I ride the train into Chicago every weekday. Most days, you can find me listening to one of my favorite podcasts, or getting some work done while I listen to music, but other times, I just want to enjoy a good game. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been playing a wonderful game called A Good Snowman is Hard to Build that is trivial to learn, but full of challenging puzzles, and tremendously charming.
The premise of Snowman is simple. You are a little black creature shaped like a gumdrop with arms and legs who wanders from garden to garden in a hedge maze building snowmen. Sounds simple, right? Conceptually yes, but in practice, many of Snowman’s puzzles by Alan Hazelden are devilishly difficult.
You build a snowman, as you would expect, by stacking three snowballs – a big one on bottom, a medium-sized one in the middle and a smaller one on top. At the outset of the game, there are a few little animations to familiarize you with the snowman-building gestures, but the goal is so clear from the context that the animations are really hints more than a tutorial. It reminds me of the opening levels of Alto’s Adventure and is an approach I like. Too often, game tutorials are tedious and feel like work.
While the mechanics of Snowman are simple, the gameplay can be surprisingly complex. As the creature, you push snowballs around a series of gardens laid out in a grid. You can only push snowballs forward – there is no pulling backward allowed. If you push a snowball into a corner or against a wall, for instance, that’s where it must stay.
There are a surprising number of obstacles. The obvious ones are the pots, plants, benches and hedges that make up the landscape of the game. But snowballs also become obstacles if you lay them out in a pattern that limits your movement around the garden. Even the snow itself can be a sort of obstacle. Push a snowball across too much snow and you can end up with large snowballs that cannot be stacked on top of one another.
But the gameplay is just a small part of what makes Snowman so engaging. The art and music play equally large roles. This game is gorgeous. The little creature you navigate around the hedge maze has lots of personality for a faceless, gumdrop-shaped creature. It reminds me a little of Ida, the expressionless character in Monument Valley. Much of that comes down to the playful artwork of Benjamin Davis and his whimsical animations. When you pause to think about a puzzle, the creature waves to you. If you think your creature is tired you can sit it down on a bench for a rest. Complete a snowman and it comes to life with a face, arms, buttons and a fun hat.
The music and sound effects also add a lot to the feel of Snowman. There is no dialogue. When you enter early garden levels you are greeted with the sound of wind, and haunting and vaguely melancholy music by Ryan Roth. As you complete snowmen, the music takes on a happier, more hopeful tone. Snowman’s soundtrack, which I listened to on repeat as I wrote this, is available to stream or buy on Bandcamp.
My primary complaint with Snowman is that it doesn’t sync to multiple devices. Snowman uses Game Center to catalogue achievements unlocked throughout the game, but that’s all. I started Snowman on my iPhone while commuting, but at home, I wanted to use my iPad where the art and music would really shine. Unfortunately, my iPhone is where most of my progress is, so I mostly stuck to playing on it. The lack of sync in iOS games is all too common these days and is a trend I would like to see reversed.
Snowman has a couple of simple settings that let you adjust the volume of the music and sound effects independently. I tried to play music and other audio sources in the background while playing Snowman, but the game crashed every time, so I don’t recommend trying this yourself. This should be fixed, but it’s not a deal-breaker for me because I enjoy the game’s soundtrack so much.
My greatest wish for Snowman is for an Apple TV version. Snowman’s simple game mechanics and grid-based map seem a natural for Apple TV’s Focus Engine. The art and music would look and sound fantastic on a big screen with good speakers.
My favorite games on iOS are puzzle games with simple mechanics, and great artwork and music like Alto’s Adventure, Monument Valley and Space Age. I also prefer paid-up-front games. Snowman fits nicely into that list for me with artwork and a soundtrack that are full of charm and challenging puzzles that keep me coming back for more. If you are looking for a good game to get you through the winter, A Good Snowman is Hard to Build is a terrific option. It makes me almost enjoy the long Chicago winter.
A Good Snowman is Hard to Build is available on the App Store, as well as other platforms.
