The game starts off with the death of your character's father. As you go through the village and talk to people about your father, you start to learn about a mysterious past that you'd never realized existed. Throughout the game, you do battle with haunting memories, literally.
Winter Voices seems to keep the surprises coming, with some fresh ideas and interesting concepts. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite take these concepts to their full potential.
The choices for the stat names are interesting in themselves. I think this is the first time I've seen humor (charisma is in there too, but it's a separate stat) as a stat, and you better believe I pumped as many points into it as I could. It opens up dialogue options for you later, but also has practical purposes in battle. All the stats have interesting descriptions, and indeed, this is the first time I've seen "perspicacity" as a stat as well. Of course, these stats all do pretty "ordinary" things as far as stats go (raise your energy / life, raise your mana, etc.) but it's a different way to think about building your character.
Another interesting thing about all the skills is that they tend to describe a mental state, rather than a physical action. It's a game that's all about spirits, and mental battles, so it all fits together rather nicely. It's also just interesting to think that the game is describing mental exercises, such as making yourself feel empty, as a skill, something you practice to keep yourself mentally fit. This is what actually matters for survival in this world, rather than physical strength.
Some of the skills are rather interesting as well, but complicated. I'm not kidding when I say you'll need a minimum of a twice-over read to understand some of these. But when you do get the skills, some of them are quite interesting. There's a healing spell called Emptiness that at first drains you of 60% of your life. During its duration, you receive less damage but also benefit less from healing. If you make it through this self-inflicted trial, you'll recover full health. Actually that's what I thought it would do, but it doesn't seem to work that way at all in practice. Here, we run into another one of the game's big problems: translation.
The dialogue begs for a better translation. It sounds like the text was translated very diligently, but without a second review for coherence, grammar, or for the target audience. This is a game about characters, relationships, and a dark past, but you'll struggle to get any of these qualities from the dialogue when you're just wondering what they "meant to say" all the time. It's frustrating, because you can just feel that there should be a great story, deep characters, and involving dialogue here, you can just feel it. It never, however, materializes. Also, for some unknown reason, people really like to call each other whores at the drop of a dime in this game; it gets pretty ridiculous.
Example dialogue: You ask a fellow hunter how the hunting is going. She replies "Well with you the femal [sic] hunter population dramatically decreased... a third less or about (smile)" Ok, I'm guessing that was, in the original script, some kind of jab at her masculine nature, but by the time I'm done guessing and pondering, I really haven't gotten anything useful, or even coherent out of this mistranslation exercise. Another nonsensical line: "You have a very perception notion of what is funny." I'm hoping that since I'm reviewing a beta copy of this game, that these script problems will be fixed, but it wouldn't be the first time that a game retained its broken script.
