Before people pretty much knew him for It Moves or Rust & Blood (But after Miserere and Skinwalker, interestingly) SnowOwl made The Visitor, a short horror game of his that I've not really seen anyone ever talk about or mention. Yet, when I played this game a few years back, I absolutely fell in love with it. I was a bit younger, maybe around 12 (too lazy to do the math rn) when I found out about it. Having enjoyed It Moves, I decided to give this game a spin. I never did end up finishing it, even though I played it for over an hour, maybe two, interestingly enough.

At the time I couldn't find a walkthrough of the game, and presumably did not think of looking up a let's play so I spent a ton of it just roaming around and trying to find what to do next. So I decided to go back to it with extremely minimal memories of what it was about. Pretty much all I remembered from it was that it was about trolls, reminded me of a movie and it was being told by this old woman.

Oh, and sorry about the low quality images on this review. The game ran on a bigger resolution and I couldn't find how to make it smaller for some reason. I assumed it was just by pressing F4 or F5 but that didn't seem to be the case (fairly sure I tried all the Fs). So the images were taken in a blurry enlarged version of the game window and then shrunk down with a blurry filter so they wouldn't look jarring (the text did).



The Visitor is a story of a family who moves into a mansion together after they inherit it from the mother's uncle. Quickly enough, they find out something's lurking about in the woods. It's a simple story that's been done to the death, but it gets the job done. There are three characters. Robert, the son, who you play as at the beginning of the game. He's a curious child who has a fear of his parents because of how strict he thinks they are. His character arc is basically just going into the woods and getting lost. Then there's George and Lillian, the parents. After playing as Robert, you switch to George. His goal is basically to find Robert while Lillian's is to make dinner.



While all the interesting plot points were clearly given to Lillian with how much she hooks you with her story of cooking for hours, I would say George and Robert were okay characters too.

One thing here that was a little iffy here was how much the characters contradicted their descriptions. We are introduced by Agartha to the parents by hearing they are strict, and yet they never show this kind of behaviour. George does act like an asshole a few times for seemingly no reason, but even he is pretty much just like any other parent out there. I feel like there was a bit of wasted potential here with not playing around with the idea behind the strict parents more. I do however really like the idea of having the villians be trolls, you don't see that very often in horror games.

There are things I can praise here too, however. For one, that book you find in the secret room in the attic really makes an earlier scene click in your head very well. There is a good mystery set up about the uncle's death with how you're told he fell off a cliff but it's unusual because the cliff wasn't that high and there were way more injuries on him than there should have been from a fall. Though, this does lead to a few questions.



The strongest aspect of The Visitor is easily its atmosphere. There's something very enchanting yet bland about the mansion, in a good kind of way. I mean that it looks like a boring and dusty old building, but that's also its charm. You know, the game actually really reminds me of a movie called The Spiderwick Chronicles, and a little bit of Bridge to Terabitha too. Both movies had a very similar vibe too them from what I can remember. That always sort of made The Vistor stand out to me, even in my original playthrough of it, due to how I've not seen many games capturing that Spiderwick kind of atmosphere. That being said, the game also shows extreme resemblance to Mermaid Swamp. Maybe a little too much to be fair. The mansion has nearly the same layout as the mansion in Mermaid Swamp. Even the rooms are placed similarly with a dining room and kitchen as well as a bathroom at the first floor's west side while a living room is on the other. The second floor does look very different but the resemblance of the first floor is very obviously taken nearly straight from Mermaid Swamp. Not to mention those troll paintings you can find all over the first floor, pretty much just like the Ophelia paintings in Mermaid Swamp. The game page does outright state that Mermaid Swamp was a big inspiration, alongside The Crooked Man and The Witch's House which is interesting because I definetly cannot think of anything in the game that resembled those two. There is a puzzle on the second floor that straight up feels like one of those block sequence puzzles from OFF, though.



The Visitor has that SnowOwl charm to its graphics with most of the tiles being rips or taken straight from google images and edited. It looks good for the most part, though, the characters are ridiculously small in comparison to the rest of the environment. The mapping looks really meh on occasion too. There are a lot of objects placed randomly in places they probably shouldn't be, like a cabinet in the parents' room that's like in the middle of the room instead of against a wall for some reason. The lack of any real symetry anywhere in the mansion really makes it look like somebody should have paid more attention in architecture class and rooms that are way too big and spacious are common too. The forest looks very unnaturaly laid out in terms of trees with how they're all basically lined it lines and have no variance to them at all. I wouldn't say the visuals weren't one of The Visitor's strongest aspects, but they also didn't look bad for the most part. That last scene in the cave was very visually impressive too.

The game's absolute weakest aspect would be its lack of polish, however. The tile passabilities were super weird and I found myself often not being able to go anywhere near objects that I should have probably been able to go near and I also came across several bugs, especially a few scenes where the developer clearly used parallel process instead of autorun so with good timing you could walk around when you weren't supposed to. Oh and the menu wasn't centered and you have no idea how much that drew me nuts.

The gameplay had its faults too. It's mostly made up of you going around trying to find an item to solve a puzzle, but most times you are given absolutely no clue as to what you're supposed to be doing next or what items you can use in what places. I found myself having to rely on a walkthrough a lot of times.



The Visitor was made for a game jam, so its flaws can definetly be justified, but with the amount of potential here, I would love to see SnowOwl make an extended and more fleshed out remake of the game sometime in the future (ahem @snowowl I'm more than happy to make a fanmade remake if you're willing to pass me the copyright™ I've got a few ideas ahem). The Visitor is still worth giving a play in its current state but could easily be much better.

I give it three trolls out of five.