How many pampered hikers can you freeze in alpine tycoon game Above the Snow?

I recently spent time in a mountain youth hostel, which offered a choice of hikes up nearby peaks together with the regulation climber’s breakfast of imploded sausage plus violently oversugared orange juice. The worst thing that happened to me there was that I bunked next to an older German man who talked in his sleep. He sounded pretty distressed about something, possibly the sausages. I’ll be inflicting far worse on my guests in Above the Snow, a tycoon management game in which you build, decorate and populate an alpine resort.

Oh sure, they’re calling it “cosy”. There is talk of hot cocoa, cottagecore rug patterns, and a dog named Brutus who is “probably a good boy”. Mental note: kill the dog. Over the course of “20+ hours of rich, character-driven storytelling in a unique Alpine winter setting”, you’ll manage a team of eccentric staff, expand your lodge, and plonk down incrementally cuddlier furnishings, from snooker tables to stuffed animal heads. How nice.

But consider this: you can design your hiking trails, perhaps weaving in difficult stretches and actual hazards in a bid to entice a more adventurous/lucrative species of alpinist. Perhaps I shall send that recently arrived coachful of tourists up Boneduster Peak. Perhaps I will encourage the middle-aged Rad Dads with Mini 3 Pros to take the shortcut down Yeti’s Asshole.

The marketing blurb also makes casual mention of some really quite worrying wider events. I gather that this is “the harshest winter of the 1960s”. There’s also a passing reference to “the incoming Great Avalanche”, which feels like it should feature higher on the Steam page. Squinting at a screenshot, I notice some kind of obelisk on the map called the Astral Door. Is this… is this The Mountains Of Madness in disguise? Mental note: the dog might be one of those dogs from The Thing. Do not leave anyone alone with the dog. Unless it’s that obnoxious celebrity climber Florina. Mental postscript: send Florina and the dog up Yeti’s Asshole. We shall monitor developments.

Above the Snow is out tomorrow, 23rd April. The developers are Above the Desk, who I suspect have a whole string of games in mind with a shared premise of being above something. They’ve got a promotional partnership with Marek Kamiński, an actual Polish explorer who appears to have spent most of his life doing laps between the Arctic and the Antarctic.