Review - A Good Snowman is Hard to BuildBy Jon Evans
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Developers; Alan Hazelden & Benjamin Davis
Publisher; Draknek Formats; PC, Mac (format reviewed), Linux Release Date; Out now |
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A Good Snowman is Hard to Build is an adorable puzzle game based around a concept similar to the Tower Of Hanoi, but with the added challenge of an area of two dimensional space to work in. It is a pure and simple game, but with an utterly addictive central concept that hits the ‘one-more-go’ addictive feedback loop based on very good game design.
You play the part of ‘Monster’, a little black lump on legs who crunches its way through its snow-filled garden, making snowmen. The garden is, essentially, a simple maze of quadrangles, populated with potted plants, wooden picnic tables and benches, but with a layer of snow in each. Also in each are snowballs dotted around, with various combinations of sizes which present your challenge. Your aim is to pile these snowballs on top of each other, to create snowmen, all with individual looks and names. The trick to this, however, is the order and route of your snowballs. |
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Pushing the snowball along the snowy ground causes the snowball to increase in size. Your snowman must be built using three different snowballs, one large, one medium and one small, in the traditional Christmas Card manner. The challenge here is in moving your snowballs to correct positions around each other to allow this to happen. Much like the Tower of Hanoi, you cannot place a larger snowball upon the smaller one. This takes careful planning and practice to ensure success. Luckily, you have controls similar to molecular build-em-up, Sokobond, (another great puzzle game from Alan Hazelden, who co-created a Good Snowman) where you can undo your last action or reset progress back to the start, for that particular area in which you are working. You can also use the empty tracks left by the snowballs to avoid increasing the size of the particular one you are rolling.
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Each area you work in has a variety of obstacles and snowball sizes shapes to further scale up the challenge, each time you build a snowman, a gate opens in a hedge allowing you to explore further. The game mechanic is excellent with no one area the same as the previous, and with a great depth and variety to the solutions you can use. Be wary though; I accidentally wandered back into a previous solved quadrangle and pressed reset by mistake, losing my progress in that area. Despite this it was quite useful to discover, that I solved it more quickly the second time round, but also more efficiently, proving not only was I learning new strategies as I progressed, but also that there was more than one solution for each area. One particular skill I noted I had gained was understanding, spatially, the limitations I had placed on me by the boundaries of the walls and the obstacles therein. I began to be able to plan multiple steps ahead, like strategising in Chess, and It gave me a warm glow to realise this.
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Moving away from the smug self-reflection, it is essential to point out the charm of this game. Benjamin Davis’ graphical design is beautiful, presenting everything in a friendly, soft-edged cartoony way. There are also sweet little touches in the way that Monster interacts with its environment. Push it one way with the directional keys and it will clumsily lean into the hedge with a rustle of foliage. Push it near a bench and it will sit down for 40 winks. Walk it past a potted plant and it will tweak the leaves, almost as if it was inspecting it like a gardener checks on the growth of his plot. Bring it close to a complete snowman, and it will hug him warmly. To me this created an emergent narrative within the game. I felt monster was lonely and it was populating its world with frozen friends to keep it company. This seemed at odds with the objective, however, which was to unlock gates and get out of the maze, almost as if it was trapped. Couple this with the calm, lilting soundtrack from Ryan Roth and the atmospheric nature-filled sound effects, it makes for a fun and therapeutic experience with satisfying challenge.
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Towards the end of the game, the challenge increased, to the point where the final quadrangle took me a couple of hours to solve. Some players may find this extreme, however the feeling of accomplishment when solving it was palpable, and it is worth avoiding walkthroughs and lets play videos when playing A Good Snowman, to ensure you get the optimum experience. There are a few achievements to unlock while playing too, which reward exploration and discovery, and you can also reset your gameplay if you want to play it multiple times.
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A Good Snowman is Hard to Build is a beautiful and charming puzzler, with a deep and satisfying gameplay experience. It has the capability for many replays, and also speed runs, and is certainly a must have for fans of this genre. Most importantly in an industry filled with games where you shoot people in the face, it lets you hug a snowman.
Game supplied by Draknek
Images reproduced by permission of Draknek
Images reproduced by permission of Draknek
