The enchanting and slightly eerie world of Tove Jansson's Moomins has found a new home in video games, with the release of Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth, the second delightful adaptation from Norwegian studio Hyper Games in as many years. The game captures the sleepy, happy-sad essence of the classic children's books, imbued with the mildest peril, making it a surprisingly fitting fit for the interactive medium.
Embracing the Unlikely Medium
At first glance, the milk-white, hippo-esque Moomins may seem ill-suited for action-heavy video games. Rather than embarking on swashbuckling adventures, they prefer to potter about Moominvalley, venturing further only when weather conditions are just right. Yet Hyper Games has successfully translated Jansson's unique charm into two games: the 2024 release Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley and the latest, Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth.
In Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley, players controlled the free-spirited Snufkin as he dismantled overly ordered nature parks and evaded authority-loving wardens. Now, Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth follows young Moomintroll as he wakes up in the dead of winter, alone and thrust into a cold, unfamiliar world while his parents hibernate.
A Brush with Mortality
Lead writer David Skaufjord explains that the game's premise, an adaptation of the 1957 novel Moominland Midwinter, forces Moomintroll to reckon with the idea that his parents won't be around forever. "It is a brush with mortality," Skaufjord says, noting that the franchise dares to challenge younger audiences with themes of loss, grief, melancholy, and nostalgia. "Children's television can be soft-handed," he adds. "The Moomin stories aren't."
In the first 20 minutes of the game, the freezing temperatures claim the life of a squirrel. Too-Ticky, the androgynous woman living alone in Moominpappa's boathouse, offers a philosophical perspective: "Death is a part of life," she says serenely. "Something is always changing." This moment encapsulates Jansson's work, which finds meaning in life's transitions—from humid summer to crisp autumn, from sweltering afternoon to cool evening, and in the still moments after a storm.
Drawing on Scandinavian Nature
Hyper Games, based in Norway, draws on a deep relationship with nature similar to Jansson's own experiences on the small islands of the Gulf of Finland. "We have all grown up in a country where there's six to seven months of winter," says Skaufjord. "If you don't learn to enjoy winter, you basically have a bad time half of the year." Like his creators, the summer-loving Moomintroll must undergo his own snowy acclimatization, learning to adapt to and accept new circumstances.
Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth makes enjoying winter easy: players can fling snowballs, create pathways in knee-high drifts, and even shovel snow, accompanied by satisfying audio-visual puffs of powdery white. The game features light, breezy interactions calibrated for both non-gamers and young children. An isometric perspective means players need not worry about camera controls as they move Moomintroll about. "We want this to be a game that anyone can play," says director Kristoffer Jetmundsen.
A Game for All Ages
Playing with a three-year-old daughter, Skaufjord notes that the game is designed for shared experiences. "That's how it's supposed to be played," he says. "That's how I wrote it." The art style of both games evokes the scratchy, hand-illustrated quality of Jansson's original drawings, a far cry from the airbrushed computer animation of the 2019 TV series Moominvalley.
However, the approval process with Moomin Characters Ltd is rigorous. Art director Marcus Kjeldsen describes getting final signoff as "excruciating." "Every curve is very particular," he says. "Since there are so few parts making up this character, tweaking just one of them makes him feel off." For the previous Snufkin game, Skaufjord wrote that Little My should react gleefully about getting rich, but the approvals team stressed that capitalism has not yet graced Moominvalley, so the line was tweaked.
Creative Freedom and Timely Themes
The team was afforded creative freedom to incorporate characters not present in the original book, such as the sensitive young woman Misabel, drawing on Jansson's lesser-known comic strips for inspiration. "We remix her library for a new medium," says Skaufjord.
The stories continue to resonate due to their anti-fascist bent and non-traditional configurations of people and family. There is also a disquieting sense that unspoiled Moominvalley sits on the brink of great change. Hyper Games head Are Sundnes draws a parallel between today's fractured politics and those of the mid-20th century. "We live in a world that's darker and more uncertain than it has been," he says. "It's similar to the period when these books were written."
Moomintroll: Winter's Warmth is out now on PC, Mac, and Nintendo Switch.
