Snowsquall Grip

A very cold, thawed and flawed horror experience. Level design is pretty good, it gives you the freedom to explore each area in any order and barely any invisible walls to stop your exploration which is always welcome. However using fire to help heat yourself up is a cool idea, but it happens abit too quickly and abit much to where it starts to become repetitive and gets in the way of solving puzzles. The visuals look great, snow details are well done on the props/items aswell as the sound design which is great. It feels immersive at times with how both parts are very well done. Solving puzzles is the main part of the game and it's okay i wish you could solve them in any order as that's what i was expecting from the level design. Using physics objects to solve puzzles similar to Half Life 2 is always welcome though grabbing items is very clunky, sometimes you need to find that sweet spot in order to grab it and juggling between that + needing to heat yourself up can be annoying as it feels like it's more the games fault rather than your own. The puzzles themselves are decent, i really liked the gravestone one where you bring it to a fireplace to melt the snow revealing a number but that was the only one that stood out making it feel creative while the others felt sorta generic as in bring item to this area to open a door. The final puzzle with the numbers in the base i just looked up a guide since i felt it was very unclear and confusing on how to solve it. The ending isn't very good at all, the boss itself runs faster than you at points and the games clunky/floatt movement with restricted aiming just doesn't feel satisfying or even rewarding after it's done and you need to do this fight twice for both endings which leaves a bad taste at the end. Overall it's a short and interesting experience, if all the flaws mentioned were fixed up then you'd have a great game here, they've done a solid job so far and should continue making more as each project is a learning experience and i hope to see more from VidyGames!