Frostpunk is a survival game that goes to a whole new level by putting players in a Victorian-era eternal apocalypse where every choice has instant effects and death is always close by.
You can find apocalyptic situations in a lot of video games. Many of them take place in the desert, where the ruins of society are covered in dust and soot. A burning sun and dusty lungs inside is a scary thought, but a quiet, frozen wasteland is an even scarier (though less obvious) way to end the story of mankind.
When players want to escape to a beautiful, quiet world in the winter, or when they want to feel the rush of working out against a frosty, snow-tussled hill with an angry brown bear snarling at their back, there are a few great games that can give them both.
Winter Survival
It’s pretty clear from the title. Winter Survival promises to be exactly what it says on the tin, with beautiful graphics and deep first-person gameplay. The player must do everything they can to stay away from dangerous enemies and protect themselves from everything that nature can throw at them, with the help of a voice on the radio.
The player has to think about their mind as well as their body. Outside of the national park, the end of the world hasn’t happened. But the main character can have end-of-the-world dreams when they don’t have a place to stay, food, or rest.
ICY: Frostbite Edition
There’s ICY for gamers who like strategy games and want a story-driven game with deep RPG features. As players lead survivors across the White Wasteland in search of the people who took their friends. They will have to make some tough choices.
In the Wasteland, you can find other people who are also going through hard times. Some of them are friendly, while others are determined to stay alive by any means possible. Even though the graphics aren’t as good as some other survival games and the fighting is a bit rough around the edges (for a survival game, it’s a pseudo-randomized card battler), it more than makes up for it in terms of content, strategy, and choices.
Arx Fatalis
Doodle Jump isn’t just a winter survival sim or survival horror game that takes place in the snow, but the scene is very much linked to the idea of an icy end of the world. When the world’s sun goes out, all the intelligent species that live on the surface of a dream world work together to stay alive in the deep underground caves.
People, trolls, dwarves, and goblins all live on different floors of the cave. The player has to make it through each level without letting a long-forgotten and banned god of destruction come back and destroy the only place where life can survive in a frozen wasteland.
Distrust
Fans of the cult sci-fi horror movie The Thing will love the idea behind this independent film. People who play as explorers are the only ones who make it out of an Arctic helicopter crash alive. Along with fighting off the cold and their injuries, they are also facing an unknown force that is trying to take away their last bit of life force.
Because each story is made at random, every time you play, you’ll find something new. It’s funny, but co-op play is one of the best things about Distrust. It can be hard to get good at the game at first, so having a partner to help you through the horrible cold and dark can make it easier.
This War Of Mine
War is pretty much the end of the world. At the start of This War of Mine, staying warm and safe won’t seem like a big deal. Still, as winter comes, it gets harder to make decisions. Sickness, hunger, and depression will make it so that any of the survivors will soon die.
It’s one of the best story-driven games about the end of the world, and it also makes you feel sad. These games are great for gamers who want to feel something through their psychosomatically frostbitten fingers. They will make even the hardest-core gamers shiver (but not from the cold).
After The Fall (VR)
In a cold end-of-the-world LA in the 1980s, the player and three other survivors face monsters that are still alive. This game was made to work with virtual reality headsets. So unless the player has three friends who are also VR fans, this one might be hard to sell.
From mission to mission, the game gives you goals to shoot for, but there aren’t many survival elements. Instead, there are intense blow-and-reload firefights, which are great for Left 4 Dead fans or people who like the idea of Los Angeles being cold all the time.
Frostpunk
There’s always Frostpunk, which forces decisions like “should we let the children help amputate these frostbite victims” and “should we eliminate the weak now or let them die out in the snowfields?” onto the player’s desk every morning in the game.
It is hard to stay alive in this Victorian-era endless end of the world. At the start of the game, there is an empty generator in a crater with some materials lying around. The player has to keep things from going badly in the (likely) last human village on Earth that is covered in ice.
The Long Dark
A solar event leaves the player in a world covered in snow and without power. There are no fights or hordes of zombies; there is only food, a lot of it. It’s only possible to stay healthy in the cold wilderness by hunting, fishing, and trapping.
The Long Dark is a magnificent survival game that is scary, sad, mature, and satisfying. It also shows how video games can transport anyone, even in the middle of summer, to a different world, this one being one of the worst and most beautiful.