Haberler
Let it snow: seven games that celebrate winter wonderlands
J
John Walker
We’re going to take quite a trip through the genres here, with everything from downhill snow sports to terrifying survival sims inspired by old Nordic campfire tales.
Steep
Steep keeps things simple: here are the Alps, now go down them. How you do that is very much up to you, be it skiing, snowboarding, paragliding, wingsuit-flying, sledding, base jumping, or speed-riding.
A very quick opening tutorial gets you used to the controls for basics like wingsuits and snowboards, and then you’re just let loose on the slopes to complete challenges at your whim. Fancy paragliding off a mountain? Go do that. Want to ski some rough routes? All yours.
Steep rules for its immediacy, the lack of faff between runs, and the pure high-octane thrill of hurtling downhill without worrying about those seven weeks you might spend in the hospital. But we must make a special mention of its snow: Not just the way your board cuts grooves through the thick pile, but more than anything else, the creaky, scrunchy sound of the crunch itself.
The Long Dark
It’s hard to think of two more strikingly different snow-based games than Steep and The Long Dark. Although if someone decided to make a combination of the two, it’d probably be the best game ever made.
The Long Dark is all about being trapped on a snow-covered island northwest of Canada, where your enemy isn’t zombies, aliens, or genetically engineered dinosaurs, but something far more terrifying and brutal: real life. This is a game about being cold, as well as the permanent struggle to stave off hunger, thirst, hypothermia, and wolves. God, the wolves.
Over its many years since release, The Long Dark has evolved several times. It began as an open-ended survival sim, but it now offers over 30 hours of story-led struggle alongside all manner of modes to challenge you. It’s one of the toughest games out there, not because it pits you against epic boss fights, but because it’s just so damned cold and there’s so little to burn.
Frostpunk
Frostpunk approaches snowy survival from a very different angle than The Long Dark. Instead of a solitary survivor in an abandoned town, here you control an entire society that attempts to maintain a town in the face of the hostile winter.
Charged with building the last city in the world, your goal here is to build and run a civilization for the survivors of an apocalypse, maintain law and order, and eventually send out people to learn what led to this situation. Oh, and it’s set in the late 19th century. Sorry, I should have mentioned that.
Obviously, you’ll be doing a lot of resource management in this volcanic winter, but the snowy climes mean you’ve also got to constantly worry about the temperature. Frostbite is an ever-present danger, and buildings will just stop operating if the temperature drops below -4 degrees Fahrenheit. These competing goals will present some pretty tricky moral decisions. Because, you know, when you’re the last people on Earth and everything is a fight for survival, are you okay with a little child labor to help grease the wheels?
There’s a sequel due next year, so now’s a great time to get into the alt-history city-builder.
Skábma: Snowfall
Set in the Nordic regions of Sápmi (Lapland), Skábma: Snowfall is a game based on the folklore of the Sámi people, who have lived in the region for thousands of years. You play as Áilu in this third-person platform adventure, and she's on the hunt for a runaway reindeer.
If you’ve seen Bambi, you’ll know that cute does don’t tend to last long in cartoon adventures, but its early demise sets Áilu off on a quest to restore balance to nature by finding four spirit guardians that grant her new abilities. A shamanic drum guides her way, which also highlights hidden collectables and secret paths. This is a gentle, traditional tale perfect for the holiday season.
Röki
More Nordic myths appear in Röki, a gorgeous point-and-click adventure reimagined for the modern day. Tove and Lars are two young children living in a remote house with their father in what might be rural Norway. There has been a recent tragedy—the loss of their mother—and their father seems to spend his days drunk and asleep. Tove is trying to keep everything together, cooking for the family and raising her younger brother. One night, she’s reading him a bedtime story about a jötnar when an enormous jet-black monster reaches through the upstairs window and attempts to grab them.
In the ensuing panic, the monster knocks down much of the house, and wooden beams fall on their father. Lars is eventually captured by the jötnar, and Tove is left alone to try to recover her brother. As you might have gathered, this isn't the cheeriest of starts.
Despite its bleak setting in the snowy Nordic hinterlands, Röki has an oddly bright tone. You move Tove around like a third-person character despite the 2D presentation, dragging items from her inventory onto objects to interact with them. Due to its fairytale leanings, characters are fun and peculiar, and lots of adventure game logic applies to its puzzles. The snowy climes of Scandinavia lend it a magical presence.
Blanc
Blanc really leans into the cutesy loveliness of a snowy woodland scene. This game belongs to an all-too-rare genre: the one-player co-op, where you control two characters at the same time on one controller.
On the left of the screen is a little black wolf pup, on the right a young deer. Not natural friends, the two are separated by the landscape, but they're trying to reach one another. You control them, independently but simultaneously, until they eventually meet and work together.
This is all presented in a lovely monochrome that gives the 3D game the look of a pencil and charcoal sketch—eminently suitable for the snowy setting. Getting used to simultaneous control might take a bit, but the game will allow you to switch between either if it gets too much for one brain. You can also switch the game to Duo Mode, which allows two people to play at the same PC together.
A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build
Anyone who’s attempted to build a snowman in real life will attest to the fact that it’s not as easy as it appears in cartoons. There, all you need to do is roll three perfect balls, toss them on top of each other, and add sticks and clothing. In real life, that tends to end up looking like a mutant horror melting in the sun’s cruel light. So, if anything, A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build at least addresses this issue. It makes building cartoon snowmen incredibly difficult too.
This is a super-tough puzzle game from the mind that brought us A Monster’s Expedition. It’s Sokoban meets Mensa: You attempt to roll three balls of different sizes and then stack them on top of each other, only done in restrictive spaces where you need to think 30 million steps ahead. But that’s OK, because you're building snowmen, and that makes up for a lot of head-scratching and frustration. Snow is magic!