Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall Review - Warm and Ambitious but not Executed Carefully Enough
Consider a game that is cosy, but also dangerous. Brave At Night’s Yes, Your Grace set the bar for this compelling combination in 2020. It was a branching narrative experience, with a ‘failure-management’ component; your story could play out very harshly if you mismanaged scant resources. Their recent sequel, Yes Your Grace: Snowfall, is even more homely and warm, while remaining impossibly perilous.
Although I knew to expect tough decision-making, Snowfall suffers from some balancing issues that undermine your decisions, as well as persistent bugs. Before I stopped playing (at the end of Chapter 3, out of 6, I believe), all five of my royal agents (who are employed strategically to satisfy petitioners) were either poisoned or on fire, or both. Times were too lean to have anywhere near enough medicine, but (without agents) ‘prosperity’ collapsed, and being able to afford literally anything was but a memory.
Let’s begin with ‘cosy’, however. The colours, rays of light through windows, forests, trees, leaves, embroidery, all just make me want to climb through my screen and spend the rest of my days knitting booties for the baby heirs. There are family members to joke around with, ‘hearty stews’, little brave quests to cold places, and so on. Even when, as King Eryk, I was stuck in camp for 8 weeks with a relative absence of objectives (which I’m guessing may be due to this game being a big container which has remained accidentally empty in a few spots, rather than by design), I enjoyed my one consistent, weekly task; reading a story with my daughter, by the campfire.
At the beginning of Chapter 3, the player becomes Queen Aurelia when her husband decides to take a seasons-long nap (in a manner of speaking), and this is also fun because you can appreciate how petitioners treat a woman differently. Suddenly, however, there is an absolute barrage of new resources to unlock and manage. Generally, I would love this, but most seem to have little meaning. For example, ‘herbs’ are incredibly expensive to get, if you consider that they flow from (the core) prosperity count, through prioritising ‘supplies’, and into (what I think are) randomly generated quests. I did complete a cool romance interaction with 12 herbs, but I’m not sure if that justifies running the queendom into the ground.
Similarly, ‘influence’ requires heavy investment, but only buys things like 5% more potential prosperity or ‘rumours’, which (I think) are just random words that float on your ‘end of week’ screen. Possibly, I was ‘swindled’, which is another (more valid) way to lose precious resources fast. Management has had a true gameplay overhaul, in comparison to the first game, and I love that petitioners are addressed by placing agents and items onto a row of dots (where you can land on various outcomes), avoiding fires, and swooshing away brambles. But, again, this is not particularly well explained, and is finicky to achieve with limited resources.
I stopped playing at the Jantar River. I failed in battle, and the game ended (which, given expectations for story-heavy genres, and the backtracking required to try again, probably shouldn’t be possible). I nearly gave it another (lengthy) shot, but the reality is that I was already playing carefully, and the game had also crashed probably 15 times (always meaning at least some loss of progress from the last save), so I didn’t. There seem to be various other bugs, too, like the same petitioner returning (with the same story) six weeks in a row, or (infinitely precious) money disappearing (for a reason I couldn’t discern) during the ‘end of week’ process.
I remember the first Yes, Your Grace extremely fondly. It was simpler, richer, more robust, and had a very good story. I certainly don’t dislike Snowfall, but its ambitious new game systems have not been executed carefully enough, in my opinion. Cosy-Danger is one of my very favourite game experiences, largely thanks to the first game, but only if danger is clear, fair, and presented in a way that only punishes your story, not your engagement.
Yes, Your Grace: Snowfall was reviewed on PC with code kindly provided by the publisher.
