Frosty games to cool you down during a heatwave

Please stay cool today and drink lots of liquids! And stay indoors if you can – it’s absolutely baking outside.

To take the edge off just a little bit, here’s a quick list of some of our favourite chilly video games.

Mario 64 – Cool, Cool Mountain

Journey is synonymous with shimmering dunes of sand, but its climax comes once the legendary mountain-in-the-distance is in the distance no longer. The 90 minutes you’ve played suddenly feel like hours and days, as the snow weighs you down and the drifts threaten to engulf you. This is winter at its most impenetrable – and euphoric.

Edge of Nowhere

Here is a game that celebrates the Lovecraftian nature of the frozen wastes, the ability of snow and ice and blinding whiteness to rob you of all hope. Edge of Nowhere is a lavishly realised VR horror game in which you work your way through the caverns and labyrinths of Antarctica, battling horrors. Insomniac has a flair for ice, whether it’s the milky, glossy ancient ice that cracks when you sink your axe into it, or the stone-like slabs of the stuff that might just make up the bones of demonic temples. A frosty horror!

SnowRunner

Finally a game with the guts to ask: is getting stuck in snow as much fun as getting stuck in mud? The answer is yes, just about, as muddy opening levels steadily give way to frost and sleet and ice. Kill your engine in a snowdrift or lose control on an icy lake – there’s still nothing quite like this series, regardless of the temperature.

Animal Crossing

Possibly the coldest game ever made, Frostpunk is a strategy game and a city builder, but really it’s all about huddling around a chunk of warmth as you build your community outwards and try to keep the heat flowing. Failure means frozen death, and even success sees your people trudging through knee-deep wastes. This is something special.

Skyrim

The peak Skyrim moment of cold, excuse the pun, is when you’re on an early mission to scale the huge mountain in the middle of the map known as the Throat of the World. You know it’s going to be cool when it has a name like that, right? Again, excuse the pun. And it doesn’t take you long to realise how colossal the mountain really is, as you wind and wind around it seemingly endlessly without the summit coming into view – and of course the summit doesn’t come into view until a bit later in the game. This place is central to the story, as you know.