Look, I'm not complaining, I know many people would be thrilled to live somewhere warmer, but I live in a climate which, if I'm entirely honest, somewhat disagrees with my Scottish blood? Pasty skin? Predisposition for basement-dwelling? More on basement-dwelling in a little bit, as it happens, but whatever you want to call it, there is a part of me that finds myself longing for colder weather, particularly as it starts to get warmer and warmer. There will be days in the coming months where there'll be some oppressive heat and I will wish I could be far away in some snowy alpine lodge but, given that that's probably pretty unlikely, I might have to make do with escaping there some other way. Enter Above the Snow from developer Above the Desk which might just provide a little bit of that alpine magic from the comfort of my own desk… just as long as I pump up the air conditioning.

*Image: Above the Desk / Wandering Wizard*

Developer: Above the Desk
Publisher: Wandering Wizard
Release: 23 April 2026
Retail Price (Steam): 24,49€/$24.99/£20.99

There's a lot going on in Above the Snow. The first thing players are presented with are two game modes to pick between: the Campaign, which has a lengthy story attached to it and is recommended for first-time players, and the 'Endless Winter' – effectively a free mode without story missions, where you'll start with the same shoddy shelter but try to build it up without worrying about any pesky narrative getting in the way. With some incredibly important (and quite unfortunate) caveats that I'll get onto later, I'd agree with the developers and also recommend the campaign, as even if you wanted to skip through all the story elements, the guidance it gives you through its missions adds a lot to the experience.

Regardless of which option you pick, the core gameplay is largely the same. You have three different layers, each larger than the one before it, to work within – the interior of the shelter, the exterior, and then the trail map. You spend most of your time split relatively evenly between the interior and the trail map, with occasional visits to the exterior as well for a handful of tasks that you'll need to stay on top of. Each area has quite different gameplay mechanics, and I was perhaps a little sceptical of that going in: I think there's the potential for that to make the game feel disjointed, or that by having those different sections rather than focussing on one, each could end up lacking depth individually. There might be a small amount of that, but I'd say those concerns were largely unfounded. So, what do you do in each?

Firstly you've got the shelter (or lodge or hotel) itself, the interior, where your visitors eat and sleep and entertain themselves for two days, before they head out on their expeditions. With the exception of the basement, as that's being used as the dwelling for your handful of workers (see, I told I'd get back to the basement-dwelling), this starts as a run-down shell of a building, with derelict floors and piles of broken furniture, and it's up to you to restore it to its former glory. You do that by placing items, primarily to boost one of three values – comfort, storage and entertainment. Each has its own rating from zero to five stars, and depending on the reputation of your establishment (which also has its own star rating), you'll need to ensure that each is up to the appropriate standards.

In the first instance, it's incredibly likely you'll have to squeeze any visitors into an array of bunkbeds on the ground floor – they won't mind that, as they're not exactly expecting much from your sub-one-star lodgings – but eventually you'll begin to free up rooms on the first and second floors, which you can fill with more luxurious furniture as you unlock it over the course of the game.

The economy of all that is very basic – better furniture gives more points but costs more wood: every ten wood spent on an item gives you one point of comfort, storage, or entertainment, depending on what that item is. Chairs, sofas and beds give comfort, tables and cupboards give storage, things like bookshelves or TVs or chess boards give entertainment – you get the idea. Get enough points in a particular category and you'll earn another half-star in it.

There are some other considerations – ensuring there are enough beds for the number of visitors you have, making sure anywhere those visitors go is well-heated by radiators, ensuring you're cooking enough food to feed everyone (if you really want to impress, you can give your visitors double-serving to improve their mood)... you can even decorate the lodge in ways that appeal to different types of alpinist to change your clientele, which has an impact on things within the trail map. It's largely up to the player how involved they want to get with the design of their lodge: if you want, you can certainly work on making it as beautiful as possible… but, alternatively, if you're more interested in just hitting those milestones you can game it a little bit by, for example, having a room full of TVs in the attic that smash your shelter's entertainment value up to five stars without a huge amount of effort. Head-cannon it as one of your workers having a dodgy stolen-TV-selling business on the side, if you like, which, if we step away from the gameplay and go to the story for a second, is actually surprisingly easy to do.

That's because, perhaps unusually for what is otherwise a very cosy game, the main character here, Francis Harland, is a wanted criminal working off his debt to a mob boss. This isn't your typical 'grandpa left you his farm' story; that mafioso's brother is the old man who's let the lodge fall into disrespect, and becomes part of your core team, all of whom seem to have varying degrees of problems in their past that they're not quite able to escape from.

It's certainly an interesting quirk to the game, it's all written well enough for what it is but I did find myself rushing through some parts that felt they were dragging a bit because I wanted to get back to the gameplay. So, back to that gameplay.

You're not just restricted to the interior of the lodge but can also build within its immediate surroundings, in the 'yard'. It's perhaps a little unfair to classify this as its own section as it's arguably more of an extra part of the lodge, where you can place a handful of external buildings, some of which have interactions that you'll occasionally want to check in on. This is the area you'll likely spend the least amount of time in, and if there was a part that could do with expanding upon it would probably be here, as you can end up unlocking quite a lot of land yet having seemingly nothing to do with it, short of putting down a random bench or two in the middle of nowhere. There are a couple of things you need to do from here, such as sporadic repairs on important buildings that will impact your ability to get upgrades or deliveries if they're not kept well-maintained, but unless you're sending Francis off to collect some extra wood there's not currently a huge amount to do here.

Which is fine, because the final area is very involved, probably even more so than the inside of the lodge. The 'Trail Map' is where you'll plan all your trails between the shelter and the surrounding points of interest. The main reason you'll do this is for your visitors: they'll come to you with a particular place they want to visit and you'll need to make sure you have a route set up before they head out, lest they leave disappointed. As your reputation increases, the places they'll want to visit become more difficult to reach, until you're scaling the highest peak and reaching the very edges of the map.

Depending on the type of alpinist they are, they'll want different things from those routes: some – casual strollers and nature fans – want a nice relaxing walk with forest and vista points, others are more interested in steep slopes and more difficult climbs. Again, the game is quite forgiving here: as long as they can get to their location they're pretty pleased, but if you want to get more involved you can try to ensure there are multiple routes that meet the desires of different types, in order to get more money and grow your reputation more quickly. That level of micromanagement wasn't too interesting to me, and I found myself earning quickly enough that I tended to prioritise safer routes over trying to appeal to those more extreme climbers. If you're not careful, you can end up with injured climbers who need rescuing: that'll invariably happen even if you do plan everything meticulously, but with too many risky paths you can end up with multiple climbers to save at once, and if you don't get to them in time, things can go very wrong indeed.

Speaking of things going wrong… there are some smaller issues I had with the game, and one which, while hopefully easily fixed, does leave Above the Snow in a precarious position in terms of a recommendation.

Those small problems first: once you've been playing for a while there are a few extra steps to everything that feel unnecessary. Things like having to go back into the lodge to assign a worker to the kitchen rather than just being able to do it from the Trail Map.

There's this whole system for renting gear out which I know I haven't spoken about but, which, while a nice little money spinner and a way to make your visitors safer on their travels, has such an annoying micromanagement system for durability: you have to select each item to move it from the rental shop to your inventory, then move it again from your inventory to the workshop to repair it, then select someone to work in the workshop, then once it's repaired send it back to the rental shop. You want to have a lot of this stuff: it just feels like all of that could've been skipped, and instead the worker could've just been assigned straight to the shop to repair any items that need it. You also need to be making constant deliveries, mainly for wood, which requires you to type in '600' or '400' or whatever the maximum capacity of the vehicle is every single time… at first it's fine but eventually you're trying to acquire thousands of units of wood at once – when you've got individual beds that cost 480 and the largest helicopter load you can get is 400 it does start to feel a little bit silly and a little bit tedious, to the point you wish you could just click a button and set up ten or twenty maximum deliveries in a row, as that's more-or-less what you're doing anyway. To set up an order for however much food you want on a daily basis, rather than having to micromanage that yourself – even if it was an unlock on the game's tech tree that you only wind up getting towards the end, just something to save you spending so much time repeatedly setting up delivery orders.

Okay, I know I probably sound frustrated, but I want to say that that stuff is forgivable. It's a simulation game, they often have those quirks to them, and while a bit eye-roll-worthy it's not like it ruined the game for me. Unfortunately, there was something that did.

It's worth reminding you that I was playing on a pre-release build so I'm hoping these things can be fixed relatively early into release, but each character has their own side story, and one of their side missions had bugged progress for me. She needed to go and do something on the Trail Map, the game was convinced that she was leaving for the mission, she never did but was always available to do other things. There's no way to cancel the mission, it's just stuck there forever. Fine, whatever, it's a side-mission, and I can still use her, so I soldiered on, knowing her quest was probably not going to be completable but that I'd still be able to finish the main storyline.

Then, another character's side quest bugged… but this time, she left the lodge, and just didn't return. Less ideal. I waited a few days in-game, and it became pretty clear she was just never coming back. Again, pretty irritating, and now one worker down, but still determined to finish the main storyline, missing characters and incompletable side quests be damned. And that was going well, until the main quest had a requirement that I needed to use the missing character for, at which point I was then entirely soft-locked.

And that's where I left Above the Snow. I gave it a few more days while I leveled up the lodge to 5-stars across the board and linked up some more further-flung locations on the Trail Map, but I wasn't going to be able to progress any further. Obviously your mileage may vary, those issues might not present themselves to you, but for me it was a frustrating end to an otherwise enjoyable experience: I was having a good time, I hope those problems get fixed so I can go back and actually finish it, because without that I would recommend it. On that experience alone, it's difficult to do so.

It does happen that I play games that have bugs or issues that render them unrecommendable or unplayable, or, in this instance, unfinishable. Often that's severe enough that I just won't put anything out about them – I'm trying to be of the mind that unless there's something untoward or malicious going on then it's not usually worth putting out negative reviews.

But I don't think I'd be so frustrated at those one and a half gamebreaking bugs if I hadn't been really enjoying the game up until that point. We're going back a bit now, but when I reviewed Roots Devour I mentioned that I had a big problem with that game and said that I'd put a note if it was ever fixed — so far that's not happened, but, based on the rest of Above the Snow and the amount of care and attention that's clearly been put into it, I have a bit more faith that Above the Desk might see those issues ironed out.

For now, Above the Snow is unrated by IndieLoupe.com, but we'll be keeping our eye on it in the hope that we can, someday soon, recommend it.

The reviewed product was provided on behalf of the publisher.

Video review: IndieLoupe.com

Review: Above the Snow

Above the Snow

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