Enchanting and a little eerie, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth is the second great game in as many years based on the classic children’s books
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leepy, happy-sad, and imbued with the mildest peril, Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories may seem an unlikely fit for the action-heavy medium of video games. Rather than embark on swashbuckling adventures, these milk-white, hippo-esque creatures prefer to potter about Moominvalley, only venturing further if the weather conditions are just right.
Yet a small Norwegian video game studio, Hyper Games, is now on its second exquisitely charming Jansson adaptation. The first, 2024’s Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley, put players in control of the wily free spirit, Snufkin, as he dismantled overly ordered nature parks (and evaded authority-loving wardens). The latest, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth, sees young Moomintroll wake up at night in the dead of winter. With his parents still hibernating, the creature is all alone, thrust into a cold and unfamiliar world.
On this lonesome journey, Moomintroll must reckon with the idea that his snoozing parents won’t be around for ever. “[It is] a brush with mortality,” says lead writer David Skaufjord, who sees the premise, an adaptation of the 1957 novel Moominland Midwinter, as emblematic of a franchise which dares to challenge its younger audience with loss, grief, melancholy and nostalgia. “Children’s television can be soft-handed,” he says. “The Moomin stories aren’t.”
