13 Cozy Video Games to Hibernate With This Winter
Reading Time: 7 minutesBecause winter is coming and it’s going to be cozy AF.
If you’ve played video games for any length of time, you’ve traveled through quaint villages and humid jungles, ruined cities, urban sprawl, and mushroom kingdoms. You’ve seen it all. So, you also know that, objectively, the best part of every video game is reaching the eerie calm and preternatural quiet of its winteriest locale. There’s a calm in the silent falling snow, the crunch of your boot underfoot, the supernatural brightness as the sun beams down on sparkling powder. You head inside to cozy up, whether it’s in a home you’ve created, or a safe haven you’ve discovered, and reflect on why we love to spend so much time in these amazing digital worlds.
In the spirit of cozy season, I’ve rounded up a bunch of games with amazing wintery settings—sometimes the whole game, sometimes just a region within a much larger game, but always both frigidly cold, and invitingly warm. Grab a cup of hot cocoa and join me in a winter wonderland.
Animal Crossing is the definitive cozy series, and New Horizons offers the greatest opportunity to bask in glorious snowy winter, and cozy indoor gathering yet. With a quarter of the year devoted to winter, there’s plenty of in-game time to build snowpeople, spruce up your home for visitors, grab a hot coffee to go, and catch snowflakes for crafting. There’s no experience in gaming quite like that first morning every ‘year’ when you boot up Animal Crossing and find it’s snowed over night. Perfection.
(And if you’re looking for winter all year round, its Happy Home Paradise expansion will let you design cozy home and snowy yards whenever your heart desires.)
Price: $59.99
Platforms: Switch
Sure, you’ve visited a lot of snow regions in your JRPGs, but have you visted Santa Claus and everybody’s favourite reindeer (sorry, Blitzen stans), Rudolph? Well, step right up, because Square Enix’s Super NES classic Secret of Mana has you covered. For a game so lush and colorful, the stark contrast of the wintery Ice Country, with its sparkling trees, is extra memorable—and you’re just a canon ride away from Kakkara Desert when you’re ready to warm up.
So, why exactly is Santa in a Japanese RPG? There’s some speculation that the original version of Secret of Mana (which shares its origins with Chrono Trigger, another Square Enix classic on the Super NES) once had polt elements involving time travel and/or real world locations that were eventually cut—which also explains why there’s a subway station later on. The game was famously cut down to fit on a Super NES cartridge when Nintendo’s partnership with Sony for a CD-based console add-on flopped, so we may never know for sure.
Price: $39.99
Platforms: Android, iOS, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Super NES, Switch Windows
Dragon Quest XI gives you every opportunity to explore nooks and crannies as you traverse its gigantic world, but its most impressive feature is how each of the game’s various regions feels like a little world unto itself. Naturally, I’m drawn to its snowy northern region, Sniflheim, and its frozen capital city. Head out into the Snaerfelt or Hekswood and you’ll notice ice floes and log cabins, and where better to warm up than the Royal Library, located a long trek outside the bounds of the city. You can even board a giant enemy called a Face Invader and smash huge ice chunks to unveil the path forward on your quest to unfreeze the capitol city.
Price: $39.99
Platforms: 3DS, PlayStation 4, Stadia, Switch, Windows, Xbox One
Only a small portion of Grandia takes place in a snowy region (shout-out to Laine village!), but it features one of the absolute coziest systems in all of gaming: dining table gatherings. While games like Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Dragon Quest XI, and Tales of Arise all feature a similar system that allows you to connect with your party members at campfires or rest points, no game has done it with quite the charm as the original Grandia. In a game that lives and breathes on its memorable characters, funny dialogue, and team camaraderie, these meal times help develop the characters and the plot in a fun and totally optional way.
Price: $19.99
Platforms: PlayStation, Saturn, Switch, Windows
The Legend of Zelda has some of the gaming’s most beloved worlds, but none compare to the breadth, variety, and sheer potential of Breath of the Wild‘s take on Hyrule. Everyone who’s played Breath of the Wild has countless memories of their time exploring its vast wilderness, including the serene peacefulness of the Hebra Mountains. Breath of the Wild‘s dynamic weather system, along with its day/night cycle, allows the mountains (and the game’s other snowy regions) to cover the gamut from quiet and contemplative to actively hostile. And once you pop into one of the region’s log cabins to cook a meal while the storm passes, you’ll find the textbook definition of coziness. It’s a world to get lost in.
Price: $59.99
Platforms: Switch, Wii U
Baby, it’s cold outside. So, why don’t you come on into your favourite cafe for a chat and a cuppa? I dunno about you, but there’s an elevated quaintness to sitting inside a bustle coffee shop, drowned in conversation and relaxed good cheer, making small talk with other regulars and taking comfort in community. When it’s snowing outside or a winter storm is drumming against the windows? Even better.
Coffee Talk, created by the late Mohammad Fahmi, is a visual novel-style narrative game featuring detailed pixel art graphics, charming dialogue, and a level of coziness that’ll wrap you up like a warm hug. Some games make you feel adventurous, some games make you feel exhilarated, and some games, like Coffee Talk, make you feel like everything’s gonna be alright. And that’s something we need more of in games.
Price: $12.99
Platforms: macOS, PlayStation 4, Switch, Windows, Xbox One
Most people think snow when they picture winter, but for folk in the Pacific Northwest, it’s a little different, and A Short Hike hits that late autumn coziness perfectly (despite being set in Ontario, Canada). From its crisp breeze to towering trees, its relaxing soundtrack to the latent coziness of its Nintendo DS-style visuals, A Short Hike is the perfect game to sink into on a cold winter afternoon, while you dream of warmer days. Set in a tiny sandbox world, it’s a low stakes game that emphasizes exploration, adventure, and good vibes. Wander about, feel the tension leaving your body, and when you’re ready, head for the snowy hills to discover the true meaning of friendship, or winter, or humanity’s parasitic relationship with technology. Or something.
Price: $7.99
Platforms: Linux, macOS, PlayStation 4, Switch, Windows, Xbox One
There are snowy regions, and are snowy regions. Then there’s Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds‘ the Cut—quite possibly the snowiest, coldest, and most hostile area I’ve ever explored in a video game. From deep drifts to hot springs and permafrost, this location, based on Yellowstone National Park, is gorgeous, intricately designed, and chilling to the bone. And when it’s time to catch your breath, you can warm up beside the fires of the Banuk people at Keener’s Rock, or admire the otherworldly beauty of the Grand Prismatic Spring.
Price: $49.99 (Windows), $29.99 (PlayStation 4)
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Windows
2018’s Octopath Traveler debuted Square Enix’s now-ubiquitous 2D-HD graphical style, and though newer games like its 2023 sequel Octopath Traveler II and the recent remaster of Live-A-Live have improved upon the original, there’s still something magical about exploring the frosty, um, land of Frostlands. It serves as the starting location for the cleric Ophelia, one of the eight protagonists who give the game its title, and it remains one of the most memorable regions in all of gaming thanks to the graphical style’s silky bokeh look and ingenious use of particle effects, and a top-tier soundtrack.
Price: $59.99
Platform: Stadia, Switch, Windows, Xbox One
No list of wintery gaming memories is complete without Final Fantasy VII‘s iconic Icicle Inn. Where else can you shred some gnar and collect balloons immediately after your erstwhile love interest was stabbed clean through by a psychotic super soldier? Not only is Icicle Inn buoyed by one of the game’s best songs, it’s also home to some pretty monumental story sequences, and serves as a safe haven for Cloud and his friends (or are they Zack’s friends? I can never quite figure that out) when they pass out from too much time wandering the Great Glacier. Final Fantasy VII Remake took the seven hour Midgar section from the original and stretched it out to over 40 hours—so, by that metric, I expect Final Fantasy VII Rebirth will give us 20 glorious hours of snowboarding at Icicle Inn.
Price: $11.99
Platforms: Android, iOS, PlayStation, PlayStation 4, Switch, Windows, Xbox One
Xenoblade Chronicles 3‘s enormous world offers every climate imaginable, from tropical shores and poison swamps to mountainous death traps, otherworldly jungles, and, of course, the ubiquitous snow region. Quite a feat for a single world traversable by foot to include so many biomes (but to say any more would be a spoiler and a half.) My favorite thing about this snowy area isn’t just that it’s gorgeously lit and serenely cool, but that it offers stunning vistas of the world you’ve been exploring over the previous 60 hours. And, really, what’s cozier than taking a trip down memory lane while gathered around the campfire with your best buds? Bonus points for the characters acknowledging how much it sucks to adventure in sub-zero temperatures in booty shorts. bare arms, and yoga pants. At least Taion’s got a scarf.
Price: $59.99
Platforms: Switch
The word ‘coziness’ usually represents safety and warmth, a reprieve from conflict. Hot chocolate, a good book, a roaring fire. The Long Dark throws all that out the window for a harrowing experience about survival in the harsh winter landscape of northern Canada. To suit every type of player, The Long Dark offers three different way to play—Story Mode, Survival Mode, and Challenge Mode—and they’ll all stretch your self-preservation instincts to the limit. With a newly released expansion, Tales from the Far Territory, there’s never been a better time to explore the treacherous and beautiful far north.
Price: $19.99
Platforms: Linux, macOS, PlayStation 4, Switch, Windows, Xbox One
As established, winter regions are far and away the best setting in Japanese RPGs. So, what’s better than a JRPG set entirely in a winter region? Well, a lot of things, actually. I Am Setsuna is a flawed-but-charming JRPG from Square Enix that stumbles more than it flies, but, boy, if you like wintery settings and incredible piano-driven soundtracks, this is the game for you. Inspired heavily by retro JRPGs like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI, I Am Setsuna experiments with the formula in some clever ways, but ends up being more interesting than good. But, damn does it feel good to wander through the snowy wilderness while listening to an A-tier Square Enix soundtrack.
Price: $39.99
Platforms: PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Switch, Windows