Winter Survival is a narrative-driven survival crafting game set in the unforgiving winter wasteland. After a trip goes wrong, the unprepared main character must struggle to survive in one of the harshest wilderness conditions imaginable, with both his physical and mental health at stake. While the game already has some interesting mechanics, it has a ways to go from its Early Access state to being the game it truly has the potential to be.
The sanity system is the game’s most unique mechanic and, by far, its most interesting.
Each day that passes in the harrowing wilderness takes a toll on the mental health of our protagonists. Starving, dehydration, close encounters with predators, and – of course – freezing can all take an understandable toll on a man’s psyche. Winter Survival reflects this with its unique sanity system that makes the game more interesting as you lose your mind.
Each night after you suffer a traumatic event, you must add a negative trait to your playthrough that’s portrayed as a loss of sanity. These mostly come in the form of hallucinations, such as rocks in your path or zombie deer, which trigger at random. You start to realize the impact these insanity traits can have on your play when you try to walk on a log bridge, only to discover it was never there in the first place.
At its core, Winter Survival is a horror game, and it does a really good job with some of the creepy aspects it goes for. By far, one of my favorite moments was when I neglected my hydration, and an unfamiliar voice popped up over the radio and said, “Thirsty?”
I’ll admit that I’m not a big fan of many of the game’s survival craft mechanics, which require crafting benches and other basics through the use of the game’s UI. Something more like Sons of The Forest’s incredibly immersive crafting system would be better here, using immersion setting animations and no unnecessary “Crafting benches” to make you feel like you’re in the wild.
Difficulty can be a problem in Winter Survival. It’s frustratingly easy to fall into a death loop, even early into the story.
Don’t get me wrong, a game about survival should be challenging. After all, that’s kind of the appeal, right? Reliving the horror and struggles of trying to survive in the uncaring, unforgiving wilderness, all in the safety of a video game. It’s just a little too hard in Winter Survival’s current state.
I’ll give you an example of a particularly frustrating death loop I caught myself right at the start of the game. This was in the prologue, immediately after the game opened up to me and allowed me to run around on my own. Before this, there were just cutscenes and scripted encounters, so this was my first chance to play the game.
The first morning you wake up and are given real control in Winter Survival, you have no resources, torn and wet clothing, supremely dehydrated, and separated from your backpack. You’re instantly given three objectives to complete: Sew your clothing so you don’t freeze, dry your clothing so you don’t freeze, and find your backpack.
Going after any of these objectives at the wrong pace will inevitably cause you to freeze to death or die of dehydration.
On my first few tries, having no clear access to water, I tried drying my clothes first. There was no way I was going to be able to sew them just yet, as it required access to a ton of materials I simply didn’t have anywhere nearby. If I didn’t first build a fire, I would freeze to death, taking my clothes off to dry. In the time it took for my clothes to dry, I would be too dehydrated to continue and would then die of dehydration.
Naturally, I assumed I should, therefore, go after my backpack instead, remembering that in the cutscene before this, I filled my water bottle completely and thus would be able to drink from it. After a few attempts at finding the backpack, each resulting in death and save load, I eventually got to it without dying and opened it up to find it. The water bottle was nearly empty. So, I then had to find a source of water, which I did, but it died to the wolves sitting around it a few times. However, I eventually managed to sneak up to it and get a drink, only to die shortly after. I froze to to death because my clothes were still wet and full of holes.
You can’t be so unforgiving with the survival mechanics in a game like Winter Survival, which wants to sell you on a narrative experience through its story and guided objectives. Setting me up so that I need to accomplish several pressing and time-pressing issues as soon as I’m given control of the game is setting me up for disaster for sure. A player needs time to explore their surroundings, get an idea of what’s going on, and figure out just how the game works before these important issues can be solved. Setting the player up to be close to death right at the start and then throwing mission objectives on top of it is sort of like setting someone’s house on fire and then telling them to replace the smoke alarm’s batteries before they escape.
Lastly, my biggest issue with Winter Survival is probably its lack of “show, don’t tell.” Your character constantly talks, points out obvious information, and tells you what your next step should be. Great moments of tension are ruined by the character talking, often with what he’s trying to say already being visually displayed to the player. This is at its worst when the character audibly reacts to hallucinations that weren’t actually in camera view, which immediately broke my immersion and left me going, “huh?”
Pros
- Unique sanity system that makes gameplay more interesting the longer you play
- Great horror elements, such as hallucinations, which both scare the player and manipulate gameplay
Cons
- Difficulty curve that feels unbalanced by the developers
- An overreliance on unnecessary dialogue to share information that could best be shared visually
- Clunky, unimersive crafting systems that break the realism the game is going for