Winter Voices Prologue: Avalanche

Let it be known that not all indie games, visually striking or not, are going to be good games in the end. While it's probably something people know already, making a game with your own wallet and without major publishing backing does not equal the next "Braid" or "VVVVVV". Available on Steam at the low price of 2.50$ thanks to its holiday deals, I saw screenshots and a couple of paragraphs describing "Winter Voices", an episodic grid-based RPG with a cool art style and an interesting battle premise. But only reviewing the prologue, dubbed "Avalanche", this game strikes me as the kind a better developer should've made, or at the very least, a different approach. Some interesting ideas but nothing about this makes me go "yeah, I'd love to see more".
 
The game starts you off playing a female villager (who you name, customizable portrait and in-game clothing and hairstyle which, bizarrely can be completely different from the portrait you've chosen). From there you're thrown into the story of your father's death and strange shadows which seem to follow you and attempt to harass you. You explore the village to uncover more about the secrets of your father, fight more of the shadows and eventually start to explore more of the world. This all sounds somewhat interesting if it weren't for the fact the writing is, well, a little bit pretentious. You know that kind of "faux poetic" writing where it's meant to come across as deep and meaningful but instead comes across as meandering and a bit full of itself, almost like it's a would-be philosopher. Not to mention there's things such as the dialogue that's written differing to that that's being spoken and using one of the skills you can unlock, I literally saw what looked like the file name for a split second before it reverted back to what it is supposed to be. The game in a way feels like a developer who wants to make a game but they don't know how to make a game.
 
Now we come down to the biggest issue with the game: the game part. It's almost done adventure point-and-click style only there's no run button which makes things even slower (I want to use the word "glacial" to describe the game's pacing but since the story takes place in a village during the winter season, that'd be too easy) and the interface is just as problematic. One thing to note is that your monitor resolution needs to be pretty high or else parts of the screen get cut off, there's no "how to play" menu for the controls and even the on-screen interface itself doesn't in fact tell you what certain things do. You can't rotate the map so if you want to move to a specific square that's underneath your skill hot bar, you have to click the button to hide the interface then click the square. Then the combat itself is fairly odd, if a bit unique. The object is to not kill enemies on the screen but just keep them away from you for 15 turns, however when enemies don't display an overlay of where they can hit from and since healing is either ineffective or just takes way too long, the battles become a serious grind and makes things really tedious. I like the idea that you're fighting off bad memories and thoughts but there's nothing compelling or even intuitive about the combat.
 
Now we get to the good parts of the game (finally...) which is the presentation. Graphically, it's a really bold and striking look and from the look of the village, your character portrait design and even in-game sprites, there's something quite unique and memorable about it. Best part though is easily the music which almost at times reminded me of a cross between sad folk music, Mogwai's use of noise and arrangements to Nine Inch Nails, more specifically his instrumentals from the "Ghosts" albums. It's kind of a shame the game is attached to it because the game looks really pretty and the music perfectly sets the tone that when the "game" part shows its head, it falters.
 
There's a web series you can watch, and buy on DVD as well, called "Broken Saints", a roughly 24 or so episode animated series that I also felt was pretentiously written but visually striking. If "Winter Voices" was done in this style, but re-written, I'd gladly give it a go. But it's not and as a download-only game that's being released episodically, I wouldn't even give this a go for curiousity's sake.