Buzzworthy Introduction
On October 9, 2008, Residential Aliens, an online speculative fiction blog, published a story titled A Taste of Honey by Fred Warren. Mr. Warren, who Residential Aliens described in his author bio as having recently retired from the U.S. Air Force and living in Kansas with his wife and three children, decided that he was not done with his sweet short story. He set out to turn A Taste of Honey into a short visual novel and succeeded just under one year after the publication of the original short story when he posted his completed visual novel adaptation of his own short story on Lemmasoft Forums on September 27, 2009.
I stumbled upon A Taste of Honey on Visual Novel Database somewhere in the neighborhood of two years ago and bookmarked it for a review because the art-style in the screenshots reminded me a bit of some of the al|together visual novels I have reviewed. I finally read it and dug into its unique backstory. Below, I present my review of a very short and niche visual novel that I was only able to read thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
A Taste of Honey Details
A Taste of Honey is a very short freeware visual novel (see Visual Novel Database entry). Fred Warren announced its release, and published links, in a forum post on the Lemma Soft Forums on September 27, 2009. Two days later, he published a blog post about the novel with links on Federation, his personal website. All of the download links on Lemma Soft Forums and Federation are dead. However, the Windows version of the original novel is available for download from the Internet Archive. While Mr. Warren did originally publish builds for Linux and MacOS, only the Windows build appears to have survived.
Mr. Warren built A Taste of Honey using Ren’Py, which is a free and open source visual novel engine that is particularly popular among English language developers (including yours truly in one 2026 case).
Fred Warren was the sole writer and programmer for A Taste of Honey, but it features art in the form of character sprites from Lonnie T. Brandt (“Vatina”), a Danish visual novel artist and writer. The music comes from Jonathon Roberts and the background images are all public domain photographs.
Backstory of A Taste of Honey
Mr. Warren described the backstory of his visual novel adaptation of his short story on his website:
In 2008, I wrote a short story called A Taste of Honey, a light modern fantasy/romance about a photographer who stumbles upon something unusual at a country fair. Not long afterward, I discovered a storytelling form called the Visual Novel, an interactive, multimedia story with pictures and music that allows the reader to make choices that affect the outcome of the story. A Kinetic Novel is similar, but the interaction is limited, with no decision branches.
Fred Warren (one link removed from original)
I would describe kinetic novels as being a subset of visual novels where there are no choices or player interaction beyond advancing the text, but other than that the description is accurate.
I thought A Taste of Honey was a good fit for the Kinetic Novel format, so I made some minor changes, modified the ending, and developed it into a script with accompanying pictures and music using the RenPy Visual Novel Engine. Since I’m a writer, not an artist, I enlisted the talented Ms. Lonnie Brandt, aka Vatina, who has built a few Visual Novels herself.
Fred Warren (replaced dead link with archived link)
Having read both the A Taste of Honey short story and visual novel, I will note that the entire text of the short story appears to be unchanged in the visual novel, but the visual novel adds a few lines to the end that do not appear in the short story.
Mr. Warren describes himself on his website, on which he published blog posts somewhat regularly through 2016, as residing in Kansas with his wife and three kids. He wrote that he had served 24 years in the U.S. Air Force before transitioning to “serving proudly as a slimy defense contractor” in the area of military tech support. While not a writer by trade, he stated that he had taken up writing more seriously in recent years (presumably following his retirement from the Air Force). A list of his publications, with links, remains available on his website (note that many of the links are dead, but the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine may have most or all of them in its archive). I also found an interesting interview with Mr. Warren on Where the Map Ends, a Christian speculative fiction site (the interview was most likely published in late 2010).
Of specific interest to A Taste of Honey, I found that Mr. Warren had written about three visual novels in the Comics & Media section of his website: Narcissu, Narcissu Side 2, and Katawa Shoujo Act 1. Regular readers of my visual novel reviews may know that I reviewed Narcissu, which was originally localized into English by Insani as part of the al|together 2005 fesitival. Mr. Warren published his Narcissu review on June 14, 2009, a few months before he released the visual novel adaptation of A Taste of Honey. In light of Mr. Warren’s having written that he discovered visual novels not long after publishing A Taste of Honey as a short story in October 2008, it is possible, if not likely, that Narcissu was the piece which gave him the idea for adapting A Taste of Honey into a visual novel (I will note, however, that he published his Katawa Shoujo Act 1 article on May 7, 2009). One reason I saved a link to A Taste of Honey when I stumbled upon it on Visual Novel Database was because the visual aesthetic suggested by the screenshots reminded me of some of the early-to-mid 2000s Japanese visual novels (one of which was Narcissu) as part of my al|together project. While Mr. Warren does not discuss any al|together visual novels other than Narcissu, I will note that it is stylistically similar to many from the set despite being written in Ren’Py instead of NScripter (which was the most common language for al|together novels).
Note on My Review Version
I downloaded the windows version of A Taste of Honey from the Internet Archive and ran it on Linux on top of WINE. I was not able to re-size the window, but the novel otherwise worked as expected.
General Story Overview
Despite the fact that A Taste of Honey is a short visual novel and the short story on which it is based is freely available online, I will stick to my general rule of offering a largely “spoiler”-free review, providing enough information for prospective readers to understand what the story is about but not so much as to potentially ruin the reading experience. Note that because the story and visual novel are almost identical save for a few extra lines at the end of the latter, my general introduction applies to both. Also note that while both of the main characters are named in the latter half of the novel, I will not use their names in this review.
The view-point character is an adult man who is working as a magazine photographer. He travels to photograph a small country fair for as part of a work assignment.
While seeing the sites and capturing photos, he happens upon a stand where a very pretty woman (by his account) is selling honey. She promises him that her honey is not only high quality and tasty, but that it will also trigger “visions of everything dearest and best.”
The man is skeptical, but through some impulse he buys 10 jars of the honey. He tries the honey in his hotel room and, sure enough, has an experience in line with the woman’s description. Convinced there was something odd about the pretty woman and the honey, he returns to the fair the next day off-duty to ask her about it. Unsurprisingly, the woman insists there is nothing amiss, and offers to, or insists on, proving her point. That leads to the final stages of the story, which I will gate off as beyond the scope of this review.
A Taste of Honey Review
A Taste of Honey is a very short visual novel that should take most careful readers somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes to read. As promised by Mr. Warren, there are no choices or interactive elements, so it is a purely kinetic visual novel.
Text in A Taste of Honey is presented in ADV mode, which means it is confined to a text box, instead of NVL mode, wherein it would run from the top of the screen to the bottom. This is a curious decision for A Taste of Honey for two reasons. Firstly, in light of the fact that it is a literary short story in visual novel form, it could benefit from showing more text on screen at one time. Secondly, to the extent which ADV mode has the advantage of making character sprites and backgrounds more visible and making it easier to distinguish speakers, the former would not be a major issue given the novel’s minimalist production values (described below) and the latter would not be an issue because the speaker is clear without name tags. While the piece works in ADV mode, I suspect Mr. Warren opted for ADV mode because the visual novels he notes having read prior to undertaking A Taste of Honey were written in ADV mode (he made specific reference to Narcissu only showing small amounts of text on screen) and Ren’Py generally favors ADV mode out of the box (that is the case today and it may have been even more the case in 2009). However, while there are some technical reasons for favoring NVL for adapting a short story, I will note, as I discuss below, that Mr. Warren implemented a few visual effects that took advantage of confining the text to a box.
The novel uses photographic backgrounds which Mr. Warren said came from public domain sources. Although A Taste of Honey is an American-made English-language visual novel written in Ren’Py, Mr. Warren’s use of photographic backgrounds reminded me of many of the NScripter Japanese visual novels from earlier in the decade – see e.g., The Letter and Shooting Star Hill. While photographic backgrounds were common in many artisanal freeware visual novels of the era, Mr. Warren attempted to make things interesting by layering smaller public domain images on top of the main background. For example, early in the novel he does this to give the effect of the photographer protagonist capturing scenes at the local county fair he is documenting or to show of the wares of the honey saleswoman (this would not have worked as well with an NVL text configuration). While the collage effect give off the appearance of being a makeshift solution, I found it charming and thought it worked well in the context of the script.
The novel distinguishes itself from the most minimal visual efforts with a single character sprite. Mr. Warren received assistance from a talented artist named Lonnie Brandt (“Vatina”) for a character sprite for the honey saleswoman at the county fair. I say talented because it is a good sprite. The events of the story are set in motion because the view-point protagonist, by his own admission, finds the honey saleswoman/beekeeper lady to be pretty, at one point noting to himself “those eyes, and that maddening fragrance…” In light of the fact that the beekeeper being pretty is relevant to the story, giving her a sprite puts pressure on the novel to depict her as being pretty. While the sprite errs on the simple side, I dare say that Vatina fulfilled the objective.
The honey beekeeper matches the short story’s description of her and she comes with two sprites – one in a yellow sundress and wide-brimmed hat at her honey stand and another in a white dress at a different location. Between the two sprites, the woman has a combined 11 expressions (but only one pose). There is a third sprite but I will set that aside as being beyond the scope of the instant review.
The novel has six pieces of background music and two sound effects (camera shutter and buzzing bees). The music selection is strong and fits the piece well, with the best of the songs being the opening piece that plays in the first instance during the first scene.
Mr. Warren did well in terms of aesthetics given his limited time and resources, and the well-drawn sprites of the beekeeper add a strong visual dimension to the piece which sets it apart from more minimalist efforts (it has a bit more going on visually than a decent number of the al|together novels I reviewed). The music selection also helps establish the ambiance. But, even with the strong character sprite and music, this is a distinctly minimalist production. There is at least one scene late in the novel where doing more to show a certain movement and action would have benefited the piece – the urgency of the dialogue and the visuals did not match up. But for what it is, I think it is a solid-enough looking piece that was in line with the spirit of some of many of the small freeware visual novel productions of the 2000s.
As I noted earlier in this article, the text of A Taste of Honey follows the corresponding short story verbatim until the end, when the game adds a small number of lines as a conclusion that do not appear in the short story. Perhaps unsurprisingly in light of the fact that Mr. Warren is a published author whose work was recognized in speculative fiction circles (according to my research), the writing quality – from the narrator’s description of his surroundings to the dialogue – is significantly higher than what one would ordinarily expect for a non-commercial one-person hobby project visual novel from 2009.
An obvious point of comparison for A Taste of Honey from my extant visual novel review collection is the original 2010 version of The Dandelion Girl. Like A Taste of Honey, The Dandelion Girl was based on a science/speculative fiction short story, in that case Robert F. Young’s 1964 short story of the same name. Both were relatively minimalist productions with a single character sprite, although The Dandelion Girl, which used ONScripter-EN as its engine instead of Ren’Py, was a stronger production. However, in terms of script, and notwithstanding my opinion (likely uncontroversial) that The Dandelion Girl is a better story than A Taste of Honey, the latter has better prose in visual novel form, not least because A Taste of Honey is largely a one-to-one port of a technically well-written short story, while The Dandelion Girl visual novel took some liberties in adapting the original short story (to mixed effect).
I found the story – both in its original short story and visual novel forms – to be a fun read. I enjoyed its portrayal of a small fair and there are a few points, one where the view-point character tastes the beekeeper’s honey and another much later in the novel, that play with change and memory. Unsurprisingly given the genre – there is a touch of magic in the piece and an event, or perhaps best-put, outcome, at the end of the novels that could be interpreted in different ways, to the extent which one may want to take a stab at it. I will note that the one change the visual novel makes – specifically adding a short conversation between two characters right after the end of the underlying short story – does potentially change how one looks at the very end of the story, albeit the visual novel does its utmost to try to retain the sense of mystery from the original through the view-point character’s speculative equivocation. I do not think the visual novel’s addenda would have benefited the short story, but in visual novel form it does make it end a bit less abruptly – so I can understand what may have motivated Mr. Warren to extend the conclusion in his adaptation. I will submit – and I submit this being less well-versed in speculative fiction than visual novels – that while there are many obvious themes and threads in A Taste of Honey, I am not entirely sure what the main thing Mr. Warren wanted me to take from the story, which was not at all an issue in the case of The Dandelion Girl (regarding both the original and the visual novel adaptations).
Unlike The Dandelion Girl, where, notwithstanding my view that both the 2010 and 2016 versions of the visual novel were good visual novels, I took the position that people interested in the story should read the short story before the visual novel; I take no such position with respect to A Taste of Honey, since the visual novel is the short story with added visuals and music. The visual novel gives readers a visual for the beekeeper lady, which may change the effect of reading the short story without a visual, but its other visuals are more or less what I imagine one would have pictured from reading the short story alone. The only area where reading one or the other first could lead to an interpretive difference is the augmented ending, but it is easy to compare and see what the visual novel added after the short story’s end.
Conclusion
I have an interest in visual novel adaptations – both to and from the format. A Taste of Honey is a genuinely interesting adaptation in that we have a short story author create an almost one-to-one visual novel adaptation of his story, supplementing his original text with visuals, sound, and bite-sized chunks of text. Mr. Warren noted in his writing that he decided to experiment with A Taste of Honey because he thought that the story would translate well to the visual novel format. Despite using largely the same text as the original short story, it does not read as if it was something not intended for publication as a visual novel. I will submit that these sorts of straight adaptations will not work in the majority of cases, so I tip my hat to Mr. Warren for recognizing the potential of one of his published short stories after first coming across visual novels.
A Taste of Honey comes with my recommended sticker – with the only caveat being that its being based on a very old version of Ren’Py may cause issues for some set-ups, from there not being a MacOS version to its being locked to its default 800×600 resolution on WINE on my Linux set-up. People with no general interest in visual novels will find an adaptation of an American short speculative fiction story that was originally published before the author was familiar with visual novels. Visual novel fans will find a well-written short story, certainly in terms of technical writing level above the standard of your garden variety freeware visual novel by a non-writer, presented as a visual novel with a distinctly 2000s visual aesthetic. Moreover, the piece serves as an interesting experiment in demonstrating the power of the visual novel medium to add an audio-visual touch to an otherwise untouched short story. For people who may be interested in the short story, which remains freely available online, but who are unable or disinclined to run the visual novel, I can assure readers that save for a small addendum added to the end of the text in the visual novel (which arguably does not improve how the end of the story reads in any event), the texts are identical (insofar as I could tell, it is possible there is a tweak I may have read over). For short story readers, I suppose the screenshots in this review can serve as a visual aid.
A Parting Recommendation
On the off chance Mr. Warren himself happens upon my review, I would heartily recommend rebuilding A Taste of Honey in a modern version of Ren’Py and publishing it to Itch.io, perhaps as a submission to an appropriate Game Jam for better exposure. Re-releasing it in modern Ren’Py would ensure that people could easily discover it and run it on web, Windows, Linux, MacOS, and perhaps even Android. While I would also recommend re-sizing the assets to at least 1280 x 700 (800 x 600 is a bit rough on most modern monitors), simply re-publishing it to Itch.io and making it available on web and all of the current operating systems would make it much easier for people to discover and read a worthwhile 2009 visual novel.
