[Review] Frozen Essence by Unbroken Hours

 

Genre: Otome, Fantasy
Features:
- 16 different endings
- 90+ CGs
- Original sound track (22 tracks)
- 4 main bachelors and a hidden character
- Approximately 40-60 minutes per path
Price: Free


From Unbroken Hours:

In a world balanced by essence, you play as a girl unsealed from her crystal prison. Without a memory and with dark powers feared by many, will she get by? Will she find love? With the guidance and protection from the oracle within her realm, her journey begin.

This is an otome visual novel, an interactive story with choices that affect the ending. You start off inside your realm with a few bodyguards to protect you. Whatever you decide to do, you may find love, or it'll end differently. There are four guys you may obtain as well as a hidden character.

So, it’s another VN doujin created by Ren’py, with VERY GOOD story, and completely FREE, with ENGLISH language. Although it’s quite short compared with my usual games, it’s understandable. At first I didn’t have my expectation high because it’s “only” a free english VN. But believe me, I change my mind after first 15 minutes of playing.

If you want to play it, just go to here and here for a walkthrough. There are total six routes, one for each main bachelors and one for lonesome route. Each route has at least two end, Light and Dark (Except for Air Path that has three ending including bad end and Life Path that has five endings including True end). Based on yourself, you can think Dark end as bad end/sad end/good end and Light End as good/best ed (I personally like Varian’s and hidden chara’s dark end).

My suggestion route of playing:
Death Route (Mina’s lone route) > Air Route > Earth Route > Fire Route > Life Route > Water Route (Hidden Character’s route).
By that order, the mystery revealed little by little, while Water Route provide you spoiler for ALL route and revealed the main mystery of Frozen Essence. Actually, Air Route and Earth route revealed same amount of mystery, but since (in my opinion) Earth Route’s story is better, so I think playing it after Air will be better.

And, my favorite route is Water Route, not only because it’s the “truth” route, but also because it has the most touching story (and also there is a yandere here.... in dark ending). Second fav is Earth Route, which I think is quite good and also touching in some ways.

My favorite chara, in order from more to less: hidden chara > Varian > Caius > Rune > Aurelius. You can see that I really fell in with the hidden chara.....
BGMs are pretty good, and fit the mood. I can’t say much about graphic, since it’s doujin free, and I can’t say it good. But at least it’s better than other english-language doujin I’ve played before. My suggestion? Go and download it now, it’s only about 100 Mbs in rar format.