To be honest I preferred the old screenshots; these new ones are very cluttered, and, as such, not really appealing.
I'd really suggest making a custom tileset to replace that default winter one; it hardly needs to be very fancy, since you are, after all, going for a feeling of emptiness.
fanciness or non fanciness, neither has no relation to emptiness. You cannot have "fancy emptiness" nor "non fancy emptiness".
Clutter has relation to emptiness. you can have "cluttered emptiness". Whatever your take on "cluttered emptiness" is, is your opinion.
Do you see what I'm trying to say?
I'm making an environmental level, which also seems empty. You can add more environment to make it more environmental, and you can suck most of the life out of it to make it empty.
I decided to "clutter" the landscape with "empty" objects, e.g I have a custom object for wind. Wind is empty. However it "clutters" the air.
I excluded the "tree" parts of the snowy trees, to make lifeless snowy shrubs.
I make whatever creature which is on the landscape as tiny and/or as "adapted to ice" as possible (lizards, little popping creatures, penguins, sea lions, etc)
I make "mountains", mountains which are colorless and lifeless.
Water rolls down some of these, but still no life reliant on it surrounds it.
I'm not trying to offend or hurt you in any way, or if you think I'm trying to act smart, and I am sorry if it just so happens that you are, however, when I mean "empty", I mean "lonely", or "without life". Do you get what I mean?
And last thing, I, more or less, am very close to Antarctica, and I know much about it. So I implement such knowledge into this level. However for it to be playable as an environmental level, There has to be a more environmental aspect to it. and for it to be a knytt level, it needs to have a more "knytt" like aspect implemented.
I hope you understand that, and hopefully you, in fact, will enjoy the finished product of this level
MUCH better. This is looking like something I'll want to play. 
That's great!
I'm around a quarter of the way through this, so hopefully you'll enjoy it all ^_^