By now, you’re probably saturated in festive spirit like an orange in mulled wine: patterned jumpers, Wham! on repeat, christmas pudding slippers, the works. You’ve probably ticked off a fair few of the usual movies too – the Home Alones or Scrooged if you’re feeling nostalgic, It’s a Wonderful Life for the traditionalists, or Die Hard if you’re feeling controversial and want to get into the irresolvable debate about what really constitutes a Christmas movie (even that debate itself has merged into annual Christmas canon).
More than any other time of year, December is a time of rituals, when suddenly we’re all ears to bad jokes (here in the UK at least) and our palates become receptive to the fragrant spices contained in mince pies and the steely taste of Brussels sprouts. But amidst all this strangeness, something that seems to miss out on the great festive ritualisation is video games.
Sure, we nab games in Christmas sales and create playlists of titles to tick off our triple-figure backlogs, while online games dish out free digital santa hats or snow-up previously unsnowy maps. But I’m talking here about something more than that, about games that actively contribute to the festive spirit. Not Christmas-themed games necessarily, but ones capable of washing us over with seasonal sentimentality like the sight of Macaulay Culkin screaming in the mirror (as in, Kevin from Home Alone, not the dishevelled 40-year-old iteration grabbing a mirror with both hands and screaming insanely at his own reflection).
Games are a ritual-friendly medium. We here at DualShockers got right into the Shocktober spirit at Halloween, and now we’re going to try and do something similar for Christmas, talking about games that for various reasons make our festive playlists – the kinds of games that compliment the seasonal good vibes, titles that you can squeeze in between hazy stretches of Port-infused family time, dip into for an hour or two, and come away feeling that little bit more joyful. ‘tis the season for all that malarkey after all.
So in that spirit, the first game to adorn DualShockers’ festive gaming playlist is Skyrim. Yes, it’s snowy, obviously, and what with me living in the south of England maybe I’m trying to compensate in games for what reality won’t give me. But snow alone maketh not the festive game. Were that the case, I could equally well be content myself with a seasonal snowy map in a battle royale game, or The Long Dark.
What Skyrim captures that few other games do is that wonderful contrast between the harsh, hostile outdoors and the cosy, fuggy indoors, speaking to a seasonal experience that we can all relate to; whether it’s after a crisp winter morning walk, shovelling snow from the driveway, or an exhilarating day on the ski slopes, there’s no feeling quite like that wave of warmth upon stepping into a safe, familiar place where you’re greeted with a cornucopia of hearty food, booze and a fire to rub your hands over.
One of the Elder Scrolls series’ greatest strengths has always been its ability to evoke ambiance, to grab you in quiet moments when you’re away from the blabbering peoplefolk, and make you appreciate just being in the world. To this day, there are few games that create ambiance quite like Skyrim. It absorbs you through soundscapes and Jeremy Soule’s hypnotic score, which seems to drift like snowflakes on the wind when you’re out in the wilderness. It evokes coldness, yes, but in a welcoming, magical way much like how December, with all its festive cheer, feels compared to the bleakness of January (a month that I think most of us would quite happily pretend doesn’t exist).
A big part of Skyrim’s identity and gameplay loop is that journey of braving the harsh wilderness, plundering frigid dungeons where you fight the resurrected husks of aeons-old warriors, then making your way back to safety. Crank up the difficulty (or play in the game’s gruelling Survival Mode), and you really come to appreciate that feeling of pushing through a blizzard–the soft soundtrack tickling your frostbitten ears–then seeing the low-lying outline of a village, or the formidable outer walls of Markarth emerge from the impenetrable whiteness.
When you survive that treacherous Skyrim schlep and make it to a tavern, with its crackling fire pits and bearded patrons, you get similar pleasant tingles to those you get after real-life frosty tribulations. Mods really let you ramp up the vibe in those taverns too. You can get better bard songs for the taverns, a mod that lets you pay for and eat food directly from the table, and even a mod that lets you hunker down for some tavern mini-games with the patrons. The InnCredible mod is also worth checking out, as it overhauls 11 of the smaller, more generic taverns in Skyrim into far more atmospheric ones that better reflect whatever region they’re in.
And those ubiquitous loading screens between indoors and outdoors that we love to moan about in Skyrim? Oddly, they kind of help here. They give the music an opportunity to fade into one of the fittingly named tavern tracks like ‘Around the Fire’ or ‘Out of the Cold’, and punctuate that all-important contrast between nice warm indoors inside and harsh, cold outdoors. The only downside is that you don’t get to look out the window at the miserable bastards trudging through the snow outside while you swig from your tankard.
So that’s what I’ll be getting up to in Skyrim this Christmas. Not fighting dragons nor getting embroiled in the tiresome civil war–just traversing the wilds, dungeon-diving, and dipping into taverns to warm my frost-cracked hands over a fire, absorbing the finest winter atmosphere in gaming. What with our festive celebrations being largely informed by Germanic and Northern European traditions, the surfeits of beardy men and snow-coated houses around Skyrim conjure feelings of festive familiarity; squint hard enough, and half the Nords in Skyrim could pass for lean, leathery, world-weary iterations of Santa…
