I stayed up till

an unholy hour for this but oh was it worth it.

wow... it's great^^ and quite enjoyable

Nice and touching story, lovely visuals and an enjoyable experience, what's not to love?

There is some promise and some intriguing bits to When Winter Ends but it never really lives up to them  or does anything with them. I liked the concept of the story as I could see several ways it would of went and interesting things to explore in it but by the ending I received nothing really happened and nothing was revealed. In fact the only thing that was truly revealed was the child’s name but that showed up right at the end as the game stopped referring to her as “child” and started using her name without any explanation as to how my character would know this. I liked the interaction between my character and the child but it never really led anywhere. I thought the art style was unique but lacked detail. The sound effects of the storm were well done but overall the game lacked music. There is a point and click aspect to the game but it didn’t offer me much other than some more details as to certain items my character sees. For me whether the game had this mechanic or not made no difference.

    I played When Winter Ends on Linux. It had one typo where there was supposed to be a space in between words and had them bunched up as one. The game never crashed. The only other issue I saw was that the words for the choices didn’t always fit into the text box and spilled out of it. You can manually save whenever you want and there are fifty four save slots.

Game Engine: Ren’Py 7.4.11.2266
Graphics API: OpenGL
Game Version Played: 1.1

GPU Usage: 0-9 %
VRAM Usage: 462-1099 MB
CPU Usage: 5-13 %
RAM Usage: 1.4 GB

    I think there were some good elements to When Winter Ends but it needed more depth to it’s story to be more than a tale of what could have been. I finished my first play through in fifteen minutes. The game is free of charge but there are a lot of better free visual novels out there so it’s tough to recommend this one.

My Score: 6.5/10

My System:

AMD FX-6100 | 16GB DDR3-1600 | Gigabyte R9 270 2GB | Mesa 22.1.4 | Manjaro 21.3.6 | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 5.18.14-1-MANJARO

Good story with well-developed likable characters.