Free adventure game For Windows
If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers is a free horror adventure game for Windows. The game is set on a train boarded by a diverse group of four travellers. The four of them tell their personal stories in turn. You move each story along by selecting parts of the dialogue and clicking on specific areas of the room that the characters are in.
The pixelated art style and animation are incredibly detailed, so they don’t detract from the gameplay. If you enjoy dark adventure games, The Last of Us and Northbury Grove are also worth downloading.
Story structure
If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers is a narrative-driven, point-and-click game in which you interact with the stories of four different characters. As you progress through each story, there's nothing to suggest that they’re connected in any way. Indeed, it appears that all they have in common is their dark stories.
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Controls
You use the mouse to navigate and interact with the game. It's the left-click that performs all actions, while right-clicking cancels the action.
On the keyboard, the Escape key pauses the game and brings up the options menu. Pressing Alt + Enter together toggles the full-screen mode.
Music
To support the 1920s setting for the story, developer Laura Hunt has used period music dating from the late 19th century and early 20th century. This proves to be highly effective in creating an authentic atmosphere.
Gameplay
The gameplay is mainly narrative-driven, but within that, you’ll have opportunities to guide the stories by selecting dialogue. At various points, you’ll also have to solve puzzles to progress.
Head out into the horror
Many pixel-style games tend to be cartoonish or rely on large pixels, but If On A Winter's Night, Four Travelers uses small pixels to add more detail to the graphics and animations. It's a huge contributory factor to the atmosphere of the game. Without risking spoilers, we're duty-bound to mention that the game deals with themes such as homophobia, murder, suicide, mental illness and racism.
For a free game, it's surprisingly long, taking around an hour and a half to complete. In our view, it's well worth taking the time, preferably in a single session, to see how it ends.
