Highlights
- Winter Survival is a visually stunning game that plunges players into a cold, unforgiving world where they must fight deadly predators and battle their own apocalyptic visions.
- ICY offers a strategy-driven experience with deep RPG elements as players lead survivors through the White Wasteland, making tough decisions and interacting with other struggling individuals.
- Frostpunk takes survival to a new level by forcing players to make morally challenging decisions in a Victorian-era eternal apocalypse, where every choice has immediate consequences and death is always looming.
Look anywhere in video games for apocalyptic scenarios, and gamers will find no shortage of doomsday titles set in the desert of dust-and-soot-coated ruins of civilization. While a burning sun above and dusty lungs within is a terrifying premise, the idea of a quiet, frozen wasteland is an equally horrifying (if understated) way to close the book on the story of humanity.
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Whether players just want a beautiful, tranquil escape to a cold world in the summer, or they want to feel the rush of burning muscles working against a frosty, snow-tussled hill with an angry brown bear snarling at their back, there are a few great games that offer those kinds of experiences.
8 Winter Survival
The title almost says it all. With gorgeous graphics and immersive first-person gameplay, Winter Survival sets out to deliver exactly what it says on the virtual tin. Aided by a voice on the radio, the player must do all they can to avoid deadly predators and protect themselves against everything an embittered nature can throw at them.
Not only does the player have to worry about their body, but their mind, too. Although the world hasn't come to an end outside the national park, the protagonist is susceptible to apocalyptic visions without shelter, sustenance, or rest. The game features an open sandbox, a story mode, and a chaotic but fun "against the waves" mode in which the player must try to outlast drastically worsening weather.
7 ICY: Frostbite Edition
For the more strategy-minded gamers looking for a story-driven experience with deep RPG elements, there's ICY. Players can expect to make some tough decisions while leading survivors across the White Wasteland on the trail of the kidnappers who took their friends.
There are other people to be found in the Wasteland with their own struggles, some of them friendly, some of them out to survive by any means necessary. While it doesn't have the most jaw-dropping graphics as other survival titles might, and its combat is (if unique for a survival game being a pseudo-randomized card battler) a little rough around the edges, it makes up for it in terms of content and depth of strategy and choices.
6 Arx Fatalis
This one isn't strictly a winter survival sim or survival horror game set in the snow, but the setting of the game is intricately linked with the idea of an icy apocalypse. When the world's sun fails, all the sentient species on the surface of a fantasy world band together to survive in the deep caverns of the underground.
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Each species (humans, trolls, dwarves, goblins) has made their home on a different floor of the cave. The player must traverse each level to prevent a forgotten and banished god of destruction from returning and wrecking the one place where life can persist under a frozen wasteland.
5 Distrust
Any fans of the sci-fi horror cult classic The Thing will really dig the premise of this indie entry. Players take the role of explorers, survivors of a helicopter crash in the Arctic. While also having to fight off the cold and their injuries, they are confronted with an unknown force intent on sapping their remaining life force.
Each scenario is randomly generated, meaning that each playthrough will offer something surprising. Ironically, one of the best features Distrust has to offer is its co-op play. The game can be very difficult, especially at first, so having a teammate to navigate the horrors of the cold dark can help to lessen the curve.
4 This War Of Mine
War is about as apocalyptic as it gets. As This War of Mine begins, keeping warm and under shelter will not seem like much of a problem. But as winter inevitably approaches, hard choices get harder, and sickness, starvation, and depression will put death just around the corner for any one of the survivors.
Besides being one of the best end-times, story-driven games out there, it also packs a somber, emotional punch. For gamers who want to feel something through their psychosomatically-induced frostbitten fingers, this one is sure to make even the most hard-hearted gamers shiver (but not because of the cold).
3 After The Fall (VR)
Set during a frosty end of the world in 80s LA, the player and three other survivors are set against undead monstrosities. This game was built for virtual reality headsets, which means that, unless the player happens to have three VR enthusiast friends, this one might be a hard sell. But it's a solid offering for VR gunplay and action for those who do have the means to team up.
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While the game offers objectives to gun for from mission to mission, there's much less in terms of survival mechanics and much more in terms of pulse-pounding blow-and-reload firefights, which is perfect for any big fans of Left 4 Dead or those who like the idea of Los Angeles in a permanent winter.
2 Frostpunk
When hauling groups of wandering survivors through five-foot walls of snow and experiencing the madness of white horizons just seems too limited in scope, there's always Frostpunk, which thrusts choices such as "should we let the children help amputate these frostbite victims" and "should we kill the weak now or let them die out in the snowfields?" onto the player's desk each in-game morning.
The struggle to survive in this Victorian-era eternal apocalypse is real. The game begins with an abandoned generator in a crater with a few resources lying around. It's up to the player to prevent everything from going to hell in the (probably) last ice-ridden human settlement on Earth. Every decision is immediately felt and a frigid death is always right around the corner.
1 The Long Dark
A geomagnetic disaster leaves the player in a world filled with snowfall and without power. There are no shootouts or zombie hordes, only hunger and the hunger of wild animals. Hunting, fishing, and trapping is the only way to outlast all the diseases the winter wilderness brings.
Eerie, poignant, mature, and rewarding, The Long Dark is a jewel in the survival genre and is a prime example of the power of video games to rip anyone (even from the heights of summer heat) into another world, this one being one of the bleakest, and most beautiful.