Welcome to Amaluuk research station, we hope your stay is a productive and pleasant one.
Very cool mod! Nicely designed.
I loved the atmosphere the best, it's pretty mind-fucky and psychological.
Great story, great map, okay "spookiness", and good interactive puzzles.
Pros: Story, Intro "cinematic", map design, puzzles, and monster.
Cons: Sounds, abrupt ending.
Well constructed horror, with a great homage to The Thing. The ending was a bit of a letdown though. Otherwise a great piece of modwork.
scary =D
Extremely cool. Awesome mapping and spot on sound design complement gameplay that brings back memories of Penumbra quite nicely. A little hard to figure out which objects are significant and which are just scenery, making things confusing at times, but most of the puzzles are fairly logical and rewarding.
Short, but creepy as hell and definitely worth a try.
Overall this wasn't bad! I loved it actually. I found myself scared, sitting on the edge of my seat, fully immersed in the story. The story was decent, but the ending was abrupt and the gameplay was somewhat slow, short, and anticlimatic. The puzzles forced you to think, giving it a Penumbra Style to The Thing. A more "Tangible" Monster along with a Psychological Twist would be better, but the "Black Snow" was good. I like the ability to search the deceased (or are they?) inhabitants' laptops, giving you background information, allowing you to piece together what happened. A portable light source would be better than annoying HL2 Flares, like a flashlight, but it needs batteries? The immersion cell should've had more of a role than it did, but I enjoyed it. If we could get a DLC of the Prologue prior to Prometheus's Insertion or continue the story in the boots of John Matsuda. I believe this mod deserves a 9/10 for delivering a unique Survival Horror Experience. It was well worth the wait!
The Amaluuk Research Station is a seemingly lifeless place: one that would be creepy to explore in perfectly normal circumstances. The fact that you have just seen, in an opening cutscene, the death of several soldiers to an unseen entity lifts it beyond that however. The facility may seem lifeless but you know that is just a façade: there is something in there with you and it is going to kill you.
Couple that feeling with the atmosphere Black Snow creates out of eerie ambient sounds and, occasionally, brilliant set design and you get a game that can chill you to the bone. The low visibility of the bitter cold tundra that separates the game's many rooms, increases this feeling, making you feel isolated and vulnerable: especially as staying in the misty tundra too long causes your life to fall.
Black Snow is fundamentally a puzzler in the vain of the old Point and Click Adventures. You collect items in a scavenger hunt fashion and then combine these items with each other or the environment to proceed. A Monster provides some survival horror elements but that would be more fun to discover on your own, I will say that it doesn't do much to please you and will probably feel an afterthought. The puzzling can be weak at times: it is often not intuitive enough and it can cause a great deal of frustration.
There is a lot to enjoy in Black Snow and the few hours that you will spend playing it are definitely worth the download.
good horror survival experience
I wrote a long review explaining everything I liked, disliked then my Chrome crashed and I lost my review. I am now too lazy to fully re-write it so I will just do a basic one.
--- Positives
The intro was great and original
The Puzzle/Interaction system was great and fresh.
The atmosphere was unique.
The "Monster" was the first monster ive seen in a video game that I was truly afraid of throughout the entirety of the game.
The Detail in the various locations such as random notes, or person affects really helped immerse me into the game.
--- Negatives
The intro was good, but also left a lot of questioning, the only thing I got from what was happening was that, Im in the arctic and "**** Happened"
The Puzzles sometimes were very blunt and the items you could use were not always so obvious, such as the blow torch.
--- Over all I definitely think it was one of the better horror mods made in source in a long time, I definitely think people should play this if they enjoy scary games and want something new and fresh to play.
Really good work, I really like the atmosphere of the mod and the mapping is fantasctic too.
Nice work in general but with some bugs that should be fixed.
9//10