The Winter Rose

The Winter Rose is a medium length fantasy adventure game. It was made using AGS version 2.6 and was released in November 2005 by Baron. It was praised for its witty writing and moody atmosphere, but its lack of a final cut-scene left many players disappointed.

Winter Rose Screen Shot.

Plot Summary

Rose is a young archer girl whose forest homeland has been beset by an evil ice-dragon. The ice-dragon's breath keeps the land locked in perpetual winter, and Rose's father has become gravely ill. Setting forth with her bow, Rose vows to vanquish the ice-dragon in order to save her ailing father. Along her way she must wander through snowy ruins, past frozen villagers and knights-errant, in a surreal and hauntingly empty landscape. She matches wits with sasquatches, evil gnomes and a mentally unstable witch on her quest, and eventually faces him down in an epic showdown of wit versus raw power.

Pioneering Elements

The Winter Rose is perhaps best known for pioneering several graphical features and game-play options in AGS. This is by no means to claim that it was the first to use them, but it was the first to use them substantially.

• Hand-Painted Backgrounds -Each background in the game was hand-painted using acrylic paints. The raw texture of the brush strokes create a unique atmosphere.
• Dynamic Footprints in the Snow -While available for all to see in the desert room within the first Demo Quest, the code for making dynamic footprints using the Raw Draw function was never substantially used before this game.
• Floating Snow -Scorpiorus' Snow-Rain plug-in had been used for rain, but not convincingly for snow until this game.
• Retry Function -This was the first AGS game to adopt a "Retry" button, which functioned much as the "Undo" or "CTRL-Z" functions do in other programs. After the player dies, the "Retry" option enables her to be resurrected immediately prior to her demise, allowing the player to make different choices without relying on constant game saving and/or replaying.