I like where Last Days of Snow is headed. It’s a Norwegian narrative thriller about a 12-year-old boy who isn’t quite what he seems. He lives in a fairly normal-looking, snowy suburb with his mother but he has strange dreams. He dreams in what looks like ASCII and he temporarily loses a kind of connection with the real world. And judging by a worried phone call his mother makes, there’s a worrying bigger picture in play.
I gleaned this from a stylish demo at EGX 2019. It begins with the ASCII dream, which you control as if playing an old ASCII game, yet as you solve simple door-opening puzzles and fill your connection gauge, a 3D world materialises before you. Now you control the boy in a kind of dream world, a verdant forest, until you jump down a well and the camera fades to black. Then, the fade to black becomes the boy’s pupil in his eye and the camera zooms out to show him sleeping in his bed. It continues to pull back to show his room and then his house, and then his mother on the phone in the hallway. The characters are impressively rendered and the mother’s performance is well captured and voiced.
We skip a cinematic interlude (for demo purposes) until finally we land in the boy’s boots in his dark, snow-piled town – based on the town the game’s makers grew up in. The demo then peters out as we plod around his surroundings getting a feel for the general atmosphere. It’s off-kilter in the way you might expect an Alan Wake or Remedy game to be – no surprise given the Nordic link. It’s gentle and foreboding, if you like. Content to let a mystery sink in, rather than ram it down your throat.