A Winter’s Daydream

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

A Winter’s Daydream is a Visual Novel first released on PC in 2018 and ported to multiple platforms in 2019, including Nintendo Switch. Its story follows Yuu, a boy returning from college in Tokyo to spend the Winter holiday with his rural family, ducking out from his abrasive sister to visit his grandmother, only for things to take an unexpected turn after a magical wish causes Yuu’s grandmother to awaken the following morning as a young girl.

In another work, this sort of premise would be ripe for creating all sorts of creepy perverted situations, but thankfully A Winter’s Daydream has little interest in that… although plenty of other characters mistake Yuu and his newly-young grandmother as a couple. Rather, A Winter’s Daydream is largely about a young man gaining a different perspective on his family by seeing them in a new light, and to this end it mostly does a pretty good job.

The writing here is good – a little predictable, and at times slow-paced and meandering, and at one climactic moment it seems like it couldn’t resist reaching for a predictable bit of sentiment when it may have been more moving to follow the characters through a less idyllic turn of events (Please forgive my vagueness, I’m trying to avoid spoilers here). Still, the quality of the writing is solid, the localization is excellent and even a bit nuanced, and the characters are well-crafted. For all its predictable elements, the story had me thinking about my family quite a bit, particularly my grandmother and grandfather, despite that my family is not very much at all like Yuu’s.

The story here is accompanied by some excellent art, though there’s not much variety to it. There are only a dozen or so locations, and only a half dozen characters that have been rendered here, each with only a few static poses. There’s nothing in the way of visual effects or animation. In fact, some major characters like Yuu’s parents aren’t rendered at all, leaving conversations with them depicting a blank background. Don’t get me wrong, what’s here is nice, there just isn’t very much of it.

This artwork is accompanied by a lovely acoustic soundtrack. It’s nothing truly standout, and can even get a bit repetitive at times, but it does a good job of setting the mood. There are also a few occasional sound effects, but these are negligible at best, and at worst they’re too loud or last for too long.

A few final notes before I wrap things up here. This Visual Novel does make optional use of the touchscreen in handheld mode, but this hardly matters – since the player isn’t making any choices (at all, whatsoever), it only advances the text forward, the same as pressing one of the face buttons does. I should also mention that the story here, at roughly 3 hours or so, is a bit on the short side for a game without branching plotlines to explore. However, at $6 this is fairly inexpensive for a Visual Novel, so in terms of value it more or less balances out in the end.

All told, A Winter’s Daydream isn’t flashy or revolutionary. It can be slow-paced, as well as overly predictable and sentimental. And if you prefer your Visual Novels to give the player some semblance of control over the events that unfold, you will be sorely disappointed. However, if you have the patience for a low-key emotional story about family, A Winter’s Daydream is a lovely experience that’s well-written, well-localized, and has a presentation that accentuates this story well. If you’re looking to expand your Visual Novel library with something relatively inexpensive, this game is well worth a look.

tl;dr – A Winter’s Daydream is a Visual Novel about a young man back from college to visit his family when his grandmother is magically transformed into a young girl again. While the player has no choice in the story, and the pacing can be a bit slow, the writing and characters are good and the localization is excellent. Don’t get this game expecting anything groundbreaking, but if a slower, sentimental story about family sounds appealing, you should give this a try.

Grade: C+

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