Ranked: the best snow in videogames

The great thing about being knee-deep in snow in a game, of course, is that in actual fact you’re sitting down in your house with a cup of tea, some soft lighting, and with easy access to biscuits.

It’s that juxtaposition that makes videogame winter so enjoyable. The absolute smugness of making your protagonist fight for their life against the elements while you sit somewhere comfy. It’s a good job they’re not sentient. Yet. 

We’ve charted the furthest frozen tundras, sent some black runs down gaming’s biggest mountains, and gracefully powerslid around its slippiest rally courses in our search for the best snow in interactive media, and the time has come to publish our findings. The academic world will doubtless never be the same, and maybe you’ll get a few additions to your winter playlist.

Sweden is consistently ranked among the happiest nations in the world, in spite of its cold climate and dark winters. And while it probably has something to do with a strong social safety net, great healthcare, a culture of modesty and regular saunas, surely the roads have something to do with it?

That’s our prevailing thought whenever we take to EA WRC’s Rally Sweden stages, each a joyous snake of frozen undulations through pine forests that tests your countersteering skill to its breaking point. In fact if it wasn’t for your roaring engine and the vast cloud of displaced slow you leave in your wake, this would be among the most peaceful snowy locations in virtual media.

Sony Santa Monica’s always had a knack for achieving incredible production quality, and they proved it all over again in 2022 when their take on mythological Scandinavia made Skyrim look like an Etch-a-Sketch. A brutal, icy hinterland where Kratos and his son bond over a mutual appreciation for hitting people really hard, it saw the God of War series continue its evolution into open world design and counters the many stern combat challenges it throws at you with nigh-constant breathtaking vistas. Fair deal.

It’s typical of master storytellers Rockstar that Red Dead 2 pulls off such a clever subversion of your expectations in its opening hour. Here’s a sequel to the famous wild west open world game that let you roam among the cacti and the dusty plains, and it’s having you trek through the snow and hunker down in a ramshackle farm building for the winter with your party, trying to stave off disease.

Without such a narrow, claustrophobic, chilly opening, you wouldn’t enjoy the subsequent freedom the game gives you once you clear the prologue. Since you started off trudging through snowdrifts in leather boots, it feels liberating to now be riding a horse under the sun. A lesson in open world game design that many studios in 2024 would do well to swot up on.

People forget about Steep. Ubisoft’s open world winter sports odyssey was notionally replaced by Riders Republic in 2021, which added more disciplines like downhill mountain biking but - heartbreakingly - ditched the alpine setting.

But Steep got the feel of hurtling down a gradient on a frictionless length of fibreglass so correct. The terror and exhilaration, the satisfaction of carving - checks notes - ‘sick lines’... it was all here. It was so good that it even became the platform for the official 2018 Winter Olympics game tie-in.

What people also forget is how profoundly strange this game is. There’s a sentient mountain, and he talks to you. He dares you to take on challenges, and encourages you to take a few minutes out to meditate now and then. More weirdness like this please, Ubisoft.

What a strange joy Snowrunner is. Essentially a haulage sim, it makes driving very slowly over lumpy ground feel like Need For Speed with spike treads. It also features, frostbitten hands down, the most physically accurate frozen water particles we’ve ever got ourselves stuck in. Feel free to use that quote for your promo materials, Saber Interactive. 

And you’d expect that, really, from an offroad driving sandbox series like this where the pleasure is in finding a way from A to B across the most inhospitable terrain possible. The way its surfaces deform beneath your sizeable tyre tracks has always been impressive, but out here in the Alaskan tundra, winter is simulated so accurately that Michael Bublé himself would be reaching for a second Christmas jumper.