Winter is a season often tied in with endings, death, sorrow, and the macabre. Leaves wither and die, trees stand aloft like forgotten skeletons of a bygone era, and the lush greenness of spring, summer, and fall is swapped with cloudy weather and heavy snowfall. Furthermore, winter drags the night—darkness—into earlier hours in the day. Daylight loses in the winter. Thus, winter has an inherent spookiness about it. Yes, it is quiet, peaceful, and brings about the holiday season, but it is also ushers in an unshakeable melancholy. Winter is the perfect setting for anything horror-related—longer nights means that monsters and ghouls and ghosts can prowl even longer.
Many video games capitalize on winter as a form of horror in and of itself, and without further ado, here are 7 of the best winter-set horror video games. I hope you brought a jacket (and maybe a flashlight or a shotgun, depending on the situation).
7. Dead Space 3
Dead Space 3 is often seen as the black sheep of EA’s seminal third-person survival-horror series. But the bulk of its runtime takes place on a messed up, twisted version of Hoth. And, in the eyes of this writer, it may just be the scariest title in the series. It uses internal horror (the fractured mind of Isaac Clarke) to emphasize the horrific events going on around Isaac. Dead Space 3 broadens the horror canvas of the series and this expansion in scope and freedom-of-movement leads to some of the most unsettling moments in the series.
Many of these moments happen in broad daylight, where the sun reflects blindingly off of snow. Deep snow often hides unspeakable horrors and, in Dead Space 3, such horrors are often punctuated with torrents of blood and viscera. White snow turns red, but Isaac keeps moving onward and, well, what lies ahead is often scarier than what came before.
6. Don’t Starve
Klei’s Don’t Starve—a survival game infused with the quirkiness of turn-of-the-century weird tales—is not wholly set during the winter, but the parts of the title that use winter are unforgettable in just how lonely and unforgiving they are. Many survival stories take place in the winter and Don’t Starve really emphasizes just how terrible it all is. You’re always cold, hungry, and that fire you built with sticks and damp underbrush will never be as warm as you want it to be. Few things are as scary as being stuck with no rescue in sight, your only ticket to freedom is to press on, to endure. Winter makes that 100x harder.
Frigid, dark, and unrelenting—winter may bring about beautiful landscapes, but buried beneath those snow-capped hills are the frozen bones of travelers who made one wrong turn. Also in Don’t Starve, you better be on your best behavior. Someone is making a list and checking it twice—Krampus is afoot.
5. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
The Silent Hill franchise is like a roller coaster. It has its ups and downs and, when it is at a peak, the series is often a fascinating take on psychological horror. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is one such peak. Set in the town of Silent Hill, Shattered Memories feels like if the first game got steeped in perpetual winter. Everything is cold, frozen, and caked in snow. Ice sticks everything together. Nothing seems to move. It is almost like winter has bound the town of Silent Hill in place, but stranger things are afoot.
Time may be moving forward, it may not be, and everything starts to fold in on itself. Shattered Memories uses winter to evoke a sense of near-cabin-fever in the protagonist (and player, proxy) and untouched snow has a certain way of making one feel utterly and wholly alone. But there is always something watching, lurking just out of sight, and as snow fractures and compounds under the foot of the player, it does too for the otherworldly horrors around every corner.
4. Dead Rising 4
Endless zombies, a mall, Christmas, a man with a chainsaw tied to a stop sign—Dead Rising 4 is exactly what it aims to be. There are zombies and you have weapons that kill them. What comes next? Violence, death, undeath. Dead Rising 4 has it all and it chooses a mall in a cold winter town as its setting. Christmas lights shine off of white snow and that light starts to fade as the snow turns red and becomes obfuscated under the growing piles of undead that Frank West leaves in his MacGyver-from-Hell-like wake. Dead Rising 4 leans into the inherent comedy and zaniness of horror and, like Evil Dead 2, does so with a wink and a nod.
Yes, it ain’t no Evil Dead 2, but there is just something oh-so-satisfying about vivisecting a zombie with a giant candy cane as Christmas music plays through Willamette mall’s crummy speaker system.
3. Frostpunk
Frostpunk may not be the first game that comes to mind when you think of winter-set horror video games. It may not even be the second or third, but after playing it one will understand why it should come to mind. Frostpunk is a steampunk, apocalyptic city-building survival game where the world is beset with endless winter. Temperatures are uninhabitable and the only thing keeping your settlement alive is a giant heat-spewing generator. As the sun dims, these generators flicker to life in the long snowy dark. Cities live or die by how they’re planned around and citizens will do anything to keep the generators running.
But will you, the city planner, do anything? Frostpunk confronts players with harrowing choices such as using child labor to keep the city alive or turning entire populations away because you lack the resources to welcome them to your already-shaky society. The horror of Frostpunk comes through the choices it poses its players with, and those choices are born out of the dangers of winter. Furthermore, the title weighs heavy with an unshakeable nihilistic tone. Nothing is scarier than death and Frostpunk doles it out on a minute-to-minute basis.
2. The Long Dark
Few video games are as unrelenting as Hinterland Studio’s The Long Dark. It is a realistic survival game set in the Canadian wilderness after some undefined global disaster. Players must eat, sleep, find warmth, and fend off wild animals. Winter is an unstoppable force and no game gets winter just as right as The Long Dark. It wraps the player in its cold embrace and refuses to let go—even after you starve, get gutted by a polar bear, and fall asleep in the cold never to wake up again. It feels like real winter and that is why it works so well as a horror title.
It is almost always dark and every aspect of The Long Dark feels unrelenting. Things may be going your way but then a wolf corners you and howls for its friends to join him. All you have is a lighter and a crudely sharpened stick. What will you do to survive?
1. Until Dawn
Until Dawn, by Supermassive Games, was released in 2015 to various degrees of praise. Using roughly the same gameplay and branching choice-based narrative structure of the all-too-flawed Heavy Rain, Until Dawn takes the branching narrative formula into the realm of 80s slasher ephemera. There are dumb teens, bad sex, bloody endings, and it is fun all the way through. Winter is a key character in Until Dawn—characters complain about the frigid cold, some get snowed into various locales, and there just might be something inhuman lurking beyond the white wall of falling snow. Until Dawn leans more into the dark fun of horror rather than sheer terror.
Things go bump in the night, but the overall atmosphere is rarely one of dread. Instead, it is just plain fun to see what awful endings the cruelest and yappiest of teens in Until Dawn can have, and on the flip side, it feels good to steer one’s favorite characters through the game relatively unscathed by the time the credits roll. Snow crunches, hot cocoa is made, and Until Dawn revels in the utter coziness and disparate isolation of winter—that is until some annoying teen comes into frame, says something eye-rolling, and then gets disemboweled. Sound familiar?
Honorable Mention: Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
Is Donkey Kong, a somewhat human-like gorilla who is always naked minus a tie, inherently scary? Yes, obviously. Whether it be the crippling collectathon horror of Donkey Kong 64, the gangly monstrosity that is Lanky Kong, or the memories of getting little-to-no sleep when my younger brother fell head-over-heels in love with Donkey Kong: Jungle Beat (damn you, bongos), Donkey Kong has always unsettled me. But the series’ great music and comedic character design have always brought me back around.
Enter Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze. Here is a title that tested all of my platforming might (which is meager to begin with) and then laughed in my face as DK plummeted to his death time and time again. Ice, snow, and a, well, tropical freeze makes this title a winter video game and how such a cute game is so damn hard makes it all-too-scary.
