Chilled Out, Checked Out: A Review of Above the Snow
- Antal Bokor
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
I love management games, and a part of me always has. Since my early days playing games like SimCity and RollerCoaster Tycoon, I’ve had a taste for video game management. Games like Frostpunk turned resource management into life-and-death affairs—and I’m done with intense decisions that can lead to a cascade of death and failure. I’d rather have something a little more cozy. So I was excited when I heard about Above the Snow. It’s a resource management game that doesn’t make it feel like what you’re managing is going to fall apart at any moment. On top of that, it’s narrative-rich—something I haven’t really experienced in a game aimed towards resource management. It’s like a wish come true that I didn’t even know I had—but even so, the monkey’s paw curls a hairy finger, because Above the Snow is boring.
You might say, “Of course it’s boring.” With Steam store tags like “cozy” and “story-rich,” you expect a more laid-back game that doesn’t punish you harshly for your mistakes. And that’s exactly true of Above the Snow. With three difficulty levels, you can choose to make the experience more or less punishing, but even so, Above the Snow isn’t about punishing failure. There’s even a tooltip that pops up explaining that most holes can be dug out of.
Of course, with less pressure comes lower stakes. Lower stakes aren’t bad by themselves, but there should be something else that drives interest. What was left is its narrative-heavy approach and its game mechanics—neither of which held my interest. The story isn’t bad on the surface, but it felt too much like a never-ending tutorial. On one hand, that’s excellent: like most management games, Above the Snow has a complicated UI, a chunk of mechanics to learn, and different resources to, you know, manage.
The story eases you through this, telling you what to do and when. That doesn’t mean you don’t have the option to pursue other tasks or goals, but it still makes the game feel like a more on-rails experience than I’m used to for a management sim. If you’re someone who doesn’t like resource management games because you get the feeling that there are too many levels and switches to learn to flip, Above the Snow is a great way to ease yourself into the genre.
The story does have a whole range of interesting characters that show up as you accomplish tasks and complete chapters. Not only do these characters have their own personalities, but they also have their own stats that make them better suited for some tasks than others. But since there is little obligation to min/max with how forgiving Above the Snow can be, it often doesn’t hurt to use a less-than-optimal character for a specific task.
As with most resource management games, your goal is to keep everything running smoothly and, ideally, make your guests happy. There are a few gauges you have to keep an eye on as you renovate your winter lodge. It has to be a video game trope at this point, but you get the chance to renovate a lodge that has fallen into disrepair, unlocking rooms and more of the surrounding grounds as you seek to expand amenities and services, all in support of alpinists hoping to explore the surrounding mountains. That means they have to have enough entertainment, food, and places to sleep—among other needs. They also need access to those mountains, meaning you need to set up trails and other access points like ski lifts. Sometimes Above the Snow can feel more like The Sims than a resource management game as you deal with guest problems that never feel too pressing, even when you have to mount the occasional rescue to save stranded mountaineers.
Most resource management games live and die by their UI, and I had a serious love/hate relationship with Above the Snow’s UI. On one hand, it’s crisp, clean, and very attractive. It matches the game’s hand-drawn aesthetic and is organized in a logical way. On the other hand, it’s clunky and buggy.
Even if the UI is logically organized, it’s still awfully complicated, requiring users to make multiple menu clicks just to assign characters to simple tasks. There are other UI quirks, too. For example, if you’re on a map and want to transition to another map view, you have to manually close whatever window you have open first, instead of it auto-closing.
Perhaps I’d be complaining if you could change the view without closing the window, but it feels tedious here. There are also alert pop-ups, but you have to search for the problem yourself; clicking on the notification doesn’t bring you to the issue it's warning you about. I even ran into a few UI bugs that blocked me from being able to access options to progress the story, requiring me to figure out some workarounds.
If you like the idea of a resource management game that isn’t too punishing but want to ditch the story, you can play Endless Mode. The whole idea behind this mode is to focus purely on building the best winter vacation resort you can. You start with three random characters with their own stats, and each time you have a reputation increase, you’re given a new crew member. While Endless Mode doesn’t fix the problems with the clunky UI, I actually preferred it over the story-driven campaign—but only just.
I really wanted to like Above the Snow more, but it didn’t quite click with me, and I’m still torn. I did love the cozy aspect, but it feels like a lot of the resource management stuff is a bit silly when it’s hard to have true scarcity unless you’re making absolutely terrible decisions. Above the Snow has some great ideas going for it, but when you take away everything that makes it unique, you’re left with a resource management game that is a bit mediocre, and even a little boring.