‘We’re remixing her library for a new medium’: the video games capturing the happy-sad spirit of Tove Jansson’s Moomins
Sleepy, 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.
Sleepy, 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.”
In the first 20 minutes of the game, the freezing temperatures claim the life of a squirrel. But Too-Ticky, the androgynous woman who lives by herself in Moominpappa’s boathouse, takes a philosophical outlook on the animal’s passing. “Death is a part of life,” she says serenely. “Something is always changing.”
So much of Jansson’s work, Moomin or otherwise, finds meaning in life’s transitions: humid summer to crisp autumn; sweltering afternoon to cool evening; the still moments that arrive after a storm. Jansson, a writer, illustrator, and political cartoonist, spent many years on the small islands scattered across the Gulf of Finland, folding these experiences into crystalline descriptions and illustrations of the natural world, which the Moomins live in harmony with.
Though Hyper Games is based in Norway rather than Jansson’s Finland, its Scandi developers were able to draw on a similarly deep relationship with nature. “We have all grown up in a country where there’s six to seven months of winter,” says Skaufjord, “and if you don’t learn to enjoy winter, you basically have a bad time half of the year.” Like these game makers, the summer-loving Moomintroll must undergo his own snowy acclimatisation: in doing so, there is a lesson for him and players – of adapting to, and accepting, one’s new circumstances.
I’ve been playing Winter’s Warmth with my three-year-old daughter: she sits on my lap as I point at things on the screen, her tiny thumb directing Moomintroll about the enchanting world. “That’s how it’s supposed to be played,” says Skaufjord. “That’s how I wrote it.”
Thankfully, both Snufkin: Melody of Moomin Valley and Moomintroll: Winter’s Warmth employ an art style that is a long way from the eerie, airbrushed computer animation of Moominvalley which debuted on TV in 2019 with Matt Berry and Rosamund Pike as voice talent. Instead, the visuals carry the scratchy, hand-illustrated quality of Jansson’s original drawings.
It may look like an effortless translation, but the approval process with Moomin Characters Ltd, the company whose job it is to oversee Jansson’s original creations, is rigorous, says the game’s art director Marcus Kjeldsen. In the case of Moomintroll, he describes getting final signoff as “excruciating”. “Every curve is very particular,” he says. “And 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 the abrasive teenager Little My should react gleefully about getting rich. But, as the approvals team stressed, capitalism is a construct that has not yet graced the bucolic Moominvalley, so the line was tweaked.
Elsewhere, the team was afforded the creative freedom to incorporate characters who were not present in the original book – a sensitive young woman named Misabel, for example – drawing on Jansson’s lesser known comic strips for subplot inspiration. “We remix her library for a new medium,” says Skaufjord.
There is a reason these stories continue to resonate. They have an anti-fascist bent in their unusual and non-traditional configurations of people and family. But there is also a disquieting sense that the unspoiled Moominvalley sits on the brink of great change. Both games deftly capture these timely aspects of Jansson’s treasured work.
Hyper Games head, Are Sundnes, draws a parallel between the fractured politics of today 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.
