While survival games often throw the elements at you, the colder weathers tend to come later in the game as low temperatures come with challenges of their own on top of the usual day-to-day survival. This will be done either by unlocking a winter biome as you progress, or through the changing of seasons. DRAGO entertainment’s Winter Survival does the polar opposite and slaps you straight into icy, deep waters. We play as Danny, who, after what was supposed to be a hiking trip in the Mount Washington State Park with his friends, ends up stranded in the blistering wilderness. If we’re to survive, we must learn to face and overcome the elements while searching for our missing friends. But is Winter Survival worth purchasing in Early Access?
Winter Survival starts off with a strange introduction shown through wooden mannequins which act out the events leading up to our hiking trip gone wrong. I felt like this could have done with not being there, as it’s pretty pointless information and we could have just started the game with a voice over explaining that the trio were supposed to be going on a hiking trip when this happened. Despite this, it does have some dialogue choices that hilariously make no difference at all as the events are already set in place. You can blatantly say “no” to your friend inviting you on the trip and they’ll still say “great, see you there!”. It’s an odd way to start what is otherwise a very bleak game.
After this introduction, we have a brief tutorial where we help to set up camp in a cave with our friend, before we suddenly wake up in the middle of nowhere with no recollection of how we got there. To me, it was unclear whether this is a flashback leading up to the introduction where we set up camp in the cave, or if we have just randomly sleepwalked somewhere. Either way, we now need to find the backpack we dropped and also relocate our friends.
It’s important to note that the current Early Access build of Winter Survival only contains the prologue of the Story Mode which took me roughly five hours to complete and also explore a little further – the road map details that more acts will be added later on. There is also Endless Mode which allows you to freely use more resources and crafting options to explore the world as you like and also survive the wilderness.
The prologue of the Story Mode mainly consists of Danny trying to find his two lost friends while also trying to stay alive. As a survival game, Winter Survival gives you several statuses that you need to keep in check: food, hunger, temperature and sanity. If you don’t look after these, you’ll be given debuffs which will further increase your insanity which can result in permanent debuffs (which you must select, so choose wisely), and also blocks your Adaptation (levelling up) buff unlocks – but you can then do a side quest (such as sleep for 12 hours) to unblock these.
For hunger, you can find various vegetation in the wilderness as well as animals to hunt. There are also plenty of canned goods to loot from abandoned buildings in the area – which there’s an abundance of. In fact, one of the things that I like most about Winter Survival is its exploration aspects, as there are plenty of points of interest in the map to explore. For thirst, there are ponds and rivers throughout the map, though these can freeze over when the temperature drops (Winter Survival has dynamic weather). You can also drink alcohol but this can make you sick and you can also become dependent on it. For keeping your temperature high, you can make a fire, keep your clothes patched and also keep them dry. If you get your clothes wet, you can make a drying line to dry them off on. Your sanity is affected by any debuffs you pick up and you also need to stay clear of enemies and the darkness to keep it low.
One problem I had with Winter Survival is that I felt that the sanity metre was very harsh as there’s seemingly no way to get it down once your insanity starts to rise – even from sleeping, smoking or drinking alcohol. Once you gain a permanent debuff it’s with you for the rest of the game. By the end of the prologue, I already had three permanent debuffs*. It’s also highly unrealistic that this would happen in such a short space of time just because I was cold one too many times.
The other problem I had was the recipe system. You unlock recipes the more you level up, which is not unusual for a survival game. However, in Winter Survival, even the most basic of recipes, such as a spear (or any weapon to defend yourself with), a bed, and a base, are locked until you unlock a certain level. In fact, by the time I had finished the prologue I still hadn’t unlocked either of these. This was even more frustrating when you take into account that saving is only available at a bed – and when we can’t make our own bed, this means we can only ever save in the one bed available in the abandoned hunting hut we find. Had it not been for the lack of saving, I could have completed the prologue in a couple of hours. But instead, my progress was restarted time and time again because I could not get back to the hut in time to save after returning from exploring. A lack of autosaving after completing certain quests is bad enough without also removing the function to save – or even quicksave – at will. It would even be beneficial if we could use the beds in the pre-built abandoned camps and huts found around the map, but I guess that would just be too convenient.
Of course, this also means you can’t settle down anywhere other than the hunter’s hut throughout the prologue – even when you spend time crafting a large bonfire to create a smoke signal in a specific spot that the quest wants you to build in, far away from the hut. It would have been really nice to be able to set up a bed there and stay warm with the huge amount of fuel I had gathered for this bonfire as, unless you keep a fire going throughout the night, your temperature will drop while you sleep.
I also think there needs to be more craftable items to prevent your temperature from constantly dropping while on the go – such as warmer clothes. However, these may be added later or could be an unlockable item that I haven’t reached yet. Otherwise it’s very risky to travel for too long (especially considering we can’t build our own base while on the move) as your temperature will continue to plummet unless you spend time building a campfire with no bed for when it gets dark.
On top of this, without a spear we must resort to stealth to stay clear of enemies, which mostly consist of wolves. To do this, you must remain in tall grass. I did find the stealth elements in Winter Survival to also not be great. Even when crouched and out of sight, somehow wolves still seem to spot me. If you don’t wash for too long, they can also smell you, but in this case this wasn’t the problem for me. Even wolves that were asleep were able to somehow spot me in their dreams, though only the sound effects of them barking would trigger if their detection metre filled… without the wolf itself moving. I think if stealth is going to be such a core aspect of the game then it should be utilised better. You can also distract wolves by throwing stones or snow, and you can find or craft a flammable torch to light and scare them off as a last resort.
Another quality of life issue I had with Winter Survival, which is also a pet peeve of mine in a lot of survival games, is that you can’t dismantle builds to recycle your resources. This means if you build a drying line in the wilderness to quickly dry off your clothes, you can’t then dismantle the line afterwards to recycle your string which is incredibly annoying, not to mention unrealistic.
Visually, Winter Survival looks great. However, I did end up with a debuff which effected my vision and made the game look very glitchy – I don’t exactly see the point of going into so much effort to make the game look this good only to enforce a debuff on the player which affects the way it looks.
Similarly, the soundtrack really caught my ear while playing Winter Survival. It perfectly captures of the bleakness of the game and Danny’s desperation as he wanders the wilderness in search of his friends. On top of this, the voice acting caught me pleasantly by surprise as well – especially Danny’s voice actor who does a tremendous job.
While Winter Survival does have promise and I look forward to exploring more of the map when there’s a story to go with it, I wouldn’t recommend purchasing this game in its current build as it’s just too bare bones and needs a lot of quality of life work to be enjoyable. That being said, more content has been promised in the Early Access roadmap and I will be picking this up again when it releases in full, as I’m not only interested to see how the story pans out, but I also look forward to experiencing the game once its more polished.
*Editor’s note: Since writing this review, there is a new set of difficulty settings in Winter Survival which allow you to tailor the difficulty to your liking.
Jess played Winter Survival on PC in Early Access with a review code.
