It reminds me of Elfman aswell as it is quite popular sounding. Trying developing the ideas more and having less repetition of harmonic progressions if you want to get away from that, not that you would :) Great.
Reviews for "Exploration"
very nice. Its a good piece of music. I dont say this often but i could get immersed in this. If you made it a tad bit longer to it would really tie things together.
It's a very good piece of music, however I felt that the xylophone became too hard (at least it sounded like a xylophone). I recommend "The Ice dance", beginning of it, by Elfman, the composer of Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands".
It also reminded me some of the music from Fable. Not sure of any relations between that and your score, it's just my mind playing around :)
Other than that it's a very nice score, and coming from someone that lives around snow and ice around 6 months of the year, it does give that feeling when snow is falling from the sky, or the landscape changes into something never seen before, transformed by the power of the snow that fell the day before. That's something magical about it :)