Shadows In The Snow - Collaborative Project

Role: Game Design, Narrative Design, Creative Direction, Cinematics

You return home for a funeral. But the streets are empty, the snow untouched, and the silence feels too recent to be safe. Whatever happened in Nordhamn, no one's left to explain it.
In Shadows in the Snow, you uncover the story the way a stranger would: by tracing what’s been left behind. And the deeper you dig, the more you realise what secrets lie buried beneath.

INTRODUCTION

Shadows in the Snow is a narrative-driven mystery game that blends psychological horror, environmental storytelling, and slow-burn exploration into a unique, atmospheric experience. Set in the fictional, snow-covered Swedish village of Nordhamn, the project takes players on a journey through a forgotten community bound by an ancient, unholy pact.

The game is structured around a two-act narrative arc, designed to immerse players in uncertainty, encourage investigative thinking, and gradually unravel a tightly wound mystery.

trying-to-100-the-ship-log-but-wondering-what-i-could-be-v0-twu0eyz42atc1_edited.jpg

The Planning Board

At the central core of the narrative system is the Planning Board, a fully diegetic in-world mechanic inspired by Outer Wilds' Ship Log.

Discovered early on in the church’s back room, the Planning Board serves as the game’s narrative hub, tracking theories, clues, and points of interest. To avoid overuse of UI elements and menus, , the Planning Board is a physical space within the game that evolves alongside player understanding. Every clue the player discovers, whether a note, a drawing, or environmental sign, is logged, cross-referenced, and visually connected.

This system was designed not only to reward curiosity, but also to reflect the player’s cognitive process. It doesn’t tell you what to do next, it reminds you of what you know, and invites you to make the next leap.

Narrative Structure

In place of traditional progression systems, we created a world where the player's only true advancement is insight. The more you learn, the more the world opens, logically, emotionally, and mechanically. To support this, we broke the game into two distinct but interconnected acts:

Act One is non-linear and investigative. Players explore freely, encountering fragments of the story through environments, journals, audio and events.
Act Two turns knowledge into agency. Once the mystery is understood, the player shifts into action, making decisions with real consequences based on what they’ve learned.

This structure allows the narrative to unfold organically, giving the player full ownership of what they know and what they choose to act on.

CINEMATICS

Created using Unreal Engine 5’s Sequencer, this cinematic utilises real-time lighting and audio without any external compositing or post-processing. Everything runs natively in-engine, ensuring it can play back seamlessly during gameplay.

Early in development, I created a standalone cinematic sequence to serve as a tonal and visual benchmark for the project. It became a personal exercise focused on how lighting, performance capture, and audio could work together to convey emotion, tension, and define atmosphere.