Review: The Window Box

Sundew Studios’ The Window Box is a visual novel about the gendered struggles women often face. It centers on Elsa, a beautiful former actress, and her somewhat estranged friends whom she has gathered for a long overdue get together to catch up on their lives since graduating from university. They get more than they bargained for when an impromptu storm leaves them trapped in the house with each other and their problems.

The cast is diverse, featuring majority women of color and two explicitly queer women. Each of the five embodies a kind of trope about women or relationships, but through sequences of exploration into their lives and personalities, they become real people and also find catharsis for the issues they’ve been dealing with.

This exploration comes by way of different sets of puzzles that each of the characters has to work through in their own special scenes of magical realism. The scenes themselves are charming and inventive, utilizing the lovely, paper doll-style art to evoke whimsical situations where the women are forced to confront the issues that have been gnawing at them. But the puzzles required to navigate these situations fall short of the settings.

Most are fine, though nothing too inventive, clicking various objects in a room in the correct order, stuff like that. But others that require more logic and utilization of clues are presented with little to no direction, which can be incredibly frustrating. I got lucky with one of Margot’s puzzles just by randomly clicking around, and had to enlist the help of our Discord server to figure out one of Sophie’s. Even with their help it still took a solid ten minutes or so for us to figure out what I was supposed to be doing. Another of Sophie’s puzzles had a bug that was almost game-breaking for me, but it finally settled down enough to solve it and move on.

These glitches and struggles with the puzzles are unfortunate, but it’s worth getting past them to see how the story plays out. The story sections for Elsa’s friends provide critique of modern perceptions of womanhood, femininity, relationships, and mental illness in a way that is self-reflective and ultimately positive and empowering–which is necessary for the conclusion of Elsa’s tale.

There are hints of darker happenings right from the start. In the opening scene, Elsa is speaking with an unknown person or thing, a stand-in for the player to make choices. As you direct the conversation, it becomes apparent that Elsa has some scathing feelings about what it means to be a woman, and is clearly dealing with something sinister. The game continues to pull on these unsettling threads as it goes on. Between each character sequence, there are interludes where more dreamlike scenes explain and contextualize what’s been going on with Elsa over the past five years. These scenes become increasingly biting and heart wrenching as they go on, until the truth of what’s happening is fully revealed.

The game issues a content warning for its themes on Steam, and I’ll reiterate them because it’s important to know before going in: without getting into spoilers, The Window Box deals fairly heavily in gaslighting, manipulation, and emotional and implied physical abuse. None of these are shown graphically and are handled well, but they appear nevertheless. But this game isn’t about these things, or at least not completely.

Above all else, this is a story of women finding a space to work through their frustrations, pain, and losses, becoming stronger and more capable through that, and coming together to help a friend who is in dire need. It highlights the ways in which women are kept down and hurt, and how they can hurt each other as well, through fairly straight forward but effective storytelling, and emphasizes what friendship between women can do if given the space to connect and thrive.

Through its use of beautiful, expressive art, and simple but direct storytelling, The Window Box is a journey worth experiencing, despite its glitches. It’s available on Steam for $12.99.

All images courtesy of Sundew Studios. Code for this game was provided by the developer