Overall Project Winter is a fun community-based game. It is a simple and engaging survival challenge that will test all of your skills. If you want to talk to strangers, work as a team, and trick people then you will love Project Winter.
A group of mountain climbers are stranded and need to fix their communication equipment and call for rescue before the mega blizzard hits. Not everyone on the mountain can be trusted. A few members of the group are not interested in being saved but are traitors that want to eliminate as many people as possible. Communication is key in this game of cat and mouse. Be a survivor and try to escape or work as a traitor trying to get everyone killed. Project Winter has solid gameplay and a beautiful art style. The game only has some minor issues including, minor bugs, long term replayability, and game tutorials/instructions. Project Winter is a fun game that lets you make new friends and enemies every match.
Communication is everything. Without communication being saved is difficult and finding the traitor is almost impossible. The best way to communicate in this game is through the voice chat but the game also has a chat box in the bottom corner. The best mechanic in the game is the proximity chat. Talking feels natural and the game properly places each person’s voices with their location in the game. So, when you are separated there is a feeling of loneliness as the voices of others drift off into the distance.
You want to be near everyone and work as a team. It was fun being a survivor trying to guess who was the traitor and being the traitor and shifting the blame on to others. I had fun talking with all the people in the game and working together to accomplish a goal. I personally had more fun joking around, taking things more lightly, and laughing with all the people I met but the games are still fun when going full tryhard. There is no progression system that effects gameplay. All characters are equal with the skill gap depending on players experience and skill.
The game has a simple but pretty art style that immediately drew me in. The game’s design is cartoony without looking goofy or childish. An indie style done right. Small details like the diamond map, blizzards reducing vision without overtaking the screen, and ghost spectating make the game feel clean and well designed. The character creator makes your player feel unique and helps connect you with the game. Items for your character are acquired through game achievements and loot boxes. Don’t worry the credits for the loot boxes can be earned in game and are easy to acquire so it does not feel like you need to be dropping any cash to look cool.
There were few issues with the game mechanics like wildlife AI and prevalence and loading screen lag but that looks like it will be patched. The game also needs to add an alert system for when a character is cold or hungry. Many times, I was surprised when I looked up and I was almost freezing to death. Other than that, there are not many mechanical changes to make to the game.
The game is difficult to immediately pick up but after a few good games, you start to understand what is going on. When I was playing, I would either get hardcore players that had invested 40+ hours into the game just days after release or new players that had no idea what was going on. I would love to see a more comprehensive tutorial rather than just a written rule book. An interactive system that has the player experience crafting, combat, and item usage would help players quickly get into the game without the awkward early matches. Players would focus on manipulating others and not waste time troubleshooting the controls. A matchmaking system may also be beneficial for new players. This would give new players some easy games to test out mechanics without being steamrolled.
I hope that Project Winter will be expanded in the future. The game does become repetitive and I feel that small additions will keep players engaged. Communication makes this game good but small achievements additions, survival tasks, and environments would be great additions to make as the game begins to age. The more community that this game gets the more fun it will become and I expect that as more and more people start to play Project Winter that it will only get better.
