Project Winter, developed by Other Ocean Interactive, mixes a thrilling combination of deceiving your friends and surviving the treacherous winter. This title was previously released on PC in February 2019 and Xbox last year, but now it is being introduced to the Switch and PlayStation. This is a great opportunity for the game to flourish as the Switch is a great platform for this title to play with your friends.
Project Winter is based around you being stuck with eight players on a mountain and you are trying to survive and make it off the snowy mountain. It seems like a simple concept, but that is where things change with the concept of the game. Among the 8 survivors, there are traitors that do not want to see you get off the mountain and will find ways to sabotage your attempts to leave and make sure everyone dies in the process. This type of game has become popular this past year with the rise of Among Us that brings deception into the video game space. However, what separates Project Winter the most is how you must deal with surviving the elements as well.
The game does not let up with ways you could see your demise. In the basic sense, you could die from one of the traitors that get you through a trap they set up or being axed murdered when you were least expecting it. But if it’s not the traitor that will get you – it could be the weather you have to deal with. In this game, you must make sure that your character is doing well with their hunger levels and staying warm. If either of these levels falls to 0, you will start losing health and will ultimately die of starvation or hypothermia from the cold temperatures. With being in the wilderness there are animals, and they can be just as much or an even bigger threat, such as dying to a bear such as I, so going out you must fear the animals that lurk and could kill you. There are even events like the blizzard, which will make your warmth plummet fast, which always keep you on your toes when playing the game as you must contend for incoming events that can cause havoc for you.
Project Winter deals with a basic central hut that you start the game in, with proximity chat becoming important from the beginning as you collaborate or try to deceive the fellow players around you. I loved the aspect of the game as it was fun to work together on objectives and figure it out or talk my way out of a situation when I was a traitor. I learned I can be a good liar to some of my friends at multiple points. This is what has made games like this and Among Us so popular to be able to bicker, laugh, hold grudges, and have a good time talking with your friends. There are also other ways to communicate with private voice chat radio channels, which add a whole new different element having to rely on these radios to communicate and text chat. But I enjoyed the proximity chat the most, especially as a traitor. The hut is where you can protect yourself from the cold, use the crafting table to build to complete the objectives, and make food. This is also where you can meet up with the other players and figure things out as a team or be deceived. Project Winter adds a lot of great options that add so much for a person to delve into and figure out.
As a survivor, your goal is to complete objectives to survive and get off the snowy mountain that you find yourself on. From repairing the radio to help you communicate, collecting resources to use for crafting, or finding new items that are throughout the world in crates and other spaces. You want to use the radio to be able to call a vehicle that will get you back to safety, but you have to make sure you can figure out who does not want you to make it back. Now, as a traitor, your main goal is to make sure that no one comes out alive and that you are never identified. You will know the other traitors by a red symbol above their heads and you have a direct line of communication with them with a red radio. This was fun for me as I loved working with the other traitors to take out the survivors in unique ways. You, as well, can use objects around the world and can go to other places quickly through hatches, like in Among Us, and the vents. You even have abilities that use traitor points, which will give you the ability to roll out of danger or sabotage certain objectives. You have a toolkit of traps and poisons to slow or kill the survivors at your will. Your goal is to blend in and slowly take out the survivors through deception, sabotaging, and a keen sense of the world and situations.
Project Winter is enjoyable, however, it’s not as accessible as other games in this genre are. There is so much going on from surviving the elements, the events, the traitors, and much more it can be overwhelming for others. One of my friends was put off guard because of this as it became overwhelming for them at first. But they got the hang of it and settled down, but I can see where this could be an issue for many when delving into this experience for the first time. As well with the balancing of the game, the traitors I feel are more enjoyable than the survivors and they have too many abilities that at times made it easy as a traitor. As most of the time, I played the traitors were winning these rounds, especially playing with people new to the game so I feel that the traitor’s abilities need to be tamed a bit. The game also needs more variety added to it as the objectives after a while became a bit bland and the environments you saw were not all too exciting after a couple of playthroughs.
The visuals being ported on the Switch look fine and the performance runs fine as well. With the simplistic nature of the characters in the environments, it does not put too much strain on the Switch system. I enjoyed the art style of the game and did not have connection issues at all in my experiences, which is great to have as well. Even with cross-play being supported, which as well is great to have and adds a lot of people to the player count.
Overall, I enjoyed Project Winter immensely when I played with my friends and even random people online. I fell in love with the deception of other people and having a great time when I look back on it. While there are some issues with balancing and not a whole lot of variety in the game now, it’s still a pleasant experience to have. I appreciate the new twist they add with the survival elements, which I love, which adds even more intrigue to the social deception genre that has been created. I’m looking forward to delving in with my friends for another session sooner rather than later.
Score: 7/10
You can check out the Project Winter Trailer here – https://youtu.be/5sHOWXtNELA
For more information, visit: https://otherocean.com/game/project-winter/
Related: PROJECT WINTER Review for Xbox One
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