FROST Review for Xbox One

FROST is a card game/survival game by publisher Digerati and developers Stage Clear Studios and Jérôme Bodin. In it, you try to reach shelter before being consumed by a blizzard known as “the Frost.”

In the game, you have 3 resources: food, wood, and survivors. You can use these resources by playing a matching card (i.e: to use food, play a food card). You can get more cards by ending your turn or by sending a survivor out to get a new resource card (although you risk the survivor dying by doing this). There is also a turn counter at the top of the screen. The counter starts at 8 and ticks down each time you rest or end a turn without progressing to the next region. If you proceed to the next region, the counter goes up by 1. If the counter reaches 0, you get a game over.

The standard game has 25 regions between the start and the goal. A region has a barrier that has a number of food, wood, and survivors. In order to unlock the option to progress to the next region, you need to play a number of resource cards equal to the barrier’s conditions (i.e: if a barrier has a condition of 3 food and 2 survivors, then you need to play 3 food cards and 2 survivor cards). You have a limit to how much of a resource you can apply to the barrier, but once the barrier is down you reclaim the resources used to unlock it.

When you enter a region, 2 cards will spawn at the top of the screen. These cards are called idea cards. They allow you to exchange resource cards for special cards. Spending resources to unlock an idea card means they won’t contribute to lowering the barrier.

Sometimes a region will have an event. These events are either trading or combat. Trading will allow you to increase  your total amount of a given resource by decreasing your total amount of another resource. Combat will apply a damage marker to you unless you clear the condition for it before progressing to the next region. Usually, this involves using at least 1 weapon card (which can be made from the idea cards). If you have a damage marker, you have to either sacrifice one of your survivors or sacrifice one of your hitpoints. If your hitpoints reach 0, you will get a game over, similar to what happens if the Frost catches up to you. Of course, if you sacrifice too many survivors, you risk not having enough to clear a barrier.

The standard game has 2 difficulties: easy and custom. Easy mode will display your total amount for each resource while custom mode has the option to turn off the resource display. I am not sure if turning off the display gives you an unlimited number of resources, but I suspect it does not.

As you play Frost, you will unlock new idea and event cards as well as new scenarios. You can play a scenario in Scenario Mode. Scenarios play more or less like the standard game, but with a special set of rules. For example, the first scenario I unlocked had the condition that I could not lose a survivor with a star mark.

Overall, I enjoyed Frost and thought it was an interesting mesh of 2 different game ideas. I think a fair rating for it would be 8/10.

Take a Look at the Frost Trailer:

Frost releases for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch beginning July 17, 2018.