Winter Survival

• Hunt or be hunted. You have no rifle and there is no combat. If you encounter wolves or even a bear, stay away and run. You won’t be able to kill a bear with a knife, it’s not the movies. What you can do is be clever about the wildlife and set traps.
• Cold, thirst, hunger and exhaustion are the four major factors you have to worry about- but don’t discount the ever present threat of injury and the unpredictable cold weather.
• Fix up an abandoned hunter’s lodge to have a base of operations.

I screwed around in the Prologue demo enough to see how things are shaping up. It's hard to say how the finished product will treat mechanics, especially since it's just about a half year off, give or take, and a lot can change. You'll deal with stats that require balancing (food, water, temperature, sanity, energy/sleep) and mechanics that impact your overall well-being, like status debuffs and injuries.

For the longest time, the game was called Winter Survival Simulator- for the uninformed, the developer specializes in simulator games- and the very first version of the demo brought that aspect home. I found it incredibly dull, very much a "paint by numbers" and handheld experience. It was a walking simulator with annoying aspects, such as this obnoxious bag-opening feature anytime you needed to get into the inventory. There was an overall feeling of being disconnected from the world itself. Additionally, it seemed to delight in having you follow through with the opposite of common sense whenever there was a whisper of tension or survival, like chasing after an injured bear.

The newest incarnation of the demo, Winter Survival Prologue, fixes some things and doubles down on others. Many aspects of the original demo have been redone- the UI/inventory system is far better; they included a little more story of 'before your fall' so that things you discover have more context, etc. Still equally buggy, precisely like the first demo variant. I'm a little meh about this "SO AWESOME" sanity feature they're heavily leaning into  - I don't mind a sanity aspect to any survival title, though clearly, such a feature needs precise balancing. Still, the idea of doing it as a path where you choose how it manifests seems... lame?

I want to stop playing bits and pieces of the game and just play the actual fucking game. The release is slated for sometime in October, and a roadmap has been released.

Website Changelog

• 4/15/23- All tabs updated
• 3/9/23- Changelog Added.