Game Review: Lost Snowmen (Xbox Series X)

From Half-Face Games and Silen Games comes Lost Snowmen, a puzzle platformer with a story, humour, and plenty of different challenges to keep players playing for hours. Even if the building monotony guarantees most won’t.

Lord Fuse, Hill, and YoYo are three alien snowmen who have crash-landed on a strange planet they call TR-4421, otherwise known as planet Earth. They need to find a way back to their home planet Pectus, but happily make the discovery that Earth is rich in the fuel they need. They just need to collect enough to power their ship, which is where the player comes in.

Taking control of one or multiple members of the trio and using their individual abilities to conquer puzzle-based levels, collecting fuel along the way. Alongside that, players must also deal with Deserters. These are other alien snowmen who have decided they like planet Earth and want to stay. Lord Fuse, Hill, and YoYo can’t allow this though as they’re worried mankind will find out about their home planet.

These deserters won’t return willingly though, so it’s up to players to do the only thing left, which is destroy them all.

It is a welcome surprise to see Lost Snowmen offer up a story and attempt to keep telling it as the game goes on. It’s nothing special, but at least adds a humorous touch to the overall puzzle-based gameplay. Just a touch though as the fact that each level begins with lengthy dialogue sections that are un-skippable does get old. Made all the worse when you have to restart a level over and over again, just to get hit by the dialogue (which has a lot of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors) again.

A story is unlikely to be the reason most pick up this game though, it’s going to be for the platforming and puzzle aspects. The latter is extremely well done, with a wide array of different types of challenges, demanding that players utilise the different skills of the snowmen to the fullest. There’s nothing ground-breaking here but figuring out a particularly tricky puzzle is always satisfying.

It’s a shame then, that the former side of things is poor by comparison. With the snowmen being awkward to control, fighting enemies having really hit and miss detection, and there being a ton of frustrating invisible ceilings. There’s very little fun to be had when it comes to platforming in Lost Snowmen.

Alongside that, we have visuals and level designs that are uninspired, and music that is just so-so. You can tell a lot of effort went into making certain aspects of the game stronger than others. The goal seemingly being to hook players in and hope they will stay once they get into the guts of it.

That’s a hard sell though, as for all its variety, it’s still just a platforming puzzle game that does nothing particularly fresh.

Xbox players will find the game is very generous when it comes to Gamerscore though. Featuring a gargantuan 4000 Gamerscore that can be picked up within an hour or two, and without even getting close to finishing the entire thing.