[Episode 1] - Snow White
Ever since I was young, I liked raising simulation games.
There were countless genres of games in the world, so why raising simulations in particular? Even when I thought about it, there wasn’t any grand reason. I simply liked seeing characters grow through my own hands.
So when it came to raising simulation games, I didn’t discriminate by genre.
From egg-shaped games sold at stationery stores to the latest releases. Having sampled this and that since I was a kid, I had somehow become the ultimate mutt who went weak in the knees for any raising simulation game.
However, raising simulation games were not exactly a popular genre, and perhaps because I had spent so long playing nothing but the same kind of game, even the new releases that appeared now and then had begun to feel stale and tiresome.
Just as I was starting to wonder if it was time to move on from the raising simulation genre and try other games, an indie game released without a sound caught my eye.
[Snow White Princess]
Translated literally, it was simply “Snow White Princess.”
This new title, with gameplay reminiscent of Princess Maker, the origin of raising simulation games, was a “child-rearing simulation game” developed by an overseas indie game company.
The game’s opening story was simple.
Set in a medieval fantasy world based on the fairy tale “Snow White,” the player became a “king who had lost his queen” and raised the “young princess” who had been left all alone.
Naturally, there was no Korean language support, and perhaps because word had not spread much after its release, there were no domestic sites where I could find information either.
The game’s reviews being “Mostly Negative” bothered me, but the price was cheap and the illustrations were cute, so I thought, Why not give it a try?
They said there were dozens of endings in total, and I had no other games worth playing anyway. With the casual thought, “If it’s not fun, I’ll refund it,” I pressed the purchase button.
And just like that, I ended up falling absurdly deep into this game.
*
“Ah... this is driving me insane. No wonder the reviews are negative...”
[BAD END]
Looking at the red letters displayed on the monitor, I scratched my head in irritation. How many times had it been now? How many times had I seen those words, [BAD END]?
[Snow White Princess]
In other words, this game, “Snow White Princess,” was a painful game in many ways.
Usually, a “child-rearing simulation game” is a game where you raise your daughter by teaching her, having her work part-time jobs, going on adventures together, and experiencing various “events.”
Depending on how the player raises the daughter, she may become an outstanding person, an ordinary person, or perhaps even a villain. Watching your grown-up daughter and feeling healed by it—that is the usual “child-rearing simulation game.”
I had played Snow White Princess expecting that as well, but...
This damn “Snow White Princess” was completely different.
It wasn’t a child-rearing simulation game. It was a roguelike game wearing the skin of a child-rearing simulation game. And a roguelike game that tormented the player to a vicious degree, at that.
“...She died again.”
True to the game’s title, “Snow White Princess,” there was one villain in this game whom everyone knew. A madwoman who stared into a mirror and talked to herself, who was jealous of the young princess’s beauty.
Snow White’s stepmother, and the woman called the Mirror Witch in the story.
“Vivian Liliensol.”
She was the root of all evil that had turned this child-rearing simulation game into a roguelike. It was shocking enough that a child-rearing simulation game had endings where the child died, but there weren’t just one or two of them.
Sometimes she died after eating poison, sometimes she died from a curse, and sometimes she died after being stabbed in her sleep. Just among the death endings I had seen, there were easily more than twenty.
For ordinary people, after seeing a few bad endings, it would have been normal to either delete the game or leave a long hate comment on the game site. But I was a little different.
A happy ending I had seen by pure chance, thanks to sheer luck, made it impossible for me to leave this game behind. After seeing the happy future of the daughter who had grown up after overcoming all kinds of hardships, I...
had resolved to collect every happy ending.
It was not at all easy. Raising her in this game did not consist merely of the daughter’s stat parameters. There were extreme luck-based elements. Unless the heavens helped, there could be no happy future for the daughter.
And the luck-based elements alone weren’t all. One mistaken choice could kill the daughter I had painstakingly raised for dozens of hours. This game required meticulous choice management.
And for a game with no save function, it was vicious enough to keep the number of times my daughter had died stored at the edge of the screen. Every time that number went up, I clicked my tongue at the developer’s cruelty.
The number at the edge of the screen pointed to 120.
The number of happy endings I had seen was only 5. Thinking that I couldn’t endure it any longer, I abandoned my pride and searched the internet for a guide.
However, as befitted an unpopular foreign indie game, there was no information about this game on Korean sites. Even if something appeared in the search results, it was only posts by people badly burned by the game, filled with heaps of curses directed at the developer.
There weren’t many overseas users either. The overseas wiki listed various endings, but it was mostly ending spoilers for people who had given up without seeing them.
Thinking that the daughter’s happy endings were meaningless unless I saw them myself, I stopped looking for guides after that.
The number at the edge of the screen pointed to 210.
The number of happy endings I had seen had increased to 15. By now, I could make it to the middle portion without my daughter dying, but the further I got into the late game, the more intense the witch’s interference became.
Sometimes I would get an absurd bad ending and feel so exhausted that I didn’t want to play anymore, but when I looked at the empty “True Ending Achievement” slot in the achievement list, I resumed raising her.
Even if seeing every happy ending was impossible, shouldn’t I at least see the true ending?
“Today in the morning, I’ll send her to work part-time in the kitchen to build stamina, then make up for the elegance she loses from kitchen work with lessons... And to keep puberty from coming too early, I have to let her rest one day out of every five... Good.”
The more I played, the more there was to dig into. Numerous characters and numerous occupations. Not only child-rearing, but farming, cooking, fishing, raising horses, horse racing, combat, and so on... There was also quite a bit of enjoyable daily-life content.
If not for the witch’s existence, this game might have received fairly high praise. To the point where I thought that, the more I played, the more this game properly showed the aspects of a “child-rearing simulation game.”
“Phew....”
And so, the number at the edge of the screen pointed to 340.
[True Ending]
Snow White, wearing a golden crown, ascended the throne.
Having taken the throne, Snow White looked down with a bitter smile. How could she not smile? The witch who had tormented her all this time was writhing in agony beneath her.
Clack! Clatter! Clack!
The witch laughed.
She laughed while shedding tears, while writhing in torment.
Wearing red-hot iron shoes, the witch danced beautifully at the new queen’s succession ceremony. Beautiful and elegant to the very end. In that way, the witch adorned the succession ceremony with a beautiful dance and met the end of her life.
“Phew...”
The Snow White I had raised becoming queen.
That was the true ending of this game. Well, I had expected it, and thinking that it was a decent ending in its own way, I found myself recalling all the hardships I had gone through until now and tears came to my eyes.
How much had I suffered to see this ending? A child-rearing simulation game mixed with roguelike elements. Would there ever be another game like this in my life?
When the true ending finished, a small system window appeared at the bottom of the screen. [Queen Ending]. Along with the system alert that I had seen the true ending, I clicked the small system window.
[Queen Ending].
Acquired by only 0.1% of all players.
“I knew it...”
0.1%. I didn’t know how many players there were in total, but it definitely couldn’t be a large number. Most people would taste the witch’s bitterness early on and quit on the spot.
Feeling satisfied, I closed the game window and looked for a guide for the first time in a while. Now that I had seen the true ending, I was tired, so I figured it would be fine to skim the other endings through spoilers.
“Academy teacher ending... saw that. Chef ending... saw that. Ending where she marries the coachman’s son... saw that.”
Looking at the various endings written in English on the overseas wiki, I scrolled down. Was it because I had played so much? Most of them were endings I had already seen.
Then, as I scrolled down with an indifferent expression, I found an ending that even I, who had burned over a thousand hours on this game, had never seen.
“Witch ending... Does that mean a witch ending?”
I tilted my head without realizing it.
A witch ending? Did that mean there was an ending where the princess could become a witch? Since I had never once gotten involved with the witch, I had never even imagined that an ending like this existed.
What on earth kind of ending was this? My curiosity wouldn’t stop. No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t even begin to guess what kind of story this ending would have.
Just as I was about to click the post out of curiosity,
for some reason, I felt my pride get slightly wounded.
I was the one who had seen the true ending of this trash game, so was relying on some overseas wiki just because I hadn’t seen one other ending really the right answer?
No. It wasn’t. Absolutely not.
The fact that it was written on the wiki meant that someone else had seen the witch ending and recorded it there. In that case, there was not a single reason I couldn’t see that ending myself.
A pointless fighting spirit blazed up inside me.
Now that I had seen the true ending, there was nothing left for me to fear. At this point, I even began to think I should get every single achievement.
‘...Let’s sleep first and think about it. It’s already 3 a.m., isn’t it?’
Feeling like I would end up pulling an all-nighter if I kept going, I hurriedly turned off the computer and lay down in bed. No matter how enjoyable the game was, it wasn’t to the point where I would give up going to work for it.
‘...If it’s the witch ending, I’ll probably have to actively approach the witch, right..? No, but how am I supposed to approach a witch who keeps trying to kill me..?’
As I closed my eyes while thinking about how to see the witch ending, I slowly sank into sleep under the wave of drowsiness. Thinking that if I just went to work tomorrow, it would be the weekend, so I would burn the weekend away with the game...
.......Without even dreaming that it would be the last day of my life as a man.