Skábma: Snowfall Is a Huge Win for Indigenous Game Makers

At the start of Skábma: Snowfall, Áilu lives a blessed life. Under the watchful eye of his adoptive uncle, he tends to a herd of reindeer in a remote Arctic village, dreaming of a day when he may one day master his own herd.

But soon things begin to change. Disease and disorder spread among the wildlife, and before long, young Áilu is called upon to beat back a pandemic armed only with a shaman’s healing drum.

The game was developed over the course of the current global pandemic, and it’s easy to see our present hellscape of disease and disorder lurking in the background of Skábma: Snowfall, a forthcoming PC release from the tiny Finnish studio Red Stage Entertainment, PID Games, and Epic Games. But the sickness at its heart is much older.

Áilu, after all, is Sámi. Indigenous people of northern Europe, the Sámi have, for centuries, been under assault from southern colonizers, divided by borders and dissected by racist biologists who taught them that their culture, built on a sacred connection with the natural world, was “uncivilized” and a source of shame.

“There is so much loss of culture inside the Sámi community,” explains the game’s writer and Red Stage cofounder Marjaana Auranen, whose Sámi name is Eira-Teresá Joret Mariánná. “That is, I think, the biggest motivation of telling this story—[to show] that there is hope to regain a culture, and battle against the demons … threatening Sámi culture.”

Slated for release next spring, Skábma: Snowfall is already being hailed by critics and designers as a notable step forward for self-representation in the video game arts. It will be the first major video game release to be designed and acted by a Sámi-led team, the first to be produced entirely in the endangered North Sámi language, and the first to be firmly rooted in Sámi folklore and tradition.

“It looks truly amazing,” said Mikkel Sara, CEO of Norwegian Sámi game studio Miksapix Interactive, who previewed Skábma: Snowfall. “I know that there are more people here in the heart of Sápmi [Sámi traditional territory] who also are eager to experience [this]. There are very high expectations of the game.”

In and of itself, it’s not so unusual for Sámi to see themselves depicted in art and popular culture. As an ancient Arctic people living within some of Europe’s most ethnically homogenous countries, Sámi have long been a fascination, even an obsession, of non-Indigenous Europeans.