Before the Snow Melts, by Zach Crowe
I’ve mentioned before that my wife is a fan of the notionally-set-in-the-Regency-but-people-talk-about-closure romance Bridgerton, so we’ve been working our way through the recently-released season, but finding it a bit of a slog. Partially this is because the writing seems to have suffered from those Netflix notes about making sure every character is spelling out the plot for the people not paying attention in the back. Partially it’s because the male lead spent the previous three seasons mired in dull subplots that didn’t go anywhere and which – since their consequences all need to be cancelled out so he can be a blank slate when meeting the female lead – made him seem rather callow. But mostly it’s because the show barreled through the process of the two leads falling in love as though it were running late for a train: there’s barely half an episode of them getting to know each other before the plot starts throwing obstacles in the way of what by now the viewers assuredly feel must be their destined union. And look, I know whose pictures are on the posters, and the tropes of forbidden love are always entertaining to work through, but it’s hard to muster up much enthusiasm because I’m not especially invested – the show is telling me these people are deeply in love, but it hasn’t shown me how they got there.
Before the Snow Melts is a visual novel that takes a broadly similar approach: from the jump, we’re told that the protagonist is deeply and secretly in love with their best friend Clover, and has seven days to tell her – or not – before she leaves the town where they grew up together. It’s a familiar but promising setup, and I liked the straightforward but nonetheless compelling metaphors the author employs to communicate the protagonist’s hidden yearning:
I don’t know when that started. It feels like it’s always been there. Like snow, quietly piling up. Layer by layer, until everything was covered. Still. Preserved. Untouched.
The seasonal imagery in the prose is a highlight throughout, in fact – here’s another bit I liked:
A light breeze moved through the trees, carrying that damp, thawed scent of early spring. Somewhere deeper in the forest, water dripped steadily, like the season was slowly unfreezing itself.
The visual presentation isn’t quite so understated. The anime-style characters are expressive, but maybe too much so – Clover is appealingly spunky but she’s only drawn with a few rather extreme variations, so that she goes from smilingly chatting over coffee, to being depicted as crying in the time it takes her to meditatively run her finger around the rim of the cup and say “hey.”
Perhaps that level of emotional whiplash is appropriate to these characters, though, since while the game doesn’t divulge specific ages or even their overall life circumstances, they’re heavily teenaged-coded, with Clover’s mysterious departure seeming to me like an impending departure for college and the light bickering that characterizes her dialogue likewise coming up sophomoric. So while the protagonist’s refusal to tell their crush about their feelings until literally the last second is definitely a bit frustrating, I remember what I was like as a teenager and can’t say that it’s unrealistic. Whether it’s compelling is a different matter, though; I didn’t agonize over most of the game’s choices because it was clear that the only important one would come on day seven, which means that by midweek some of the pseudo-dates had a harder time holding my interest. Here, the game’s refusal to offer specifics is to its detriment; the line by line dialogue is solid enough, but being told that the characters go to see “a drama” is less compelling than if it had been, I dunno, Oppenheimer, and a lot of the conversation topics are quite abstract and philosophical, so they could have benefitted from additional grounded.
Fortunately, the game does get a mid-stream dose of energy when a third character is introduced into their tiny menage; Iris, a mutual childhood friend, is a bundle of chaos who drinks too much and speaks too bluntly, and in her frustration that these two people haven’t just started kissing already is an effective proxy for the player. Her attempts to move things along are necessarily unsuccessful (and for anyone tempted to roll their eyes at the way that the two main characters just completely ignore the way Iris all but tells them “you guys are super into each other!”, I can testify almost this exact same thing happened to me when I was this age, again, this is gritty realism), but her presence is a highlight and helps ease the process of getting to the ending, which is the other highlight.
The climactic conversation is, I suppose, just as high-level as the rest of them, and edges closer to melodrama, but that’s fitting for the stakes. And it finally pays off some of the seeds sown in earlier sequences: very often the protagonist talks about things feeling or being “easy” in those previous conversations, which provides a counterpoint when Clover, justifying her decision to leave, says “I’m afraid of choosing something smaller than I wanted, not because I had to, but because it was easier”. You really do have choices here, and while all the endings work well enough, I found myself most drawn to the one where you can let Clover know about your feelings without initiating a relationship – there’s a grounded poignancy to acknowledging, at a time of transition, that something could have happened but now it’s too late.
It would have landed harder, though, if I’d come to this scene with a clearer sense of what, exactly, the protagonist saw in Clover, and what Clover saw in them. They both seem like nice people, and as a player, I felt the vague benevolence of wanting them both to be happy. Before the Snow Melts didn’t sell me on the idea that they could only be happy together; it’s vague, perhaps intentionally, about whether this is star-crossed destiny or just youthful hormones bubbling over. I suppose this, too, is realistic, since God knows it’s hard to have that perspective when you’re in it, but fairly or not, the standards for fiction are different.