A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build
A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build is a 2015 puzzle video game developed by Alan Hazelden and Benjamin Davis and published by Draknek. The game was released in 2015 for Linux, OS X, Windows, Android, and iOS.
Gameplay
A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build is a grid-based puzzle video game that tasks players with helping a featureless monster to build snowmen. Snowmen are built by stacking three snowballs of decreasing size. Rolling small or medium-sized balls over snowy ground increases their size. Building all snowmen in a room unlocks adjacent rooms which are all part of a hedge maze.Players can undo one move at a time or reset a room.
Development and release
A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build was created by UK-based independent developers Alan Hazelden and Benjamin Davis. Its prototype was developed using Puzzlescript, an open-source HTML5 puzzle game engine, in 2014. The commercial release was written in Haxe and OpenFL and released for Linux, OS X, and Windows-based personal computers on 25 February 2015. A version for Android and iOS mobile devices was released on 9 December 2015. A Nintendo Switch version released on 2 September 2021.For the game's 10th anniversary in 2025, the Itch.io release of the game permanently moved to a 'Pay What The Temperature Is' pricing model, where the price would be $1 for every degree Celsius it is in London according to OpenWeatherMap's tracking, updated every hour. For example, if the temperature was 2.5 degrees Celsius, the price would become $2.50. If the temperature in London drops below freezing the game will become freeware.
Reception
A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build received "universal acclaim" from professional critics, according to the review aggregator website Metacritic.A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build won the award for "Best Character Design" at Intel Level Up 2014.