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(+1)

what a haunting and chilling experience, honestly thought it was gonna be a cute stroll until I gradually noticed what was happening, well done! the art is beautiful, really nice low poly aesthetic with nice shapes for the models. love how the material on the player is unlit while the dead trees are lit. it makes the trees stand out in a very unsettling way, where its the only thing thats being affected by light in the scene so the surface color has both dark shadows and a shine to it that isn't present in lets say the character or the snow. that visual dissonance made it feel more disturbing for me personally, nicely done! also the music is so nice and chill, i'd love if you posted it somewhere so i can add it to my "songs to work to" playlist xd.

the character animation blending is also so well done! they are animated beautifully, it was fun to just move the camera around to see the motion of the character while adjusting for these changes. also the gradual blend to the ending animation is also really sick, awesome job here!

but yeah, this was such an incredible experience, really was expecting something like a nice stroll (wasn't paying attention to the thumbnail xd). the confusion of just getting dropped into the world to walk around slowly turning to concern as you see the character animations and expression shift from indifference to pain is horrifying. they're stuck there and nobody is around them for miles. seeing the relatively warm colors on the character get drained into clean whites, becoming indistinguishable from the snow you lay upon, and it holds you uncomfortably there at the end for so long to allow you to soak the tragedy of it all until finally fading to black. this was such an engrossing experience, thanks for sharing, great work!

(+1)

It's an honor to have been the subject of such an in depth, and thoughtful review! You managed to pick out a lot of intentional detail that I thought might have been lost due to the short nature of the game. 

You're right that the trees stand out of when compared to the rest of the scenery - that unsurprisingly wasn't totally intentional. It was the result of me trying to build a shader that puts snow "on top" of stuff, if that makes sense. In short, it checks upwards facing normals and adds a noisy white texture to those faces depending on exactly how "up" they're facing, to simulate snow laying on those surfaces. It had the unintended effect of giving the trees a lot of depth and texture, and less like they were covered in snow - but I liked it, so I left it in. 

Regarding the music I made - all of the game assets (including the music and sfx) are in the repo (https://github.com/hey-tack/a-short-walk-in-the-snow). I left the repo unlicensed, so technically I haven't given express permission to rip audio from the game - but because it's public, I couldn't necessarily stop you, if you catch my drift

If it's easier, I went ahead and uploaded the music on SoundCloud (https://soundcloud.com/hey-tack/a-short-walk-in-the-snow). You can download it from there if you like. The music felt very empty without the windy ambiance, so I composited that into the track. If you're interested in a totally raw version of the music (which is in the repo), let me know and I can upload that too. 

Thanks again for the glowing review - It really makes me happy to hear it resonated with you!