Darkness crawls ever more forward into dawn, daylight descends, as nighttime lengthens. As any member of House Stark will tell you: Winter Is Coming. Or maybe its here already, depending on where you’re reading this. Like many gamers, the coming of winter brings in its wake the perfect excuses to hunker down, shut myself in and play video games. Its either going to be too cold, too dark or too wet to go outside. Obviously, I am an advocate of a balanced lifestyle but sometimes it is nice to accept it’s too miserable outside to do anything and the video games can commence.
As well as enjoying indulging in excuses, I’m also a huge fan of topical gaming. As the weather turns, so do my tastes to reflect it. So, at the moment I’m playing what I consider good “winter” games. Here is my non-exhaustive list of some brisk winter games to keep you frozen to your screen.
Long Dark
The first game I think of when I think of winter, gripping, edge-of-your-seat survival in a desperately cold and unforgiving world. This game can be so intense, it should come with a content warning, in fact I was so scared of playing it, it took me at least a year to fire it up for the first time I bought it. The terrifying nature of the game is a testament to its atmosphere, apart from the wolves, there are no enemies or intentional horror elements, it’s just you against the wild. The game takes place in a post-apocalyptic north Canada, so as well as starvation, the other big enemy is the bitter cold. The difficulty means that when you do manage to survive, it’s oh-so-satisfying. If you’re a wimp like me, you can also play on much more forgiving difficulties until you feel ready for the more hardcore survival stuff.
Frostpunk
Another brutalist winter game, this is also a survival game, but it’s about the survival of a society as opposed to the survival of an individual. So instead of lighting a fire and eating berries its more about deciding whether to enforce child labour, or whether to let the people engage in bloodsports. You might think it will be easy to maintain your virtue; however, the increasingly crushing conditions and highly limited resources mean that sooner or later, you will need to make sacrifices. Similar to long dark, the brutal survival mechanics are accompanied by incredible atmosphere, you can really feel the cold and the music is phenomenal, it’s also a fantastic looking game, zooming in to watch your citizens wading through the snow, creating new paths through the perfectly smooth white snow never gets old.
Icewind Dale
The bitter survival games are over now I promise. Now we move onto more comforting coldness. Starting with Icewind Dale, which is an old-school RPG originally released in 2000, but has since gotten an enhanced edition in 2014 which updates it a bit. Similar to Baldur’s Gate (the original), you will control a group of adventurers in the bitter northern regions of the Forgotten Realms. Unlike Baldur’s Gate however, you design your entire party before sending them off on their expedition. As somebody who loves character-crafting and trying different team synergies, this is an incredible feature. The game relies heavily on your own imagination; your party is given no backstory apart from that they’re a band of adventurers who have found their way north. If you’re someone who enjoys meeting and getting to know a cast of fleshed out original characters, this game has none of that. Instead, you fill in the gaps with your own imagination. Also, unlike Baldur’s Gate, there is way more of an emphasis on dungeon crawling and combat, look away if you want more of a sprawling open world RPG, but if you want to create a fellowship and test them in the icy dungeons of the far north, then this will be perfect.
Steep
Now we’re really sliding away from the survival games, even further up the scale of pacifism we now land at Steep. No survival elements, not even any combat. I have unwittingly written these games down in the order and I played them, and it made me realise that after the brutal ice crucible of The Long Dark, the corrupting influence of harsh govern ship in Frostpunk and the relentless dungeon crawling of Icewind Dale I can see why I was ready for some Snowsports. If you’ve played any games like SSX in the past, then you will be familiar with the set up here. Tear it up down slopes on skis or snowboard (as well as wingsuits or a paraglider), performing tricks and trying to maintain speed. It’s the same concept, but with a triple-A coat of paint and a modern open world to traverse between events. Taking place in a beautiful snowcapped mountain range it replaces the idea that cold is a bitter and oppressive thing and turns it into a vibrant and bouncy playground, there’s no punishment here, if you wipe out you simply spawn a few metres back on the track, although of course if you’re racing this can mean the difference between victory and defeat. Personally, I have only ever played time trials, so it was just me and the pristine white slopes, backed up by a suitably coo’ soundtrack.
Obviously this a completely non-exhaustive list, it’s just the games that have grabbed me in the past few weeks. Honourable mentions include Subnautica: Below Zero and Rise of the Tomb Raider and of course no winter game list would be complete without Skyrim. A game I have purchased but not yet played is The Pale Beyond, which is another brutal survival game. It is no doubt that our obsession with harsh winter games is a deep reflection of our innermost primal fear of the cold; the winter must have been the harshest time to be a neolithic human and we have evolved to respect and fear the winter. Luckily for us, we can experience a very small dose of those conditions from the safety of an office chair in a warm room with some hot chocolate. Winter survival games act as a sobering reminder in how far we’ve come as a species, but they also teach us that in these cold and oppressive months, that it’s okay to seek comfort.
