It’s cold. Too cold to stay outside for very long stints of time. There’s a blizzard about to hit in thirty minutes or so, a bear that’s just outside a cabin with much needed supplies, we have a radio tower to find some ways to get out. We have a chance.
If it weren’t for the two bastards in this room that want us to die here….
That’s about the start of any game of Project Winter. You and seven other survivors must find a way to escape while trying to oust traitors in your midst. In a full eight-player game, you only have two. How hard can it be?
It’s like grade school again
I was totally wrong. Everyone is suspect in the beginning. Suspicious if you go off on your own for any reason. Suspicious if you and Jon Smith are hanging around a bit too much, as you both must be traitors and planning, right? Of course we’re right!
The traitors automatically know who the other is. This makes their job easy. Finding ways to sabotage the rescue without being spotted can be the most tense part of this game. Or like one experience I had a traitor found one of his traitor boxes and got lucky with a shot gun and came back to the cabin as we all were pouring out and shot us down like lambs in the slaughter…thus making my shortest game at about 3-5 minutes.
The communication becomes key. Always keeping tabs on someone. You have a built in proximity voice chat and you can build color coded radio’s that can talk to the same color over distance.
Tryin’ to Survive
You spend the first parts of any game harvesting wood or rock so you can build tools to make it go faster so you can make parts to fix the various installations around you. Each map is randomly generated with the cabin (the only safe spot in the game) being dead center. You explore the map and find sheds which have more supplies, bears to kill for food, and the installations such as a helipad which will tell you how you’re getting out of here!
Most objectives, like the radio tower to help find objectives or the aforementioned sheds, require at least two people to open while some require 3. This makes teaming up a necessity. I have yet to see a game where anyone could lone wolf it and get out.
If you’re the traitor, that is randomly decided at the beginning, your job is to stop the survivors at all costs. Those two person sheds? You and your saboteur buddy could go and loot them yourself. Keeping the good gear and hiding the rest so the survivors can’t make use of it. In the mid to late game, you can directly sabotage the rescues themselves.
And that’s the basic game play loop. For the most part i found myself enjoying it greatly. But it’s not always that simple….
Community…..the double edged sword.
By the time I had gotten to try Project Winter, they have been out in early access for a few weeks. I had issue’s with the in-game audio that kept me from playing right at launch, but this was no fault of the devs but rather my complicated setup. There’s a good die-hard community on their discord. People I found in matchmaking know and recognize names and the type of player they are. So myself, trying to learn the game, was constantly suspected of being a traitor. One game I had where I was hacked to death because I couldn’t explain where I was, which I get, but I literally had no idea of a way to identify where I was. There’s already “moose shed” and other landmark call signs that have established into the lexicon of the player base that was nearly impossible to learn. People in-game don’t want to share or help for fear that it’s an elaborate hoax and you’re the traitor. Ask on the discord though and the community is great!
Caught in the blizzard
And ultimately, that is where the game falters. I’ve played many games, a couple as the traitor, but I feel like I have zero clue as to what I’m doing still! The players right off the bat run out of the cabin usually and go right to hitting objectives. There’s nowhere for a new player to pick up the flow of the game. As a traitor it’s a little bit easier as at the very least you know killing the other players will net you a win too. If there was a way to practice, maybe an all survivor scenario or AI….hell I’ll take a “solo run” mode….just so I can test and get a feel. Or more documentation in-game as to what I should be looking to do.
The rundown…
The art style is great with a simplistic pastel color pallet. The audio is minimalist as well. The game has some hitbox issue’s but I believe they were fixed in a recent update that I didn’t get the chance to play for this review. With private lobbies coming out and many cosmetics, this game I think is going to have at the very least a good small community behind it. I’m a fan of these types of games (I’ve loved the Battlestar Galactica board game for years) and this is a good entry in the genre of these types of games. My only wish is that the new player experience got better. More instruction and what not. I shouldn’t feel like I HAVE to go to a forum or community board just to get answers. This style of game makes getting help during the game itself problematic as you don’t know who to trust. So giving more information is a must.
If you don’t mind the early new player woes as you get your feet wet, or you can get yourself your own small group to play with on a regular basis, this is a great game to pick up. I’ll definatly be checking it out myself over time.
