Final Winter

Final Winter came to me via a message reply to one of my advertisements. I never would have heard of this game if one of the developers had not reached out to me. Which is unfortunate because this game is probably the most fun I have had losing in years. Now I know what you are thinking. Probably something like. “You had fun losing a game?” Yes. Yes, I did. Some games you play to win but do not always expect to. Let’s talk more about this game. Final Winter is a described as an RPG with Speedrunning elements on its Steam page. Though I would say it is more like a roguelike but you get 30 lives. A village is cursed and most of the people have left, though the remaining villagers and strangers come to the village hoping to gain rewards, travel in to the caverns one at a time to stop the curse. Here’s the catch, you only have ten minutes to do it! To do this, you play through a dungeon crawl, learning various skills which are inherited by the next villager when you die. I suppose I should say if you die, but I died a lot, it just became a when. These skills you learn as you go allow you to find quicker ways through each dungeon level, eventually allowing you to easily traverse each …

Mildly fun for about 20 minutes and then it gets incredibly repetitive. There are some decent ideas, and as a concept the game isn't bad. But the execution is extremely amateur in all regards and the core gameplay is just a bit too simplistic to really keep you interested. Not nearly enough variety between runs (nearly zero). Especially at 10$ absolutely not. Maybe for 1-2$ I would say give the game a shot, but even then, there are dozens of free games I would recommend over this.

This is a fun arcade-feeling speedrun game. It is rewarding and story-rich. A lot of minor things make the game feel crappy/can be improved: The voice acting in the beginning sounds awful, even like the actors are on the verge of laughing. It ruins the experience of starting a new game. The hero being cocky in the opening cutscene is really hard to connect with. With music on, going from scene to scene has the music immediately switch. Gradually fading between songs feels more organic(sometimes it should be jarring, not always). With music off, each sound cuts in from silence, which is jarring. Ambient sound effects like wind would be great. Menu options should be hover-selected as if they were rows in a grid, instead of having just the text being able to be hover-selected. Every fight is almost entirely the same, and it more-or-less doesn't make a difference when they're short battles, but boss fights are very, very boring. The sound effect after is great, but often not enough to make up for the amount of time wasted doing the same motions for a long time, thoughtlessly. The speech-text does not appear fast enough, in my opinion. It would be nice to have confirmation of a succes…

Very cozy and chill

A very neat game! The controls are honestly kinda jank. I created a custom layout for the XBox 360 controller, which I've shared with the community, and that makes the game infinitely more playable in my opinion. At the time of this review, I think some of the achievements might be glitched (i.e. unobtainable), which disappointed me greatly. I like the music, sound effects, artwork, and game mechanics! I also really appreciate the fact that it has an upper bound on how long the game will take for a complete playthrough. Overall good game.

This game gets more intriguing, intricate, and complex the more I play it. I find myself limiting my play sessions so I don't discover too much at once. Excited to reach the end, and see what kind of replay value it has as well.