The Best Games to Play This Winter Holiday Season

Cold outside or not, most of us feel it anyway. Winter is finally here, and we all need a bit of warmth. Sometimes that heat is pressure in the form of horrors like Lethal Company and Phasmophobia, which makes everyone a little tense. Or not a little. And on some nights, it’s the reverse energy. The split-screen craze of local co-op games like Overcooked, Moving Out, or It Takes Two, where the point is just surviving the session together (keeping the friendship going is optional). Both naturally belong in winter play.

Source: https://lifehacker.com/13-cozy-video-games-to-hibernate-with-this-winter-1849838971

There’s more weight to the seasonal atmosphere at this time of year. Maps sprinkled with snow, timed events in online games, or a subdued Christmas setting help to bring a delicious flavor to the table. Titles like Fortnite, Destiny 2, GTA Online, and Overwatch 2 flaunt winter rotations that lure your old friends back into the fold. For many, it becomes routine. The familiar systems, slightly reworked, feel different in the colder weeks.

Of course, we all have our “I want to be alone” moments. Not all winter sessions are social. Games also offer you this “anti-social” shelter with immersive worlds, with systems and worlds where the mind can be allowed to drift without needing to be constantly tapped into.

And we’ll cover all of them, all the winter games that will feel just right in any possible life scenario for the following few months and Holidays.

A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build presents itself as something gentle. The game is built around rolling snowballs of different sizes and stacking them into properly proportioned snowpeople. Seems like a simple idea, but it quickly asks for careful thought. Each snowperson has a name, and the spaces you move through feel calm and contained, even when your brain is working hard to find the solution. It’s one of those winter video games where atmosphere carries as much weight as mechanics.

Sources: https://store.steampowered.com/app/316610/A_Good_Snowman_Is_Hard_To_Build/

Winter Burrow is a homey woodland survival game about a mouse returning home to restore a childhood burrow. It immediately settles into the kind of quiet rhythm that fits cozy winter video games and longer winter play sessions. You explore, gather resources, craft what you need, knit warm sweaters, bake pies, and meet the locals, all while winter presses gently from the outside. Pine Creek Games’ hand-drawn style with a rich color palette gives the world a soft, storybook presence. From the opening moments, the game leans into themes of family bonds, loss, and finding connection.

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3008740/Winter_Burrow/

Milo and the Christmas Gift is a small, hand-drawn point-and-click game that follows a house cat whose quiet Christmas plans are interrupted when a new pet wanders off into the neighborhood. What follows is a gentle search through familiar streets, guided by puzzles. The game moves at an easy pace, offering help if you get stuck and small optional secrets along the way. What’s nice is that this title is also free-to-play! It can be one of those games to play on New Year’s Eve when attention drifts easily and time feels unhurried. What’s nice is that this title is also free-to-play!

Nonetheless, some winter-themed video games don’t try to feel cozy at all. Batman: Arkham Origins does exactly that. Gotham, with a Christmas Eve shrouded in snow, here feels heavier and quieter. Its streets are buried under ice and shadows. Combat is fluid and familiar, and the story circles familiar Batman tropes: working alone, not crossing certain lines, and carrying that choice through one long, hostile night. The city itself feels frozen, in various ways, more as fatigue through the journey of its snow-covered rooftops.

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/209000/Batman_Arkham_Origins/

If Arkham Origins creates the mood through winter, Frostpunk makes it a consistent, suffocating agent. Set in the brutal ice age, the game has you take command of humanity’s last city. The world has been washed out and stripped bare, only broken by firelight, machinery, and the slow motion of laborers cutting through frozen ground. Every system and every moral choice is molded on the cold. Even moments of progress seem fragile, borrowed warmth in an indifferent world.

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/323190/Frostpunk/

The games both ease into the chill of winter, giving players experiences that seem more purposeful than usual. Look out for them in the Steam Winter Sale games. Holidays create an easy moment to revisit such legends or finally pick them up without breaking the bank.

Winter has a habit of pulling players back together. Even those who “haven’t played in months” suddenly get time again. Online games and co-op games thrive during the colder months of the year because they’re easy to return to, easy to share, and built for collective downtime.

Fortnite continues to be one of the best winter video games for exactly that reason. Seasonal updates regularly bring snow-covered POIs, limited-time modes, and cosmetic shifts. Recent community chatter points less to competition and more to shared moments. With full cross play co op games support, it’s one of the easiest ways for groups split across platforms to reconnect without friction.

Source: https://www.fortnite.com/

GTA Online does the same work in a very different tone. Snow is rendering Los Santos chaotic, even strangely nostalgic. It’s not structured co-op in the traditional sense, but it remains one of the most enduring fun winter games to play with friends.
A single person made it, calling the project The Sledding Corporation. The Sledding Game dives headfirst into messy, snowy fun. You steer frogs, penguins, and even polar bears as they race down slopes. Big groups join at once, sometimes nearly a hundred riders packed into one wild run. There’s character customization, plenty of collisions, and very little pressure to “play well.”

What makes its rise especially fitting for winter gaming is how it spread. Short, funny gameplay clips shared on social media (particularly Instagram, where one clip reached over three million views) captured moments of harmless fun that felt instantly relatable. By January, when the Steam page arrived, people already knew the rhythm. They added it to their lists without second thoughts, numbers climbing past any forecast.

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3438850/Sledding_Game/

Snow maps in Star Wars multiplayer titles tap into a different kind of winter appeal. Icy battlefields, muted color palettes, and familiar sci-fi soundscapes slow the pace just enough to make matches feel heavier and more deliberate. Community feedback often highlights how these maps feel better during the winter months.

Some snow-themed games are tied to winter so tightly that players don’t even question it. Suppose there were, in fact, some small time machines. Then overnight, it’s late December again, it’s dark by 4 p.m., and you’ve got no place to be.

For many players, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone on PC is welded to winter break. Hogwarts always felt colder there than it ever did on film. Those long stone corridors, echoing footsteps, and snow settling in the courtyards. Fans still joke about getting lost and sneaking around after curfew. It’s clunky, slow, and unmistakably of its time. That is exactly why people still return to it on modern winter games PC setups, usually knowing it won’t hold up and loading it anyway.

Source: https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/play-harry-potter-and-the-philosophers-stone-with-path-tracing/

Max Payne comes from a completely different emotional place. The endless snowstorm. The neon slicing through the darkness. Even more so, the sound of footsteps crunching while the city feels almost deserted. It wasn’t comforting, but it matched the season in its own way. That mood is why it keeps resurfacing whenever fans talk about the best winter video games, even now.

We are not able to build on this list without referencing Crash Bandicoot: Snow Go!. It’s just a couple of minutes long, and even then, virtually everybody knows what kind of video game it is. The penguins are slipping by. The ice. It’s not the level that people laud for design, but it’s the one that stuck.

Source: https://www.ign.com/videos/crash-bandicoot-2-walkthrough-warp-room-1-snow-go

And if you spent winters online in the early 2000s, Yeti Sports likely has no need for any explanation. It’s launching penguins, retrying the same throw, and attempting to beat a friend’s score during a school break. It was everywhere for a while, then vanished. Except it didn’t, not really. Not from our mids a the very least.

None of these games was built to be a seasonal icon. They became fun winter games through shared experience. You remember the sounds before the visuals load. You remember exactly where you failed. And you know, without needing it explained, that a lot of other players remember it the same way.

Source: https://gamaverse.com/yetisports-pengu-throw-game/

Winter is already cold, we all know that. But some cult classics and new gems manage to fill both players’ and developers’ hearts all the same.

For some, winter gaming comes with its own small traditions. Old friends online. Maybe even a glass of sparkling champagne nearby as the year winds down. And sometimes, between matches or during a quiet loading screen, an idea takes shape. It might be a world, a mechanic, or a game that exists clearly in the mind, waiting to be made real. It’s rather important that you write it down.

If that spark shows up, Argentics is here to help turn it into something playable. We help teams transform those winter thoughts into real, finished games—titles that might one day become part of someone else’s seasonal ritual.

Enjoy the sessions. Enjoy the season. And don’t let good ideas fade with the snow.