Project Winter ~ First Impressions
Project Winter by ‘Other Ocean Group’ just hit Xbox Game Pass today, and if one of my friends hadn’t mentioned this game to me, it would’ve flown completely under my radar. Initially, I thought it was just another Among Us game, but the complexities of Project Winter makes the basic deception-survival structure a lot more exciting than I expected it to be.
You and up to eight players have to survive the harsh wildness of the winter in order to escape to safety. While you try to brave the dangers of Mother Nature, there are also two traitors among you who will attempt to prevent you from leaving.
The innocents will need to follow their objectives in order to repair buildings and machinery that will eventually lead them to freedom. During this, traitors can sabotage the buildings and machines to slow the progress of the innocents.
When playing the game’s ‘normal’ mode, all players are randomly assigned a certain role as innocents or traitors. Certain roles give those players abilities to either sabotage or support the team - for example, a ‘hacker’ has the ability to open bunkers containing valuable items without assistance from other teammates.
Bunkers are scattered around the randomly generated maps that can contain essential crafting materials such as electronic or mechanical scrap, or even weapons such as tripwires. Most of the time, bunkers have multiple terminals that need to be activated simultaneously by other team members in order to access it.
I’m trying my best not to compare the game to Among Us too much, but I feel like I need to. Among Us was such an incredible hit in the past year, and as much as I did enjoy it, I did find that it became a bit stale once you became familiar with the locations in each map. Project Winter kept me constantly thinking about the best strategies and items I could take on in order to combat both the traitors and environment.
The proximity chat feature in this game really shines. There is a decent map size to explore so it was quite fun hearing people calling out for each other and deciding whether to approach them or not. The use of walkie-talkies is especially interesting when trying to work together long-distance. All traitors always start with a walkie-talkie, but when an innocent player is using a walkie-talkie with another player, no one else around you can hear your conversation- regardless of how close they are to you! It created some really great rounds to plot against suspected traitors or innocents.
During the game, you’re required to look for resources to craft items crucial to your escape. I really loved this element in the game because trying to find materials whilst also being cautious of other dangers, players are being kept on their toes. You can craft items as well as cook at the cabin (everyone’s spawn point), and there’s a fireplace for increasing players’ warmth so it’s such an important location in every map. You can only craft and cook at the cabin, so it’s a brilliant way to draw people back together!
The pacing of the game can feel particularly slow if you die quite early in the game. Once you die, you become a ghost and can spectate between all living players. While a ghost, you have abilities you can use to either assist or damage any other team members. For example, you can either help increase the hunger, health or warmth of an area of teammates, or you could send out a deathly chill to send them running for the closest campfire. The cool-down on these abilities is understandably long as to not mess with the surviving players of the game, so there can be a bit of waiting around. In saying this, all ghosts can talk to one another while watching and listening to all the remaining survivors so it can be quite entertaining to watch.
The mechanics of using long-ranged weapons is incredibly awkward. Trying to use the thumbstick on the Xbox controller to try and angle a shot in a high stakes situation is uncomfortable to control and doesn’t feel natural. Most of us in game resorted to using axes as weapons for that reason, but I felt like I was missing out on some potentially fun and sneaky kills with a crossbow.
I think the beauty of this game is that it doesn’t feel too repetitive. I played this game for about three hours with almost a full lobby, and whether you were playing traitor or innocent, the world we played in was always changing. I love that the environment around us was always making us think outside of ourselves - there were so many other factors at play like the dangerous wildlife and the stormy weather that kept us on our toes.
I had so many laughs getting to deceive my friends and attempting to form alliances to try and escape. Project Winter offers so much more to the typical survival-betrayal genre, so I highly recommend everyone to try this!
