- DEVELOPER: DRAGO entertainment
- PUBLISHER: DRAGO entertainment, HeartBeat Games
- PLATFORMS: PC
- GENRE: Survival
- RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2024
- STARTING PRICE: 24,99€
- REVIEWED VERSION: PC
Winter Survival is an open-world, narrative-driven survival game with a twist: a sanity system. Slowly go crazy by yourself in the wilderness and you might start hallucinating things that aren’t there or cripple your existing survival instincts.
Play as Danny who was invited to go on a trip with his friends Joel and Mike. Why they decided to camp in the middle of nowhere during Winter is beyond me. Anyway, Danny leaves his wife who’s pregnant with his child behind to go on vacation. That’s a real jerk move, but hey he’s got some serious motive to survive beyond just not dying.
Visuals
The visuals of this game are beautiful. The environment looks outstanding with such a pretty blanket of snow covering everything. The water test is also passed, the water looks great. Using sources of light like your flashlight or torches faithfully render reflections and shadows. You also have Survival Sense which I like to call Assassin’s Creed Eagle Vision that helps you easily spot resources, prey, and predators. In this mode, the environment darkens around you as you focus. Ironically, you can also abuse this to see in zero-light situations like caves.
The user interfaces are designed well, I never got confused about where I should look to find a crafting recipe or specific item, and the icons indicating your thirst, hunger, energy, warmth, and sanity are incredibly obvious and easy to understand. You’ll see your sanity meter squirm as insanity spreads in your brain.
Sometimes you’ll see some yellow indicators on things you can interact with, to help keep them from blending in with everything else in the environment. Some are more in your face like yellow paint on rocks you can attach a rope to in order to climb down, or arrows on walls. Then the more subtle ones are yellow vines and leaves hanging off ledges you can climb, or above holes you can hide in.
Music & Sound Design
The sound design is executed well, and this can make or break a game that’s set in the wilderness. As you explore, you hear the snow crunching underfoot, and birds cawing, and creatures hollering in the distance. The running of water and flames from a campfire or your torch sounds incredibly realistic. Sometimes when you’re exploring and getting chased the music kicks in and the heavy bass got my heart racing. Other times, the soft music compliments a beautiful and serene landscape when you can stop thinking about all the creatures that want you for dinner.
Gameplay Mechanics
The game plays a lot like other survival games, in the way you need to find food, water, shelter, and things to protect yourself with. Your hunger and thirst meters go down and you need to consume food and water to increase them so you don’t suffer. You also will need to forage for resources to craft with, to create better clothing, healing items, weapons, hunting traps, and eventually shelters of your own. The pre-release demo I was allowed to play didn’t let me progress far enough to begin creating weapons or houses, so I can’t really speak on them. The game is being developed and released in waves in Early Access, so we’ll get to try that stuff out soon enough.
There are a couple of mechanics in this game that I’ve never seen in other survival games I’ve played. First is the stinky meter, and when it gets bad enough you can actually see the stench. When you go too long without a bath and smell like a neckbeard at an anime convention, you’ll attract the attention of predators. To avoid this you have to strip down and wash yourself in a body of water. Thankfully a bar of soap is not required, I’m not sure how you’d get that in the wilderness.
Next is their unique sanity system. Your insanity will increase as you spend time in the wild. Get too close to some wolves for too long, hide in the dark or tight spaces, or get too cold, hungry, or thirsty and you’ll start to go a little crazy. You’ll see your brain rot in the bottom left corner, and when it reaches 100 percent, you’ll get a new trait of insanity the next time you go to bed. At the very least you get to pick your poison, but be careful as they are permanent. Some traits will allow you to do a quest to get rid of them, but you can only do one at a time.
Story
As you spend your days surviving, you’ll be given story questlines to fulfill to progress the game. In the beginning, you’re trying to find your friends. One leaves tracks that you notice are paired with bear tracks, leading you the player to believe that they were being chased. Finding the end of the tracks you see their silhouette on the other side of a broken bridge. To find your other friend you follow the signal of their walkie-talkie to a wolf den in a cave, and see them as you exit. Then at the end of the Intro you build a big fire and finally hear from one of your friends as you wait a couple of days. Are all of these events real or figments of your imagination, symptoms of being alone in the wilderness for too long? I guess you and I both are going to have to play the full game when all the parts release to find out for sure.
Conclusions
In conclusion, this is a good, unique survival game. If you’re like me and play on Explorer difficulty which is easy mode for babies, you’ll find plenty of resources to make your experience more narratively and exploratively driven, instead of the hardcore survival experience, though you can play on the harder mode if that’s what appeals to you. The sanity system is really unique and I can’t wait to see what new traits they add and how drastically they can affect your gameplay experience. If you like survival games, you should definitely keep an eye out for this one.
English (UK) 
Hrvatski