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Snufkin said ACAB. OK, not literally “all cops are bastards.” Rather, the hero of Hyper Games’ Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley says things like, “If you remove all the signs in a park, the police officers leave.” Still, the message remains—and it’s getting noticed. Ever since the game hit Steam and Nintendo Switch, it has been pulling in devotees thanks to Snufkin’s proactive objections to finding his beloved Moominvalley overpoliced, reviving some of the 80-year-old franchise’s long-held philosophies for fans eager to share them on social media.
A family-friendly cozy game set in the world of legendary Finnish cartoonist Tove Jansson, Melody follows Snufkin’s iconic return to Moominvalley after a winter spent wandering the world. Moomintroll has disappeared; ever the optimist, he’d tried reasoning with the police, resulting in his indefinite arrest. Snufkin’s main objective is to undermine the Park Keeper, a haughty hemulen who wants to fill the valley with monoculture lawns, manicured hedge mazes, caged animals, a river-destroying dam, and an ocean of signs dictating how nature must be enjoyed.
Snufkin’s response to all this is to absolutely kick shit, laying waste to signage, evading the police, and dismantling fences, forcibly rewilding the degenerative parks with direct action.
Following the game’s March 7 release, players picked up on these themes almost immediately. In their review, Vulture called Snufkin “an adorable ecoterrorist” with “‘no gods, no masters’ energy.” On platforms like X, fans have celebrated his jovial fondness for criminality; on Reddit, his more explicit anarchist philosophy.
Make no mistake, these themes have been prevalent in Jansson’s work for years. Snufkin has been thumbing his nose at the Park Keeper since the 1950s, and people were making TikToks about his response to overpolicing back in 2021, too. Seeing these ideas in what is essentially a children’s game on the Switch, though, has brought them to light in a new way.
Not that this was exactly Hyper Games’ intent. When asked, Are Sundnes, the company’s cofounder and CEO, is not keen to enthuse upon a radical political agenda at the heart of the game. The game’s direction involved a conversation with the franchise’s rights holders, “Moomin Characters Ltd,” an organization chaired by Tove’s niece, Sophia Jansson, that oversees new Moomin content.
“It’s been very important for both them and us not to have us invent too many new things,” Sundnes says. “In one of the books Snufkin does remove park signs setting rules, and burns them all in a big fire, then electrocutes the Park Keeper with Hattifatteners … Even though Tove Jansson never wrote this exact story, I think it’s one that could have taken place in the canon of the Moomins.”
Generally, Sundnes says, Moomin characters don’t really take political stands on real-world issues—they’re not even aware of them. So, “we never set out to make any kind of political or environmentally themed game really,” he says. “All of those elements came from focusing on Snufkin’s character and Tove Jansson’s stories.”
While the police have been depicted as ineffectual, overenthusiastic, unnecessary, and antagonistic several times across the canon of the Moomin franchise, they are suitably well meaning for the genre, and have even resolved situations on occasion, albeit in part unknowingly.
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Snufkin himself, meanwhile, is famously based on Atos Wirtanen, a mercurial intellectual and one of Jansson’s lovers who spent much of his life opposing the rise of Nazism and the Finnish far right, having to briefly live underground due to his then-radical beliefs. In one of the franchise’s popular animated series, the character based on him recommends he and his friends begin a crime spree, something that has fascinated younger generations.
“It feels more like Snufkin himself drew these themes out, rather than us trying to force them in there,” Sundnes speculates. “The balance of nature and everyone living in it is our central theme, and something I believe Tove Jansson would have been very supportive of.” Still, he says, the studio wanted to make something relevant, “and it’s only natural that we include themes and topics current and important for us as people.”
Put another way, Snufkin: Melody of Moominvalley might be a game as committed to reformism and pacifism in addressing authority as its source material. Ultimately, via a stage play, the Park Keeper is eventually taught the error of his ways, and Moomintroll forgives him, suggesting the cop become the valley’s administrator of the arts. Snufkin himself, though, remains utterly unshaken in his belief that the Park Keeper and his police officers must be banished eternally.
The game fits into a rising trend in postpandemic games seeking to illustrate solarpunk sensibilities and degrowth cottagecore lifestyles. Last year’s Terra Nil, the recently released Garden Life, and the upcoming Outbound all center the health of natural environments over their productivity in ways that Stardew Valley or Anno 2070 perhaps didn’t.
“Jansson was ahead of her time in many ways, including [predating cottagecore],” Sundnes says. “It seems [Snufkin’s] ideals have become even more relevant for younger generations when everything is increasingly digital, materialistic, and unstable—on top of the feeling that older generations are destroying the planet for future generations.”
Our hunger for comfort media surged during Covid-19 quarantines, in which a socioeconomic hiccup proved a life-changing turning point for the vast majority of millennials and zoomers. That hunger has only grown in the time since, Sundnes argues.
A similar hunger was growing in Finland when Jansson was producing her Moomin comics and books, starting in the 1940s. The country was emerging from the Winter War with the Soviet Union, and people needed something whimsical. “I strongly believe that escapism is a very important coping mechanism in us humans,” Sundnes says. “When the world seems increasingly harsh and unstable, we seek out entertainment that offers other kinds of emotions.”
While Jansson may not have been a soothsayer when it came to predicting the 21st century’s existential necessity of sustainable systems, rewilded biodiversity, and skepticism of authority, her work still has answers in it, and ones that creators will likely emphasize in the future.
“These things all came from Jansson herself. We just decided to highlight them a bit more than what’s in other adaptations,” Sundnes explains. Moomin Characters Ltd “has been very generous in letting us write a new story”—and in laying the groundwork for new ones.
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