10 Best Open-World Games That You Need to Play This Winter

Good gravy, it’s a cold one out there. Winter isn’t pulling any punches this year, which means it’s a great time to stay inside and play video games, power and internet permitting. Somewhat paradoxically, though, the winter tends to inflict some with an inescapable wanderlust, which can’t be sated when your car is buried under six feet of snow and surrounded on all sides by sheets of ice.

If you’re stuck at home and feel that need to travel around, rather than risking slipping on black ice, just play an open-world game. There are plenty of open-world games out there that are either directly set in winter seasons and locales, or otherwise embody the distinctive vibes that accompany the cold and quiet months. Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll spend enough time exploring in these games for the snow to melt and spring to arrive. Not that that’d stop me from staying indoors and playing games, but still.

10 Easy Delivery Co.

Always Tip Your Delivery Drivers

I have a personal policy of always going to pick up my own takeout when I can, rather than getting delivery. Besides being cheaper, I just don’t feel the need to burden a delivery driver with something I can do myself. If games like Easy Delivery Co. are any indication, most delivery drivers have enough on their plate as it is.

Easy Delivery Co. is a fairly cozy game about making deliveries in a frigid mountain community for far too little money. You hop in your kei truck, crank the heater, and try not to fall asleep while you drive around town, delivering food, drinks, and other assorted odds and ends, and occasionally popping a corporate-permitted energy drink. When you’re off the clock, you can explore the town and meet the residents, and perhaps uncover a little bit of lore.

While we all love cozy winter vibes, it’s important to remember that winter is not a hospitable season. Easy Delivery Co. has a kind of… pleasantly bleak vibe, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron. You just keep driving and driving, the only thing shielding you from the cold being the caffeine in your system and the warmth of the heater, as well as the quiet sounds of the radio.

9 SnowRunner

It’s Rough Work, But Someone’s Gotta Do it

Speaking of wintery professions, I have a lot of respect for long-haul truckers, especially those that work in the cold season. It’s cold, it’s cramped, and it’s dangerous, but they still put their necks on the line to get our stuff where it needs to be. If you have difficulty conceptualizing the difficulty of this profession, play SnowRunner, and maybe you’ll understand.

SnowRunner is a vehicular simulation game where you hop behind the wheel of various heavy-duty vehicles to deliver materials for construction and repairs through a variety of hostile biomes. As the name implies, snow and ice are two of your most frequent foes, requiring a combination of gutsy charging forward and careful, methodical driving to reach your destination quickly and in one piece.

As you progress, you can upgrade your rig with extra equipment like snow chains for your tires or snorkel exhausts for fording flooded rivers. You can also engage in optional challenges along your routes, which helps to break up the monotony and danger a little bit.

8 Kona

Mysteries Love Blizzards

Winter has long gone hand-in-hand with mystery stories because it’s the perfect natural way to trap characters in their circumstances and obfuscate the truth. When there’s a blizzard about, you can’t just run into the wilderness and away from your problems. Well, unless the solution to your problems is in the wilderness, like in Kona.

Kona is an open-world survival mystery game in which you, as a private detective, need to get to the bottom of the mass disappearance of the residents of a small Canadian town. The town is ravaged by a perpetual blizzard, with hungry predators lurking in the snowy drifts, so you’ll need to constantly keep yourself warm and protected as you conduct your investigation.

Kona also incorporates a psychological horror element, with both the general stress of the blizzard and the occasional upsetting sight wearing on your detective’s nerves. You won’t die from stress, but you’ll run out of breath faster and have a harder time aiming your gun. Winter may be nice when you have a warm home to hole up in, but when you’re all alone against the elements, it’s terrifying.

7 Metro Exodus

Nuclear Winter

A “nuclear winter” is a hypothetical scenario that scientists believe would follow global thermonuclear war. The large quantities of ash and soot propelled into the air by nuclear weaponry would create dense, long-lasting clouds that block out sunlight, causing the surface to completely freeze over. It’s not a nice concept to think about, but if you want to see it anyway, try Metro Exodus.

The third installment of the Metro series of open-world FPSes, Exodus takes the story out of the Moscow Metro tunnels and into the wider nuclear-devastated world. The goal is to cross the entire continent in the hopes of fleeing Russia’s frozen remains in the hopes of brighter shores eastward. As you can probably guess, it’s a pretty bleak story, though a combination of weather effects and a day/night cycle do lend a certain brutal beauty to your journey.

Interestingly, as the story progresses, the seasons will shift slightly and the topography will change. It never completely stops being a nuclear winter, obviously, but you can see little bits of the Earth trying desperately to claw its way back from manmade annihilation. It’s a bleak story, but there’s a kernel of hope at the center.

6 Subnautica: Below Zero

Life by the Icebergs

The vast majority of the continent of Antarctica has been successfully mapped out via satellite imaging technology. This is good, because it takes monumental effort for just a few humans to survive on top of the ice sheet, and the waters below are impenetrably cold. If we had more advanced technology, maybe we could make a go at exploring in person, though if Subnautica: Below Zero is any indication, it still wouldn’t be a walk in the park.

A spin-off of the original Subnautica, Below Zero has you revisit the dark waters beneath the massive oceans of planet 4546B. In addition to that, though, you can now explore the massive ice drifts above the water’s surface, encountering bizarre creatures that have adapted to the sub-zero climate.

You might think exploring on land would be easier, since you don’t have to worry about air, but instead of running low on oxygen, your body heat constantly dwindles. This means you have to regularly set up fires, find warm pools to hop into, or use consumables just to keep from turning into a popsicle. If you find it difficult surviving in this kind of hostile climate, now you know how Antarctic explorers feel.

5 No Man’s Sky

Frosted Planets and the Vacuum of Space

Here’s a fun science fact: the dark side of the Moon is about -338 degrees Fahrenheit, while the light side gets all the way up to 248 degrees Fahrenheit thanks to exposure to the Sun’s rays. Basically, so long as you’re not within spitting distance of a star, space is as cold as cold gets. There’s a lot of that cold space to experience in No Man’s Sky, though there’s plenty of cold on certain planets as well.

As a massive simulated universe, No Man’s Sky has plenty of randomly-generated planets locked in the throes of perpetual winter. Exploring these planets is much different than the standard lush biomes; the frigid temperatures mean that thermic layers are all but required, powerful storms quickly drain hazard protections, and there’s little-to-no flora or fauna.

However, exploring a winter planet presents interesting opportunities. You can harvest frozen resources that can’t be found elsewhere, and if you’re feeling enterprising, you could set up an extensive garden on one. Yeah, the cold makes it hard for plants, but there’s plenty of water to go around!

4 Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales

The City Done Up in Lights

If you’ve never visited Manhattan during the holidays, it’s quite a sight to behold. There are lights everywhere, steam rising up from sewer vents, and a lot of dirty snow piled up on sidewalks. It’s nicer than I’m making it sound, genuinely, but if you’d rather stay off of street level while taking in the sights, there are few better ways to do it than in the booties of a Spider-Man. Specifically, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

Miles’ interquel between the first and second Insomniac Spider-Man games is set in the midst of winter, right on the cusp of the holiday season. New York City is done up in lights, with the streets covered in festive decorations and everyone sporting trenchcoats and earmuffs. Since the game maintains the same free-swinging open-world travel as its predecessor, you can swing through this urban winter wonderland with ease, taking in the sights and busting the occasional punk.

The time of year doesn’t really have that much bearing on the overall plot, beyond perhaps that Roxxon’s Nuform reactor is hooked into Harlem’s power grid, and its instability could end up cutting power to the whole neighborhood. If there’s anything that warrants a spider-intervention, it’s ensuring New Yorkers don’t die of exposure.

3 Death Stranding

Quiet Loneliness

I think my favorite thing about the height of the winter season is the all-encompassing quiet that settles in after a snowstorm in the middle of the night. There’s no rustling trees, no chirping birds, no noisy crickets, just complete and utter silence, only broken up by an occasional gust of wind. While it’s not exactly snow-covered, I think Death Stranding best embodies that particular flavor of isolation and quiet.

The entire ethos behind Death Stranding is that humanity has been forced to isolate itself in a variety of closed-off shelters and cities to protect themselves from the titular supernatural event. Sam, as one of the few brave couriers and bridgers, is completely and utterly alone for the vast majority of the game as he hikes through the wilderness, some of it ordinary plains, some of it covered in snow.

Even if the goal is to gradually link humanity through new roads and the Chiral Network, Death Stranding does give you plenty of time to properly appreciate its inherent quiet, a state not unlike the one I described. Granted, that quiet is occasionally disrupted by a bandit or BT, but just think of it like getting mauled by a moose in the woods or something.

2 God of War: Ragnarök

There’s No Winter Like Fimbulvetr

In Norse mythology, Fimbulvetr (or Fimbulwinter, if you prefer) is the state of the world that immediately precedes Ragnarök, the end of all things. It’s a multi-year period of bitter cold and constant snow, without a single ray of sunshine in sight. It’s not fun, to say the least, but our man Kratos has braved worse, and he did the same in God of War: Ragnarök.

God of War: Ragnarök is a fully-realized depiction of the Norse realms in the throes of Fimbulvetr, triggered by Baldur’s death at Kratos and Atreus’s hands in the previous game. You can find many of the locales from the first game completely choked by snow and ice, with blizzards buffeting at every turn and entire lakes freezing over. It’s the kind of cold no one in their right mind would set foot into, but Kratos’s godly disposition makes travel safe, or at least safe enough.

Covering the rebooted God of War formula in snow is a fun way to encourage you to explore locales you may have previously visited, as well as give a sense of impending doom to Kratos’s looming conflict with the Norse pantheon. It’s a very thematic winter.

Visit High Fantasy Norway

Speaking of Norsemen, if you’re looking for a place that knows how to make winter cool, pun unintended, you should visit Norway. If you can’t afford a flight to Norway, the next best thing would probably be booting up The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and taking the time to explore the titular region.

Skyrim is the home of the Nords, which apparently translates to “sons-of-snow” in Draconic. This is why a large portion of the game’s region is either constantly covered in snow or at least a little bit chilly. Part of what made Skyrim such a landmark game back when it first released was its commitment to fully rendering this previously undepicted region of Tamriel, from its massive frosted peaks to its deep, windy valleys. Obviously, the topography is nothing like real-life Norway, but it’s a similar vibe.

The heavy winter also lends itself well to Skyrim and Elder Scrolls’ overall high fantasy setting. It’s one thing to beat up a dragon with your bare hands, but beating up a dragon with your bare hands in the midst of a snowy drift? That’s some Bear Grylls stuff right there, the epitome of wild dominance.