South Park: Snow Day! isn’t meant to be a tough game, but it could be one if you don’t adapt to its mechanics quickly. Our top tips and tricks will help you get through this snow day in one piece.
In short, South Park: Snow Day! is a co-op action game with a roguelike progression system where you have to clear an entire chapter’s worth of enemies to progress the main quest. Not dying once for what could be over an hour of intense battles can be a challenge even to seasoned action players, so we’ve prepared some tips and tricks to ease your way through the blizzard.
Always bring a healing power
You can prepare your loadout before each chapter. You can take along one melee and one ranged weapon, and a couple of special powers. Not all weapons and powers are created equal, and none is more important than the Healing Totem Pole power.
You will probably get hit a lot, and while early-game enemies don’t deal a ton of damage, this all changes later with the introduction of new enemy types. Your health can get depleted within a couple of seconds if you get caught between a few of those hard-hitting enemies. If you don’t have the totem pole with you, you’ll only have the limited healing items scattered around the map and the even more limited healing drops from fallen enemies to lean on. You’re going to have a bad time relying on just those to survive.
It’s unfortunate that you’re pretty much pushed into always reserving one of your power slots for the totem pole, but on the brighter side, when you get good at the game, you can self-impose the challenge of beating it without using the healing power. Then, you can truly unleash the offensive potential of the other special powers.
Don’t be afraid to use your special powers
Speaking of special powers, these are meant to be used as frequently as you can, so use them! Your special powers replenish when you engage enemies in combat, and you can usually fill the entire power bar with just a few hits, which is an obvious sign that the developers intended special powers to be a nearly constant element of combat and not something reserved for special occasions.
It’s easy to fall into the hoarding trap where you’re afraid to use your special powers in case you need them in a tighter spot later, but you shouldn’t worry about that. You’ll have your bar full again before you realize it. I personally learned this the hard way, so don’t repeat my struggles and spam away those powers!
Spend your TP at Jimmy’s
Toilet Paper is one of three currencies in South Park: Snow Day! It is used for upgrading cards at Jimmy’s, giving your weapons and powers buffed stats, and for new moves. The unique thing about TP is that unlike Dark Matter and Platinum Pieces, it does not remain with you after finishing a chapter. Any Toilet Paper you’ve ended the chapter with is irreversibly lost.
This is another hard lesson learned via gameplay, but as soon as I saw my precious TP go in the toilet, I made it a rule to always upgrade as many cards as I could. Toilet Paper isn’t a scarce resource and even a single upgrade can make a huge difference in damage output, so do yourself a favor and use Toilet Paper, please.
Take your time to explore
South Park: Snow Day! being an action game mostly taking place in moderately sized battle arenas may lead you to believe exploration isn’t very useful, but that can’t be further from the truth. There are a couple of incentives to look around every corner of the map, like finding loot and Henrietta, the goth girl.
Loot in this case doesn’t mean weapons or armor: It’s all about the Toilet Paper, Dark Matter, and Platinum Pieces that you’ll get during a playthrough, so unless you purposefully don’t want to upgrade anything, you should take the occasional stroll through the streets of South Park and bash every container you find.
Henrietta is more interesting, as she’s the second card vendor in the game. Jimmy will always spawn in obvious spots, usually near the arena’s exit, but Henrietta is usually well-hidden and easy to miss if you just rush through the level. Her upgrades are more limited, but also more powerful than Jimmy’s, allowing you to do stuff like max all of your upgrades, gain a significant amount of currency, or replenish all your overpowered Bullshit powers. Needless to say, making sure you pick those up will be a major relief on your way to defeating the chapter’s boss.
Going into New Game Plus adds another motivation for exploring. Much like Henrietta, Nichole starts appearing at various spots after you’ve beaten the main quest once, offering you special deals called Infernal Pacts that reward a huge chunk of the game’s cosmetics arsenal, among other upscaled rewards.
Take care of your teammates
Last, but not least, be a good buddy and don’t let your teammates die. In Snow Day, when you lose all your health, you don’t die but get “downed” and your teammates have a chance to revive you. Whether you’re playing online with real folks or solo offline, reviving your downed teammates is crucial, for their and your sake.
South Park: Snow Day! is balanced around four players, so losing even one can quickly spiral out of control, and you will all be dead before you know it. I can’t count the number of times I lost track of my teammates and by the time I realized they were all downed, I had 15 enemies attacking me at once. Be selfish and revive your teammates for your own benefit, the South Park way.
These are our Snow Day tips and tricks that should spare you a lot of headaches. If you want to further enhance your knowledge of the game, then you definitely need to check out our list of the best weapons and best special powers in South Park: Snow Day!
