I've played almost every single Chilla's Art game, and this is my review.
I generally enjoy these games, although I must admit I enjoyed the earlier Chilla's Art games more. The low-poly graphics and the heavy atmosphere was charming to me. Although there wasn't too much gameplay, I enjoyed them more as horror stories than the latest few.
Chilla's Art seems to be going in a new direction with their latest titles, UMIGARI and now Snowed Under. These games are much more gameplay focused, with upgrades and resource collection being a major element of their gameplay.
I enjoyed UMIGARI's story more than Snowed Under, but I enjoy Snowed Under's gameplay moreso. Although I will admit, the gameplay mechanics come at somewhat of a loss of atmosphere.
Snowed Under starts out in a typical horror setting. You, a defenseless girl, Miyuki, stuck in an abandoned restaurant during a snowstorm with the not-at-all obvious incel twist villain Toshi, who from the first moment seems infatuated with Miyuki. He also seems to have mysterious access to meat, and doesn't seem very concerned for Kai, our third character who disappeared at the start of the snowstorm.
These elements work well for the setup of a horror story. Chilla's Art delivers the atmosphere well, and the scary sounds we hear while digging through the snow, discovering bits and pieces of the town, on our way to the radio tower, adds to it a lot.
Where it begins to somewhat fall apart, is that humorously, if you spend even a little bit of time farming materials early on, Miyuki very quickly goes from a helpless frail girl, to some sort of overpowered superheroine. The upgrades to your snow shovel start out fairly logical, but not soon after turns it into a powerful machine that can rid the entire area of snow in a matter of moments, while consuming barely any stamina.
In fact, by the time the bath event took place, and I was asked to find snow for the bath, I hilariously had barely any snow in the entire area around the house, because I'd decimated all of it in my hunt for materials to upgrade my now ultimate snowblasting machine.
Miyuki is not only able to eradicate entire areas of snow in mere moments, by this point, she's also able to chop any tree in a single swing. I had over 100 cans of food, more wood than we'd ever need, and the ability to empty the entire map of snow in a matter of 20 minutes.
At this point, one wonders if Miyuki will return in Avengers: Doomsday.
The game's night-time arrives not based on time, but based on proximity to the radio tower. Which means when I had my fully upgraded snow machine, I was able to trigger night-time in a matter of less than a minute from when I started digging. I think the monster crawling through the snow would have been a lot scarier if it wasn't for the fact I had emptied the entire area of snow.
The monster is scary and effective. One of the better monsters in Chilla's Art. But of course, in classic horror fashion, the true monster is very human indeed. So let's talk about Toshi. I really loved his dialogue. It starts out with only small hints at his feelings for the protagonist, small moments of overbearingness, and as the days go by, he becomes more and more rude and possessive. He makes for an excellent villain. But sadly... it doesn't really work out that way.
Very early on in the game, Toshi is able to conjure up fresh meat out of nowhere. Paired with the fact that he seems certain that Kai, our other male companion, is dead, seems to suggest to us that Toshi killed him over jealousy and wanting Miyuki to himself, and that's where he got the meat.
But during the climax of the game, suddenly, Kai shows up. He kills Toshi, and then becomes the one chasing us. This felt very anti-climactic. We spent so many days with Toshi watching us sleep, getting aggressive in his dialogue, whining and whinging, like a proper misogynistic man-child villain, only for him to get killed off by a character we didn't get to have any interactions with at all. And then, suddenly, Kai, who has at this point had no reason to want us dead that we're aware of, takes Toshi's place for the final chase.
I cannot help but feel that this was a pretty late-in-development change. The game would have been better if Toshi had been allowed to be the villain towards the end. It would have felt more natural, as he was the one we were building up to.
I didn't get invested in the lore about the monster, the families, and the village. Perhaps because all of it plays third fiddle to our nightly interactions with Toshi, and our snow shoveling and upgrading. The monster, and her story, is not integrated into the gameplay, like previous Chilla's Art games. As a result, we are given little reason to care about her.
Overall it's a solid 6.5/10. I would say UMIGARI had far more solid storytelling, but Snowed Under was an entertaining horror story that I felt infested in. I also enjoyed the snow shovel upgrading a lot, although I do feel it came at a cost to the atmosphere. The early-game atmosphere of digging tunnels through the heavy snow and hearing scary noises was excellent. Sadly not very long-lasting.
I hope that Chilla's Art in their pursuing of this new style of more gameplay-heavy horror games, do not forget what made their earlier games successful. The stories, and the funny/scary/interesting characters we meet along the way.
