• 1. A Story Lived Over Nine WintersEach winter grows colder, and the city changes with it. Follow broadcasts and old recordings across the radio to uncover what happened and draw closer to the choice waiting in the ninth winter.
• 2. Turn an Empty Place into a Home of Your OwnChoose one of 16 locations and make it your own. Repair the cracks, restore the heat, and bring in furniture until a cold, empty space begins to feel lived in.
• 3. Exploration & Direct ScavengingChoose where to go and what to carry, then enter ruined buildings and scavenge them directly in the world. Search interactable objects, decide what to carry home, and read sightlines, sound, and your route as you move.
• 4. A Home That Follows the SeasonsRain dampens the walls and winter frosts the windows. As the weather and time change, the view inside and outside your home shifts with them, leaving traces of each passing season.
• 5. Life After the ExpeditionComing home begins another part of the day. Make a meal, tend the crops, and care for a stray cat as you shape a home of your own.
• 6. Experience the World Your WayChoose Cozy when you want to focus on home life, or Survival and Deep Freeze when you want to feel the pressure of cold and survival. Endless Mode lets daily life continue, while Wallpaper Mode and the desktop widget keep your finished home close.

Nine Winters began in a slightly unlikely place. In 2025, an AI-slop ad for Dark War Survival sparked the idea, and development began. The game has been built solo at KKIRI Studio ever since.

Interior decorating is one of the developer's hobbies, and another question soon followed: what if you could create a home of your own at the end of the world? That became a cozy survival life sim about exploring frozen ruins outside, then returning with what you found to repair and fill your home.

At first, home holds little more than a worn mattress and a tin stove. Swap out the bed and stove, arrange the furniture, and turn on the lights, and a place you once entered simply to survive becomes somewhere you want to return to. Nine Winters finds its coziness in that contrast: the warmth inside feels clearer because the world outside is dangerous.

The current internal build includes cooking, gardening, cleaning, sewing, photography, caring for a cat, and the core progression through nine winters. Every scene is rendered in-game with 3D voxels, and all screenshots and trailer footage come from the game itself. Work through launch is focused on refining winter expeditions, the late-game story, English and Japanese localization, long-run balance, and release preparation.

During development, AI has assisted with some modeling work, coding, machine translation, and song production. The developer remains responsible for the game's design, direction, and final review.