In its best moments, Snowsquall Grip is engaging and satisfying to play through. It’s a shame that one of its main mechanics lets it down.
Low-poly horror games are pretty common at this point. That’s not a bad thing, as throwbacks to the original PlayStation era of scary games are often quite fun. There’s something about the lack of detail that makes the world and monsters all the more unsettling. Snowsquall Grip makes use of the art style and relies more on an unsettling atmosphere and world rather than old fashioned jump scares. Whilst this is refreshing, some of its mechanics make this really rather short horror experience feel more like a slog.
Set in the developer’s Re.Surs universe, Snowsquall Grip has you playing as a young aspirant tasked with bringing essential equipment to a research facility. Your helicopter crashes in a snowstorm, just outside the research facility, and you’ll need to survive the cold and find a way to get inside and make your delivery. As far as I can tell, you don’t need to have played other games in the series, but there were references to things that made no sense to me. A Supreme Leader, Modern-City, and even you being referred to as an aspirant that seems to have abilities that other people don’t were somewhat lost on me, but they aren’t really essential for this game’s plot, so it’s easy enough to give them a pass.
In real terms, Snowsquall Grip is a puzzle game with a horror atmosphere. You’ll need to find your way around the rather small environment, finding ways to get power to buildings and locate access codes to unlock doors. These puzzles are for the most part pretty simple yet feel good enough to work out. When a key item is needed, you’ll get a location marker for a short time to help you get an idea of where you need to go. This is somewhat essential as the core mechanic at play here is you surviving the cold. Stray too far from fire for too long and you’ll begin to be hunted by a monster. Fail to return quickly and you’ll suffer the consequences.
I wouldn’t complain about this in a lot of cases, but this got very old, very fast. You can’t be away from a heat source for more than thirty seconds before your display starts getting distorted as you suffer from the effects of the weather. I can understand why this is done when the play area is so small, but trying to find a small item on the ground with a distorting screen is very irritating when I have to go and run back to a fire before returning and scrounging around again. Being fair, you can increase your heat sources by solving puzzles to build fires and open doors, but it’s quite annoying, especially early on when you have no idea where to go.
Once you get your bearings though, things are more fun. You’ll solve puzzles, find notes, and maybe uncover a secret or two involving people who seem to live and work nearby. I quite liked the subplot of the man selling pizza from his trailer, and kind of wanted more of that story rather than the main plot. The overall story certainly has its moments though, especially once you’re inside the facility. I won’t spoil too much but there are some hints toward cosmic horror elements that I always appreciate.
I appreciated this console port less though. I expect on PC things run much smoother, but here there were all manner of problems. Playing Snowsquall Grip with a controller felt wrong, with lots of cases where the game wouldn’t let me pick up an item I was looking directly at, but there are problems beyond something that simple. There are holes in the scenery everywhere, inexplicable frame drops all over the place, the bizarre inclusion of Windowed Mode in the options menu. That’s assuming you can access the menu, as whenever I would pause the game, the screen would jitter and no menu would appear. I could hear the cursor moving around, but couldn’t see anything. It’s quite a poor port to say the least.
Still, the visuals are solid when they aren’t playing up, and the sound design is quite excellent. The ever increasing volume of wolf howls certainly kept me on edge. If you are in the market for a short, atmosphere heavy horror game at an admittedly low price, I’d encourage you to try Snowsquall Grip out, but specifically on PC as the Xbox version I played felt somewhat broken.
Snowsquall Grip is available now on PC, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation.
