A wintery atmosphere has always served as a beautiful and tonally harmonious setting for a tale of mystery and isolation. There is certainly an almost romantic serenity in the stillness of the snow, often intermingled with chords of a slightly melancholic and haunting character.
This story of a man and his doll creations residing in a somewhat desolate and vaguely disquieting village seems to use the insinuations of a winter environment to great effect. I appreciate the pacing of this short story and I believe that it successfully demonstrates how effective narratives, especially in the psychological horror genre, need not always rely upon momentous twists to culminate them. Rather, it beautifully establishes a tenor of unease beneath that snowy veil of placidity, while minor details and hints, like falling snow, slowly accumulate. Plots of this character afford continual speculation and reformulation of theories as new information is presented, and though some impression of the ending can be predicted, its exact nature remains obfuscated until the final moments.
I’ve always found the image of a pinned butterfly to be a striking example of a visual contradiction—a living creature symbolically representing the transience of beauty, change, or a metamorphosis is now frozen in time, motionless and preserved. To me, this game wonderfully portrays an obsession with distorting this metaphorical quality of a butterfly while simultaneously having the protagonist also corrupt living, aging people into something unnatural and perverse. Excellent job on the part of the developers overall.