A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build

A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build is a block-pushing game about an adorable gumdrop-shaped monster making snowmen in a quaint, wintry hedge maze. To do this, you roll around snowballs, which become larger when rolled onto fresh snow, and stack them onto each other to make the characteristic round base, body, and head of a snowman. It’s all very sweet, but some of its puzzles are genuine brain-burners, and the game might even have some extra difficult secrets…

Like a lot of block-pushing games, the puzzles in A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build require spatial reasoning to work through. Each grid-based level presents you with various snowballs, which you must push around to make snowmen. Pushing a small snowball onto snowy ground makes it amass more snow, causing it to grow into a medium snowball, and pushing it further turns it into a large snowball. To make a snowman, you push a medium snowball onto a large snowball, and then push a small snowball onto both, at which point the snowman comes to life with a charming expression and its own name.

The entire main game only uses these basic mechanics, but gets a lot of depth out of them by exploring them in interesting ways. The game is relatively open-ended, allowing the player to tackle puzzles at their own pace, and you don’t have to beat every puzzle to get to the end. However, some puzzles are meant to be properly challenging, and the game also has an extra tricky twist on its mechanics that can be found by players determined to sniff out its secrets.

The artwork of A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build is charming, simple, and picture-book like, and the music is bright but gentle, all of which creates a calm, chilled-out atmosphere. (You can even sit down and relax on the benches!) The game has no story or non-puzzle elements at all — it’s just you and the snowman friends you make. Draknek & Friends later developed and published a spiritual successor to the game, A Monster’s Expedition, which has similarly relaxed vibes and the same adorable gumdrop-shaped monster character.

When A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build launched in 2015, Alan Hazelden of Draknek & Friends asked the founder of Itch.io to be able to adjust the price of the game programmatically. Hazelden went on to have the price mirror the real-world, hour-to-hour evolving temperature of a London weather station, as a nod to the game’s snowy setting. The price later became fixed, until the pay-what-the-temperature-is model was brought back indefinitely on Itch.io after the game’s 10-year anniversary.

This description was written by Asher Stone.