Snowémon Ho Ho Ho!

I played Snowémon Ho Ho Ho! with ClubFloyd. It’s a cozy, seasonal game that encourages exploration and curiosity rather than pressure or difficulty.

The writing is playful and delivered with a blizzard of puns. The puzzles are light and approachable. Overall, the experience is warm, festive, and charming. It's a fun holiday piece to enjoy at a relaxed pace, especially if you’re looking for whimsy, kindness, and a bit of seasonal cheer.

On a final note, this was written as a kind of “Speed IF,” inspired by a recent ClubFloyd conversation where we lamented that we no longer do New Year’s Speed IFs. The game was written in a couple of days. You’ll find some rough edges, as is to be expected for a game crafted in such a short time frame.

I miss Taleslinger's old New Year's Day SpeedIF comps, so it's glad to see something filling the void after a few years absence, and I sort of am sad I didn't make it to ClubFloyd, since Snowkemon more than fills that void. And I think this game does more than that. Now I'm not a big Pokemon fan, and in fact I even got a lot lost with the references in Pogoman Go, but here we have a nice tiny little game where it's pretty clear what you're supposed to do, and it uses a parser nicely, with a few standard verbs to break up too much of a "dry goods" feel. The items and NPCs are delightfully nonsensical, yet with a bit of thought, it's pretty clear who gets what item.

The NPCs are all non-canonical Pokemons that haven't grown yet. You can find an item which helps. They are scattered around the map, though some only appear once you've solved other puzzles. There's also scenery to SEARCH or do other things with, which lets you find a present. Then you can pretty much brute force your way around the game map, which is a symmetrical snowflake with passages 1 and 2 squares out of each of the 8 main directions from the center, where you start. (The inner ring is also connected, so there's a lot less backtracking.) If my words muddle you, just look at the handy cover art, which will not. It's seful and attractiive!

The author mentions in the CREDITS that they really aren't well equated with pokémon, and neither am I, but they still give what's important, and maybe if they were more acquainted, they might not have gone with the NPC puns. There are references to a lot of other myths or stories, some Christmas and some not (a schneezer becomes an Ebenschneezer, for instance.) So it's one of those fun holiday game experiences where you can't lose. Well, you can, but you have to try and invoke a Christmas movie, and I won't say more other than the joke's been done before and I don't care and neither will you. It's well placed.

Snowkemon is well laid out and I can see myself replaying it to get through faster--the organized map makes it easier to bounce around wondering whom to give what. It's a really nice bit of creativity. I got spun around twice trying to go too fast: once when I didn't interact with some scenery, and again at the end where I tried too hard to focus on the chair in the final room. I guess that's one problem with dry goods games, where if the author goes for a little variety to break up monotony, people like me who charge through will hit a wall a bit. We completely ignore the nice scenery the author put into it. And we deserve the slight inconvenience.

Given that it's a SpeedIF, it doesn't have a lot of idiot-proofing amenities, but I think if the author chose, there'd be a lot of cool things they could try to make the whole affair even slicker. The big one would be blocking off places you were done with, or maybe using green and red colored text for places that were done, or for snowkemon games. But this is the usual "make it even better" quibble I have when something works nicely, the sort I want to do with my own SpeedIFs but it gets lost in the shuffle.