Winter Survival - Casual Gaming Review
Winter survival
Winter Survival was released on March 6th, 2024 it was developed by DRAGO entertainment and published by DRAGO entertainment, and HeartBeat Games. Thank you for the key devs! I got it through a program called Keymailer.
When playing this game one of my viewers suggested that it looked like someone took the forest and mixed it with the long dark and I could not help but agree with that. This is a survival game, where you leave your pregnant wife at home to go take a quick adventure with a few of your buddies. A few things happen and after getting chased by bears and wolves you are trying to find your friends and get the heck out of there.
There is an option of doing a tutorial before the game which I felt was an interesting concept of how they had it set up. It was a dark room with a variety of signs, each sign teaching you a different concept of the game. As I have played many survival games before I just went to view the various mechanics of the game that might be unique to the game itself. like there was a sanity concept and a few others I had to check out.
Hunter sense
This mechanic allows you to use your stamina to grey out and focus on harvestable plants, highlight resources, and highlight animals. Sneaking is a very important concept in this game. Which I want to point out that I just suck at sneaking. I don't have the patience to do it.
Sanity
When a negative effect happens it affects your sanity. Things like if your person is hungry too long, if they are thirsty too long if they are scared or in some kind of danger. These things will increase the sanity percentage. Once the sanity is at 100% you gain a negative effect. This sometimes can be a general effect like now you see illusions, or can give a negative status to one of your level perks like instead of having a longer time before you are hungry there is a shorter one. You want to make sure your person is well taken care of and stay out of danger. While there are even some negative stats that just happen. One of the ones that I encountered was that my guy was home sick, there was no way that I could take care of that. It's easier to feed or warm the character than if he is just big sad about existing in his current state.
Building/crafting
This concept was driving me nuts for a while I wanted something to defend myself with but how the game works is by a progression of finding something and your characters going oh I can do something with this. Which is a general concept for a lot of survival games. The original forest game "The Forest" did this for a lot of items while in the newer one most items are already buildable from the start.
There are different areas where you can do certain concepts like I had to build a loom to upgrade my clothes, which you have to take off an item to even repair it. There is no pausing so while you are in your menus, you really need to pay attention as your person gets hungrier and colder as you are crafting things.
There is also limited space in your inventory so I ended up just dropping things in a pile on the ground at the first cabin that you find. Sorry random hunter this is my place now.
Effects
There are a lot of effects some I found interesting. Like I mentioned before my guy got homesick. Some of the others I have seen were, I must have stayed inside a house too much as my guy got cabin fever I didn't want to be in there anymore. Normal ones like he got hungry, thirsty, and cold. He has some kind of fear when he is in the dark, but there is another one dread when he is close to a wolf. Another one is my person became stinky which animals can smell him faster, the reason being he hadn't bathed in a while. I ended up going to the hot spring to bathe and just jumped in. Well, that made all my clothes wet which had to be dried and I had to take everything off to bathe. So my guy was mad he was wet and even more cold. Remember you have to resolve these quickly to not fill your sanity meter.
Thoughts
A lot of items I'm not sure to pick up or not as they say old or broken I have picked up a few but nothing is like oh I can make this now kind of thing so I just end up dropping it.
As always I get stuck at looking at the random things in the game, like oh look at those boxes, look at this random flower, etc. The game looked great.
Of course, my biggest complaint is I suck at sneaking games, that's more of a me problem. There are a lot of things you have to pay attention to, I also felt like I was stuck in the beginning area just because of the number of wolves there was, but that also could just be me sucking at sneaking. I ended up going into a cave that said I needed to go into but didn't see an outlet.
I also found something that I couldn't pick up because I needed something else to use it but didn't more than likely discover that item yet somehow. So that sucked because it was an attack item.
I didn't like the start of the story, he left his VERY heavy pregnant wife to go screw around in the mountains with his buddies. Then they get lost. She looked like she was about to POP in the silhouette they showed. In my head I'm just thinking to the guy, "That's what you get hope you get eaten by wolves. XD."
If you like games like The Long Dark I would think this would be a good game to pick up.
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