8 Best Adventure Games That You Need to Play This Winter

3 hours ago 1

Published Feb 9, 2026, 2:43 PM EST

Daniel has been playing games for entirely too many years, with his Steam library currently numbering nearly 750 games and counting. When he's not working or watching anime, he's either playing or thinking about games, constantly on the lookout for fascinating new gameplay styles and stories to experience. Daniel has previously written lists for TheGamer, as well as guides for GamerJournalist, and he currently covers tech topics on SlashGear.

Have you ever had an older relative tell you they had to walk fifteen miles in the snow to get to school every day? Obviously, most of those kinds of stories are exaggerated, but there is something about the winter season that makes a journey feel longer and more oppressive. The cold silence, the dim conditions, and the melted snow pooling in your socks make you acutely aware of just how far and how long you’ve been trudging around, just trying to reach a safe haven.

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It’s not the most pleasant thing to experience yourself, but it does make a compelling setting for an adventure game. Some adventure games use the constant threat of freezing to light a proverbial fire under you, forcing you to hustle from place to place to preserve warmth, while others merely use the winter as set dressing, a little extra vibe to hammer home the oppression of a particular locale. Either way, if, for whatever reason, you want some even colder adventures to accompany the winter season, these are the games you should try.

8 The Thing

The Original Spooky, Snowy Adventure

John Carpenter’s The Thing is one of the all-time classic horror films, a tale of a group of researchers in an Antarctic outpost who have found themselves infiltrated by a shapeshifter. Despite being released back in 1982, it has an enduring legacy. How do I know? It got its official video game in 2002, and that got a remaster in 2024.

Rather than an adaptation, The Thing is a sequel to the events of the film, with two teams of U.S. Special Forces agents venturing to the outpost in an effort to figure out what the heck happened. Our protagonist, Captain Blake, investigates the facility and nearby in search of answers, while being hounded by the Thing’s many shapeshifting creatures.

What was interesting about this game, especially for its original release, was the trust system used by your NPC squadmates. You never know who’s a Thing in disguise, after all, and if your squadmates think you’re a Thing, they’ll either ignore your orders or try to kill you. You need to keep your team calm before they fly off the handle, while also maintaining a healthy skepticism in case they end up being Things themselves.

7 Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

Kill Bugs, Get Warmth

Here’s a fun science fact: the occurrence of liquid water is stupidly rare in the observable galaxy. That’s why Earth is the only place we can truly call home, because it’s only available in abundance here. I guess if we ever needed another planet, we could settle for one covered in ice, at least assuming something else doesn’t already live there like in Lost Planet.

Lost Planet is an action-adventure game in which rogue soldier Wayne Holden tries to both break the iron grip of a spacefaring megacorp over the planet EDN III and destroy its native inhabitants, the insectoid Akrid. EDN III could be humanity’s next home, except it’s in the midst of a major ice age that can only be safely traversed with mechs called Vital Suits.

Because of the harsh conditions, your Vital Suit is constantly bleeding thermal energy, which you can only replenish by killing enemies and siphoning it from them, or launching yourself out of your cockpit onto an enemy VS and hijacking it. It’s one of those settings where the use of mechs makes a lot of mechanical sense, but that also means you’re effectively defenseless if you’re ever forced to abandon yours.

6 Puzzle Agent

Your Tax Dollars at Work

There’s something about small towns in snowy climates that are perfect for an old-fashioned mystery, supernatural or otherwise. Only a few people to meet, isolated conditions, maybe some fae folk in the woods; it’s a perfect kind of adventure for a fledgling sleuth. Or, in the case of Puzzle Agent, an FBI agent.

Puzzle Agent follows Nelson Tethers, top (and only) agent of the FBI’s Puzzle Research Division. On assignment from the President, he’s sent to the sleepy, snow-covered town of Scoggins, Minnesota to investigate the mysterious closure of the local eraser factory, only to find himself embroiled in a supernatural conspiracy that encompasses the entire town. With art from Grickle’s Graham Annable, it’s a game with a very distinctive vibe; quiet, unassuming, but with a certain darkness beneath.

As one of Telltale Games’ pre-Walking Dead works, Puzzle Agent is a point-and-click adventure, albeit with a brain-teaser slant. As you investigate the town and question its residents, you encounter various self-contained logic puzzles, and solving them will reveal new information and clues. Also, every time you send in a puzzle for processing, it costs taxpayers thousands of dollars!

5 The Long Dark

Dang, Canada, You Scary

With the world getting smaller and smaller these days, it’s very easy to forget that there are still long stretches of land in many countries that are, effectively, completely empty. You feel like you’re always connected, always within easy distance of a safe haven, until, in The Long Dark, you find yourself in one of the most inhospitable stretches of nothing in the world.

The Long Dark is a survival game in which you crash-land in a big slice of the Canadian wilderness in the midst of both a regular snowstorm and a geomagnetic storm, which means no phones, low visibility, and encroaching cold. You have to move fast to secure food and shelter, preserving your calories to withstand the elements and keeping up your body heat to keep from turning into a block of ice.

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The game’s standard mode is a permadeath survival sim, but it also has an episode story adventure mode, wherein you flip perspectives between your crashed pilot, Will Mackenzie, and his companion, Dr. Astrid Greenwood, as they work independently to find each other and explore nearby towns for the truth about this vicious storm.

4 Rise of the Tomb Raider

Visit Scenic, Snow-Covered Ruins

The idea of being an archetypal Hollywood archeologist is already pretty intimidating, what with all the traps and snakes and giant, rolling boulders. If you add frigid temperatures and blinding snowstorms on top of that, it’s not really a healthy career path. That never seems to stop Lara Croft in Rise of the Tomb Raider, though.

A follow-up to the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot, Rise of the Tomb Raider sees Lara searching for the lost city of Kitezh and its supernatural legends. This journey takes her all over the world and to a variety of locales, though the bulk of the adventure is in snowy, mountainous biomes. This is reflected in some of Lara’s tools of choice, such as an ice axe that can be used for both climbing slippery surfaces and, occasionally, caving in skulls.

When you’re not delving into actual tombs, you need to get a little more in touch with nature, either hunting down local wildlife to craft into weapons and useful tools, and sneaking up on the soldiers of the mysterious paramilitary organization pursuing you and gently persuading them from being alive.

3 Until Dawn

Couldn’t We Have Gotten Drunk at a Non-Abandoned Ski Lodge?

You know how I mentioned snowy, isolated locales are great for mysteries? Well, they’re also great for slasher horror stories. It’s bad enough when you’re trapped by snow, but try being trapped alongside one or potentially more murderous entities. That’s the thesis statement behind Until Dawn, a send-up to the bottle-episode slasher films of old.

Until Dawn is a cinematic choose-your-own adventure story in which a group of teens visiting an abandoned ski lodge for a party find themselves hounded by both mad killers and supernatural monsters. The bulk of the gameplay is in decisions and quick-time events; as the story unfolds, you need to keep your hands on the controller and be ready to intervene when someone starts losing their foothold or needs to pick a path to take.

The game’s big hook is in its butterfly effect system, wherein choices and successes affect how the story unfolds. Fittingly, the game occasionally plays tricks on you, using the poor visibility of the snowy mountain to make some paths seem more or less dangerous than they actually are. You ever wonder why horror movie characters always make bad decisions? Well, you try making a snap choice in a pitch-black snowstorm.

Don’t Take Anti-Freezing Peptides from Strangers

Metal Gear Solid Master Collection gameplay

I know nothing about covert military operations, but I can hazard a guess that having to undertake such operations in the midst of a snowstorm is pretty miserable. I guess that’s just the difference between me and Metal Gear Solid’s Solid Snake; when he has to infiltrate a terrorist-occupied, snow-choked island, he just gets right on with it instead of complaining.

The original Metal Gear Solid is a stealth action-adventure, in which you, as Solid Snake, must infiltrate Shadow Moses Island in order to deactivate the nuclear-armed Metal Gear REX. At the beginning of the game, Snake receives a little injection of anti-freezing polypeptides, so he won’t freeze to death at least. This is good, because there are many sections throughout the game where you’ll need to sneak about snowy exteriors, dodging or disabling patrolling troops who could track you down if you leave footprints in the wrong place.

Some of Metal Gear Solid’s most iconic moments take place in the midst of the intense snowstorm, such as the battle against Sniper Wolf and her canine companions out in the middle of a snowfield.

1 Resident Evil Village

This is Why You Don’t Vacation in the Winter

The Resident Evil series has dabbled a bit with cold and wintery conditions, with Revelations in particular springing to mind. For the most part, though, those games followed capable agents like Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, and with partners at that. What if you were completely alone in a frozen hellhole teeming with winter-resistant beasts? Well, then you’d understand the pressure Ethan Winters faces in Resident Evil Village.

The eighth mainline Resident Evil game, Village follows Ethan a few years after the less-than-pleasant events of the previous game, with him in witness-protection with Mia and his newborn daughter Rose. Unfortunately, circumstances conspire to dump him in the midst of a snow-choked village in Eastern Europe, searching for the kidnapped Rose and dodging attacks by a band of mutated, monstrous individuals.

Village doesn’t use its cold setting to inform gameplay in any particular way, but it does make for great set dressing. The first major locale, Castle Dimetrescu, has a very distinct dichotomy between its quiet halls and the raging snowstorm outside, bolstered whenever you have to break a window and let the cold in.