On December 30, 2013, an English-language visual novel circle called OpenH Studio released Christmas Rose, a very short original English language visual novel (OELVN) written in Ren’Py. The novel is entirely kinetic (meaning no player input other than advancing the text) and takes about 10 minutes to read to completion. Open H described it succinctly: “A short Winter to Summer Love Story.”
To be sure, this Christmas Rose is substantially fluffier fare than The Christmas Rose, a 1913 short story by Lizzie Deas which I re-printed and discussed in brief back in 2021. Moreover, it has little to do with either Christmas or the botanical Christmas rose. But reviewing visual novels around Christmas has become something of a tradition the last couple of years, so let us keep things going with a look at Open H’s Christmas Rose.
Christmas Rose Details
Before continuing, note that while I will be talking about official websites for Christmas Rose that are no longer online, Christmas Rose’s original download link remains online.
The official website of OpenH Studio and Christmas Rose is no longer extant. The most recent Wayback Machine capture was made on June 23, 2015. The website only had two pages, with one being for Christmas Rose and the other being an About page for OpenH. Unfortunately, there are no archived captures of the About page.
The original Christmas Rose page was published on the same day the novel was first made available for download: December 30, 2013. OpenH Studio described it as follows: “This is a short Winter to Summer Love Story” while also noting that it is a kinetic novel. Beneath the description of the novel, the team wrote “Even though it never came out exactly on 25th December 2013, thank you.” From this, I gather that OpenH Studio had originally planned to release Christmas Rose on Christmas but came up five days short of the goal.
Because this was a Ren’Py project, I suspected that the there may be threads about it on Lemma Soft Forums, which is a site for independent visual novel projects (mostly, albeit not exclusively, novels written in Ren’Py). OpenH Studios published a link to the novel on the forum at 9:40 AM on December 30, 2013, and that thread with its mostly positive responses is still live. OpenH Studios deleted the content of its posts at some later date, meaning that its post opening the original thread is empty in the live version of the forum, but you can see the original, which copies the description from the OpenH website, in an April 1, 2015 capture of the thread. I found a tangentially-related thread by BEERINGS, who is credited as the sprite artist for Christmas Rose, started on November 13, 2013. Beerings listed his or her resume for those in the market for a sprite artist and listed Christmas Rose as a Collaboration. As we know, Christmas Rose would not be released for another month and a half, so we can infer that it was in progress on November 13, 2013.
Christmas Rose has a Visual Novel Database Entry which includes a link to the official download and other information noted on the original website. VNDB notes a Spanish-language translation of Christmas Rose was completed by Sakashi Plans and made available for download on January 1, 2019. Those interested in the Spanish version can find it here (I have not tested it and do not know anything about it other than the fact it exists). Ren’Ai Archive, which is a comprehensive listing of Ren’Py visual novels going back to 2001, has a page for Christmas Rose but no additional information other than a note that the novel has 2,027 words.
Running Christmas Rose
The Christmas Rose download comes with executables for Windows and Linux/MacOS. I could not get the native Linux version to work, even after tinkering for 15-20 minutes to see if I could resolve the permissions issue I was seeing in my console. Because I was just playing this novel out of curiosity rather than as part of a larger project, I opted to run the Windows version on top of WINE. The Windows version ran on top of my system WINE-staging on Linux without any issue.
Christmas Rose Review
As I noted at the top, Christmas Rose is a very short (about 10 minutes to read) visual novel with no interactive elements.
The novel begins with a verbose monologue about the majesty of the seasons and the mystery of their changing.
We then learn it is winter in the world of Christmas Rose. But the fact that it is winter has little effect on the heroine of our short kinetic visual novel.
The heroine is named Summer. There is significance to her name. The young lady is in fact the personification of the season summer.
What is Summer to do during winter? Her humble abode has a nature-powered super computer (so we are told). She uses this computer to communicate with Winter, who as you may guess, is the personification of winter.
Winter had sent her an image of a rose in the snow (Note: The scene leaves an ambiguous first impression). Summer responded with a teasing lecture about how roses (which she is known for, being summer and all) do not bloom in the winter.
Winter offered a business-like response explaining that the Christmas rose does bloom in winter, but he kept things short because he was busy. Summer was mildly triggered not only by Winter’s curt response to her playful message, but also because Winter had mentioned Spring, who again as you may guess, is the personification of spring.
We quickly gather that Summer has a crush on Winter, who is a boy. Spring is a girl and Summer is suspicious that she gets along too well with Winter. We also learn that Autumn is a guy but he and Summer have a fraternal relationship. Note that the only characters who have dialogue are Summer, Winter, and Mother Nature (Mother Nature does not have a sprite).
The bulk of the story involves Summer working through her romantic feelings before eventually winding back (cleverly, I will add) to the themes introduced in the opening narration.
The text is presented NVL style, overlaying the sprites and backgrounds – which is unusual, albeit not unprecedented, for OELVN Ren’Py projects. There is a semi-transparent text box for the text reminiscent of a freeware Japanese visual novel I reviewed, A Dream of Summer.
According to the novel’s credits, the script was written by Zun Yi. In evaluating the script – I note as a threshold matter that this is not an ambitious piece, but rather it was intended to be a humorous little story book-ended by a deep set-up and concluding punchline. The script struggles when it tries to wax poetic – the quasi-philosophical opening scene does not read well. There are a couple points where the identity of the speaker is not obvious. Summer is mostly charming and easy-to-follow, save for it being unclear on my first reading how she became initially acquainted with the image of a Christmas rose. The script is clear with respect to Summer’s internal romantic conflict. As some commenters in the Lemma Soft forum thread noted, the novel has clear Japanese visual novel influences which appear in the rare use of “-chan” and the word tsundere, not to mention Summer laughing like a Japanese visual novel character. To the script’s credit, in the end it delivers the punchline the story is built around well enough.
The character sprites were handled by BEERINGS. Summer and Winter are the only characters with sprites. The have a distinct anime-style, but I venture that most people who have seen enough Japanese and OLEVNs would guess they were from a non-Japanese piece. That is not a note on quality, however – both of the sprites are well above what I would expect from this sort of production. Summer is well-drawn and thought went into making her design evocative of summer. She has two poses, with the second pose not appearing until late in the novel – meaning most of her expressiveness is in her face. Winter is just as well-drawn with white/silver hair (a la a certain more-recent anime character I wrote about) and a snazzy winter scarf (where can I get one of those?). There are two instances where the novel uses a semi-transparent Summer or Winter against a background, both of which work reasonably well. The backgrounds were drawn by Collette Ren – the novel technically has five backgrounds, but two are stock photos (Christmas rose and the sky). The vast majority of the novel uses Summer’s and Winter’s rooms as backdrops. Summer appears to live in some sort of tree house. While the tree house is a solid background in and of itself, it does not strike me as being as being as obviously estival as Summer herself. Winter’s home is made of silver, white, and gray-blue, with a snow-flake-pattern window. While it gives off a more hibernal air than Summer’s home makes me think of summer, it made me think of an Arctic lair or something of the sort. The background quality is solid but I think Summer’s home should have been a little bit brighter and Winter’s more like a home.
The novel uses stock music for all of its tracks. The main menu theme is surprisingly somber. It reminded me of the winter theme in the most seasonally-sensitive video game I have played, Harvest Moon: Back to Nature, which matches winter but does not match the tone of the novel. A couple of the in-novel tracks were surprisingly subdued for what is, in the end, a lighthearted piece. They are all good quality for a freeware music section, but I do not think they all fit the piece.
Conclusion
For what it is, Christmas Rose is a fun little novel. The team had a clear idea of what it wanted to accomplish and created a short piece to deliver a specific joke in the end. Granting some of my critiques of how well the backgrounds fit, the artwork is ultimately high quality for this sort of piece – certainly better than your typical ten minute freeware Ren’Py production. There are moments when the writing is clunky and, strong artwork aside, where the aesthetics do not fully mesh, but Christmas Rose is still a model project for small teams looking to work together to produce a short visual novel. It does not bite off more than it can chew, focuses on accompanying the story with a solid presentation, and ultimately feels like a finished piece.
Christmas Rose is not among the must read novels I have reviewed or one I would recommend for all audiences. However, for those of you with an interest in small indie visual novel projects or who find the concept as I described it amusing, it is easy to download and run and as good a way as many to spend 10-15 minutes.
Final take-away: Seasons are fickle things (or folks).
