Skabma - Snowfall is a platformer/exploration game with some light puzzling, collectables to collect, and a wonderful atmosphere that gives a great portrayal of Sámi culture. You play as Áilu, a young Sami reindeer herder on the journey to understand and prevent what's going wrong with nature. The game is beautiful, relaxing, and with a comfortable soundscape. The gameplay is relatively simple but also frustrating at times due to some platforming and control jank.

Graphics: 5/5
The graphics are beautiful. The game plays with its lighting well, switching between the soft ambience of aurora borealis, intense sunshine through the treetops, and gloomy caves adorned in glowing runes. The nature starts out beautiful and serene, and constantly shifts as the game progresses even when revisiting old areas of the game. The character outfits and environmental setpieces are also authentic and well designed!

Gameplay: 3/5
The gameplay is relatively simple but also the games weak point. A mix of walking simulator and platforming. Sadly, the platforming alternates between simple and annoying. Sometimes it's unclear if you're supposed to be able to make jumps. I also experienced a fair amount of frustration from the shared buttons for using abilities on yourself and environment objects. Sometimes you try dashing across a bit only for the skill to get auto-targeted on a random nearby object, causing you to fall to your own untimely death...

However, the game comes with some super welcome QoL features, like indications for new dialog, a beautiful map with points of interest marked down, and a super comprehensive replay system for going back and grabbing missed collectables!

Story: 4/5
The story is straightforward and relatively simple, but it fits the game well. Sámi stories are integrated but also revised to make for a compelling game rather than a historical document. The game also hides a fair amount of intriguing side stories behind some of the optional collectables, providing more content for one so inclined!

Characters: 5/5
The characters are great! Faces are surprisingly expressive and coupled with awesome voice acting, making cutscenes and dialogue feel impactful and emotional. The little chitchat dialogue the game provides is great too. This is the kind of game where I enjoy just walking around hearing what the characters babble about. Heck, even the trees are worth talking to!

Sound and music: 4/5
The music is awesome. Traditional Sámi music and joik is integrated well. The sound effects are also great. Oh and did I mention the whole game is voiced in Northern Sámi? Yes please!

good characters, the gameplay is pretty varied and fun but oh god the grabbing and ahem certain end game fight detracted massively.

the story is fun but suffers from similar memes that players of the yakuzer franchise will already be familiar with.

all around pretty standard yakuza experience. Enjoyable but not revolutionary!

Really enjoyed the time I spent with this game but man do I miss when zelda games put any actual effort into the main story. The reason I dont rate it lower is because i guess this is exactly what I expected, and there are some genuinely enticing story-bits on a micro-level if you take the time to explore/do the quests in some of the settlements.

In terms of gameplay the game is just silly fun, I love the building and fusing (especially shields, the skating is so fun!) However, the more time I spent with it the more routine it became with same enemies over and over, and a lot of areas start feeling copy-pastey. Would probably hate to 100% this game for that reason alone.

This is what final fantasy is all about baby
- music was superb
- gameplay is fun and varied due to encouraging you to use all your party members
- basically enjoyed every party members presence
- sprite animations are A++ and make me a little sad that no more 2D FF games were made after this point