the same ending. (I knew there was more then one- the box said so, and besides, the ending I got might as well have had "YOU MISSED SOMETHING" stamped on it in bright red ink.) A third, forth, fifth try all wound up to be different routes to the same place, and by now I was starting to become... annoyed, to say the least. So I set out solving the game via the most efficient way I know... with a map.

That, once I got to it, wasn't that hard. Unlike GLO-RI-A, where the internal mechanics were damn near impossible to figure out, Snow Drop is very straightforward: 1-4 events are available at each decision point, with additional, null events that consist of Minoru coming to some place, looking around, and deciding to go somewhere else. Certain events, call them "key" events, add a piece to the overall puzzle of just what's going on here. This modifies the content (not the location) of future events, and hitting all the key events unlocks the second act at the end of day three. In the second act... ummm... you do the same thing. Map it out, find the key events, and go for act three. Only this time, there are four different possibilities, one of which leads nowhere and one of which leads to a nowhere that looks like somewhere. From act three two endings are accessable, which two having been determined by your actions in act two.

The thing is, while Snow Drop sports most of the good parts of an AVG, it also sports one of the genre's most consistant flaws: poor feedback to the player. In an action-based game, you know immediately if you've screwed up: you die, lose life, drop your coveted powerup, whatever. In an RPG or an adventure game, you might have to wait a while to get that feedback, but you get it.

In AVG, you often get nothing. An unsatisfying ending, yes, but that doesn't tell you WHAT you did wrong. You can judge what's happening only by what changes from one play to the next. Which means that 1) you don't know if you're doing something right unless you've previously done something wrong or vice-versa, and 2) if you think you're doing something wrong, you have no idea how to do it right until you actually do it. Which means, in turn, that there's no strategy to solving puzzles other then educated guess: you basically just jab at decisions blindly until something different happens. If the correct course of action is fairly obvious, this is one thing, but if not, the game quickly becomes a chore. Furthermore, you have no way of even knowing if something different *can* happen. Add in the fact that, in the case of Snow Drop, there is only one path to success (branching into two later in the game), and the result from the player's end is frustration. Frustration is not what you want to get from a game.

I don't LIKE mapping an AVG. I like an AVG that lets me coast through with few worries. Not totally linear, no, but not so obscure or bottlenecked in it's plot branching. The story should be enjoyable at it's own pace, I should not have to smash my head against the wall repeatedly searching out the next part of it. This is just not fun.

I could go on, but you get the picture: Bad clueing severly diminished my enjoyment of Snow Drop. It did not, however, shrink it away to nothingness. The plot, when you can actually find it, is pretty engaging. Although the first day is a little slow, the pacing on a whole is exemplary, and the work smoothly transitions from whimsical romance to supernatural mystery, without the contrast being jarring or disconcerting. The characters are well-developed, (though finding much of the development requires venturing off the path of key events) and their actions are consistent with their personalities. Our main girls, Kyoka and Shizuka, effect a nice symmetry of feminine archetypes- strong-willed and weak-willed, outgoing and reserved- fire and ice, if you will- that serves the story well. The attempted juxtaposition of the romantic and realistic doesn't come off as well... though Kyoka is written well as the "super-realist", Shizuka doesn't strike me as especially romantic, though there are some fairy-tale aspects to her character. The writing is superb, and has received an excellent translation job, one which reminds me why I so dislike Himeya's translations, with their inappropriate jokes and non sequitar pop culture references. Nothing of the sort is to be found here, though a few slip-ups are present (Why does Kasumi keep ending her lines with "W-What?")

One cannot deny, however, that the story is not exactly brain food. Although a few surprises will be found, in general the story is predictable from the start, and though it keeps your interest while being played, it's ultimately forgettable. The same could be said for the music: it fits the mood and tone of the game, but doesn't really stick in the head.

Graphics are a significantly brighter story. Actually, graphically, Snow Drop excels. The artist makes skillful use of shading to accentuate the curves, resulting in characters that don't look flat or cartoonish, but also lack the stilted, polygonated forms of pure CGI.When their facial expressions change, the transition is very smooth, almost organic. The artist also creates admirable portrayals of low-light conditions. Darkly-shaded pictures are permeated by very light blues and purples, and some of the most evocative scenes taking place in dark rooms lit by light blue-silver moonlight. (Witness the half-dressed Shizuka and spooky Kasumi) This is the kind of game with art you really want to stop and look at.

"But what about the sex?!" I hear you yelling...

The sex, like the plot, doesn't really strike me as spectacular, but it is pretty good. both writing and drawing are up to the task, as is voice acting, though the writers portrayal of oral sex doesn't really "click" with me. The sex is light, however, and most of it is in the second act, so you have to go through the trouble gathering up key events first... and finding %100 of it requires straying off the correct path, so this is clearly not a single-playthrough game. And this also encourages mapping all the more. But if you like a lighter game with sex balenced by characterization, then this'll do, no problem. Unless the central puzzle forces you to bash your monitor in, of course.

Conclusion: Could have been better, but overall a solid game almost wrecked by unclear plot pathing. Almost.