I had the honour of proofreading this game, and what can I say but that another banger was added to The Under The False Sky universe...
For the story per se, per usual, it is a striking tragedy, highlighting the fragility and the vanity of human existence, and how so many deaths meaningless in conflicts are actually meaningful to someone. An inner fight in the concept of humanity itself: what will triumph? Our empathy ("humanity") or what we deem the great good is (for "humanity")?
This game in particular, more than any other previous written for the series, is rather slice-of-life, focusing on the rebels' daily life, especially when facing the ruthlessness of winter... This games serves both as an amazing introduction to some of the characters we get to see in other games (Micah, Mariam, Ester...) for new players, and as an excellent exploration of some well-known characters for players already familiar with the UTFS universe. The characters we get to discover are also very touching (Cain my baby)!
For the art, it is absolutely lovely! The sprites look gorgeous, and I love the addition of colours in hair, to either mirror the eyes of the characters... or mirror other things! It felt like an amazing addition, making the characters pop! And also, I ADORED their character designs, they were so good! The outifts were detailed, the haircut so good, and for the characters we've already seen, it was so great to compare them with how they look now and how they look in the future!
The backgrounds too, as usual in these games, are very well edited, and completely immersive. But here, in particular, I really appreciated how desaturated they were, how grey the sky was... It felt cold, just like winter. The GUI too is absoluely gorgeous, perfectly implemented, absolutely immersive - long story short, perfect!
Finally, the sounds in these games were so good: the music slapped, and how many indie VNs have custom SFX????? This is absolutely insane, and the audio engineer/composer did such an amazing job!! The voice actors, per usual in this series of games, knocked it out of the park, the performances were amazing, and the more dramatic lines were truly heartbreaking!
Long story short: this game, and this series in general, is a gem, and I encourage everyone to play it!! Thanks for involving me in this!