Frosty Kiss

The winter holidays are usually pretty special in most parts of the world, since everyone is home, giving and receiving gifts from their closest friends or family members. However, it is also a nice opportunity for you to get closer to that special someone. Movies and video games take full advantage of this to flood you with a variety of romantic flicks that have many elements in common, so it's pretty hard to resist.

Frosty Kiss is a short visual novel game in which you have to make the desired decisions in order to get close to one of multiple female characters. The short play time means that you cannot really get to know them that well, but it should be enough to put a smile on your face. The fact that you can replay the adventure and make different choices is definitely a plus.

The story revolves around Semyon, a boy who’s about to celebrate New Year’s Eve with someone special. In essence, the girls you have the opportunity to talk to are actually friends from a camp Semyon visited in the past. Hence, he already knows a bit about each of them, but it’s left up to you to decide with whom to share a special moment at midnight.

The dialog is pretty well-written, although there are times when the lines might be a bit too cheesy for most people, depending on how familiar you are with anime. As usual, the characters express their emotions a bit too over-the-top, which might not sit well with western audiences. Still, you can get over it if you just concentrate on the actual story, because that’s where the real fun comes from.

In the artwork department, everything is pretty much spot on, except maybe for the fact that there are just too few backgrounds to go with the scenes. You’ll be staring at the same stuff for minute after minute, so they might get boring after a while, regardless of how detailed the backgrounds are. Thankfully, at least the music keeps boredom at bay with soft and calming acoustic guitar tunes.

In the end, Frosty Kiss is short enough to be enjoyed in under an hour, especially if you are a fast reader. The artwork is great, the story is pretty captivating if you are a fan of the genre, and you can even change the outcome by doing things differently with every playthrough.