Publisher: Hatters' Guild Productions
Genre: Adventure
Summary: To save the land, Rose sets out to defeat the ice dragon.
Gameplay: The game is set up like a traditional Sierra-style adventure game with buttons across the top of the screen for walking, seeing, moving, inventory, saving, loading, and settings. Puzzles are inventory-based and generally fairly straightforward.
Style: The Winter Rose has lovely art of hand-made backgrounds and pixel characters. The art isn't fantastic, but the homespun quality feels welcoming. Given the plot, there's a lot of blue and white and ever-falling snow. The Vivaldi soundtrack and occasional scavenged sound effect only adds to the charm. Perhaps if the game were longer the lack of variety or polish would grate, but the game doesn't last long enough for it to do so.
Story: There isn't too much story to The Winter Rose, but it manages to combine a dark set-up (there are few characters around due to the doom-like reign of the ice dragon, who has literally frozen most local life) with a surprising amount of humor that makes those characters fun and memorable.
Unfortunately, the ending is so disappointingly abrupt the game managed to make my five worst endings list.
Conclusion: The Winter Rose truly shows the possible charms of a short, home-made adventure game. It manages to create a coherent story and characters with lovely art. Its main, great flaw is its abrupt ending.