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Ssad, sad, and downright scary, Tove Jansson’s Moomin stories may seem out of place for a serious video game. Instead of wandering around, the milky-white and hippo-looking animals like to mold Moominvalley, but only if the weather is good.
However a small Norwegian game studio, Hyper Sportsit is now in Jansson’s second beautiful transformation. The first, 2024’s Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley, put players in control of an intelligent free spirit, Snufkin, as he broke through a nature reserve (and evaded control-loving guards). The latest, Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth, sees a young Moomintroll waking up at night in winter. While his parents are still asleep, the creature is alone, immersed in an unfamiliar world.
On this lonely journey, Moomintroll must consider that his sleeping parents will not be around forever. “(It’s) the destruction of death,” says the main writer David Skaufjord, who sees the plot, based on the 1957 novel Moominland Midwinter, as a symbol of a franchise that tries to challenge its young audience with death, sadness, grief and nostalgia. He said: “When children watch television, they look calm. “The Moomin stories are not.”
In the first 20 minutes of the game, the freezing temperatures destroy the squirrel’s life. But Too-Ticky, a shy woman who lives alone in Moominpappa’s boat, picks up on the clever ideas of the animal’s passing. “Death is part of life,” he says calmly. Something always changes.
Much of Jansson’s work, Moomin or not, finds meaning in the transitions of life: wet summer to autumn; warm evening to cool evening; times that arrive after a hurricane. Jansson, a writer, photographer, and political cartoonist, spent many years on the small islands scattered across the Gulf of Finland, folding these experiences into crystal descriptions and illustrations of nature, which the Moomin live in harmony with.
Although Hyper Games is based in Norway and not Jansson’s Finland, its Scandi creators were able to draw on the same deep relationship with nature. “We all grew up in a country where you have six or seven months of winter,” says Skaufjord, “and if you don’t learn to enjoy winter, you’re basically going to have a bad time half the year.” Like the creators of the game, the summer-loving Moomintroll must have snow: in doing so, there is a lesson for him and the players – to get used to, and accept, new conditions.
But Moomintroll: Winter Warmth makes enjoying the coldest time of the year easy: you can chase snowballs and create knee-deep trails. Even shoveling snow is fun, accompanied by the crisp sound of the white powdery stuff. There are other light and airy items like this, carefully selected for both non-gamers and toddlers. Viewing the action in isometric view means that players don’t have to worry about moving the camera while moving Moomintroll. “We want this to be a game that everyone can play,” says director Kristoffer Jetmundsen.
I’ve been playing Winter’s Warmth with my three-year-old daughter: she sits on my lap and points to things on the screen, her little finger pointing to the Moomintroll of the merry world. “This is how it should be played,” says Skaufjord. This is how I wrote it.
Fortunately, both Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley and Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth use art that is a far cry from the horror computer animation Moominvalley that appeared on TV in 2019 with Matt Berry and Rosamund Pike as voice talent. In fact, the paintings have the impressionistic, hand-drawn elements of Jansson’s original paintings.
It may seem like a simple translation, but the approval process by Moomin Characters Ltd, the company whose job it is to manage Jansson’s original creations, is difficult, says game director Marcus Kjeldsen. In Moomintroll’s case, he describes getting the final signoff to be “difficult”. “Every pill is unique,” he says. “And since there are so few parts that make up this character, just one change can make him feel bad.” In Snufkin’s previous game, Skaufjord wrote that the shy teenager My Little One needs to do something cheerful about weight gain. But, as the official team emphasized, capitalism is a construct that never existed in the bucolic Moominvalley, so the line was changed.
Elsewhere, the team was given creative freedom to include characters not found in the original book – a young teenage girl named Misabel, for example – drawing on Jansson’s familiar mini-screens. “We also mix his library into a new medium,” says Skaufjord.
There is a reason these stories continue. They have an anti-fascist bent in their unusual and non-traditional social and family arrangements. But there is also a worrying sense that the unspoilt Moominvalley is on the brink of a big change. Both games take seriously the timely aspects of Jansson’s valuable career.
Director of Hyper Games, Are Sundnes, draws parallels between today’s fractured politics and the middle of the 20th century. He says: “We live in a world that is darker and more uncertain than it was before. It is similar to the time when these books were written.
