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Pack a sweater, it’s a bit nippy.
The first thing Arctico asked me to do was name my dogs. As someone who’s been retelling the same handful of stories from the six months I spent training sled dogs over (oh no) ten years ago, this was an impossible task. How am I meant to pick four dogs from the almost 100 perfect pooches I fed, cleaned and steered all those years ago—and could these virtual pups ever live up to their namesakes?
Developed by Claudio Norori and Antonio Vargas, Arctico is a chill survival game in more ways than one. In the wake of your mentor’s passing, you’re sent up to the frozen roof of the world to collect their notes and findings and establish your own research base to finish what they started.
At a drop, this means managing food, energy and fuel for your base, your dogs and yourself, slowly building out a self-sufficient life in a wonderfully bleak frozen wasteland. At first I wasn’t impressed—the game so quickly introduces you to timers and resources that I wasn’t prepared for given its low-stakes appearance, and I was ready to chalk Arctico down as a disappointment.
And then you go sledding.
You’re sent off into the ice to hunt for fish, but you’ll soon find more distractions such as logs from downed aeroplanes and research huts long-since abandoned. An automatic glide will save you from perilous drops, and you’ll enter a small kayak on walking into any body of water. It clicks for me that the resource management, while fussy, is a mechanical excuse to explore every inch of Arctico, your base a home that grows with farming equipment and decorations the longer you comb the surprisingly vast frozen isle.
There was another sled dog game that got my hopes up for a chilled-out nostalgia trip, 2020’s The Red Lantern. But the joy of sledding is in the absolute silence, broken only by padding feet on snow, and that game never lets you linger in the moment more than a minute before throwing you into a bear den or narrative intrigue.
And hey, it’s a damn sight cheaper than making a trip up to the arctic with a team of pups yourself.
20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time—and she’s not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and having herself developed critically acclaimed small games like Can Androids Pray, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it’s the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She’s also played for a competitive Splatoon team, and unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.
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