‘Winter Survival’ is an open-world, survival crafting game developed and published by DRAGO Entertainment with HeartBeat Games. As the name suggests the aim is to survive in the frozen wilderness, escape from predators, find or build shelter, and try not to lose your mind. Your primary goal is to survive after an accident leaves you stranded in the middle of nowhere.

The story takes you through your first night while showing you the ropes, then guides you with various tasks to complete. I can feel a lot of nuances from other survival games in Winter Survival, however, there is one mechanic I will touch upon that is very interesting and somewhat sets it apart.

Now gameplay-wise, I am enjoying Winter Survival. The building and crafting of your basic needs like food and shelter are easy to learn and use, and the tutorial is very useful and gives you the basic run down. It can be a bit buggy sometimes and I wish they added in item slot saves so if I were to throw a spear when I pick it up it was back in my item slot for quick access, so I didn’t have to go into the inventory menu and re-assign it to the hotkey again. The gathering is fairly straightforward and one of the least jarring things to do so far. The idea is there and once a little polish is applied this game will have a lot to offer.

One aspect left me a little frustrated and that is trying to defend yourself. I have seen in the trailer and how it is meant to look but I have yet to damage an animal whether it be with axes that didn’t work, or it would be a good ten seconds when I would swing at the wolf.

I don’t know why it is so slow and nothing would happen. I haven’t confirmed this yet, but I thought maybe an axe would only work on trees and such which is odd, so I tried a spear. Waiting for the right time I would thrust my spear at the wolf as it charged at me, only for it to do some ultra-instinct dodge and bowl me over. With my next attempt, I was adamant that this time I would get it and thought throwing it might work, so I aimed to account for the projectile drop released and it landed a couple of feet in front of me. Safe to say, I was struggling with the combat aspect of the game, to the point it left me a little frustrated.

However, poor combat guidance aside, the cool little mechanic I mentioned above is quite interesting. During your survival, if you are to suffer through too many horrific encounters you can be debuffed. If you go to bed and your trauma for the day is sitting at a hundred per cent you will have to choose a symptom that will make surviving that little bit harder.

You might start seeing things that aren’t there or the survival sight that allows you to highlight items, creatures and other things may start to get a bit blurry, and the more you rack up the harder it will be to function and the easier it will be to get yourself killed out in the harsh environments. I liked this mechanic it gives the experience a little bit more of a realistic feeling of ‘ok, I cannot be reckless, or I could end up paying for it later’ inner monologue.

Another thing I will say is that it looks really good, while not totally wow factor, it is still aesthetically pleasing, and the small details are really good. The creatures from the simple to the most beastly are well animated and even a corpse hanging from a tree,

you can see the feet have been eaten down to the bone which is a real thing that would occur. I applaud the effort put into the animations and the world in general; it looks pretty clean. The music had me tripping though, there are wilderness noises, music and your character constantly saying how hopeless the situation is. There always seems to be this sense of an eerie silence like I would even hold my breath to actively see if I could hear movement or noises.

Currently, there are two out of three modes Story and Endless which is just free play, then there is Cold Wave which will be available soon. I will check that out as soon as I can. Being an indie game, there have been a few issues, like the game crashing but that has only happened twice and there were a couple of freeze frame moments but all-in-all, pretty solid survival game so far.

I will continue to work on the combat aspect maybe I am missing something we will see, for now, though great effort and a fun game so far, let’s see how it looks when they take all of the feedback from the community and clean it up a bit more.

Written by: Adam Brasher