A YEAR OF SPRINGS

I'll be straight with you: I track decision trees for a living, and A Year of Springs has some of the most intentionally weighted choice design I've seen in a micro-budget visual novel. Each of the three chapters puts you in the seat of a different protagonist, and the branching is not decorative. In One Night, Hot Springs you play as Haru, a trans woman trying to work out something as mundane as which bath to use at a spa, and the dialogue options carry real social weight. In Last Day of Spring, perspective shifts to Erika, a former delinquent arranging a birthday spa day for Haru, where the 'positive' choices force her to confront systemic barriers rather than sidestep them. The third chapter, Spring Leaves No Flowers, hands control to Manami, a sheltered university student quietly reckoning with what friendship and romance actually mean to her. Each chapter runs to three or four distinct story paths, and the epilogue, exclusive to this compiled version, is locked behind finishing the chapters properly. So let's talk scope. A single playthrough of any one chapter can wrap in under 30 minutes, and at least one reviewer clocked a run of Spring Leaves No Flowers at five minutes flat. That is not a misprint. What you're buying is a short anthology, not a sprawling RPG. The replay loop exists only if you want all the endings, and the game gives you minimal signposting for which choices unlock which branch. A few players have noted they needed a guide to reach the epilogue, which is a fair criticism of the structure. Mechanically, there is nothing beyond read-and-select, no stat system, no timed inputs, no build variety. If you come here expecting mechanical depth, reset expectations immediately. What the game does offer is writing that is grounded enough to sting. The developer, npckc, built each chapter out of real frustration with real events in Japan, including legal debates around gender recognition, and that specificity shows in the dialogue. A doubt mechanic - where Haru's hesitant responses appear visually crossed out on screen - is a small design touch that communicates anxiety better than a paragraph of exposition. The soft pastel art style and gentle piano-driven soundtrack by sdhizumi complement the tone without trying to manipulate the player's emotions via swells and crescendos. It is restrained, and that restraint is the point. Who is this for? Primarily, players who want representation handled with care rather than as a checkbox. Community feedback across platforms is consistent: LGBTQ+ players, particularly trans and ace-spectrum players, report the characterisation as accurate and meaningful, sometimes uncomfortably so. But the game is also worth the time of anyone who does not personally identify with any of the protagonists, because Haru's social anxiety, Erika's frustration, and Manami's self-discovery are human problems with specific LGBTQ+ framings, not the other way around. The barrier to entry is essentially zero; the game ran its original three chapters as free jam releases before the remastered compilation arrived on Steam, and the learning curve is nonexistent. The ceiling is low, the floor is high, and the runtime is honest. If you can accept that this is closer to an illustrated short story collection than a game in the traditional sense, A Year of Springs delivers something most genre entries do not: consequences that feel real within a fictional space designed, explicitly, to be kind to the player.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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