Project Winter is an online multiplayer social deduction game with a focus on survival both from a player's potentially traitorous teammates and the frozen wilderness. Developed by Other Ocean Interactive and published by Other Ocean Group, the title released on the PC early in 2019, and has now come to Xbox One and X/S. Project Winter is cross-platform compatible, allowing PC and Xbox players to join lobbies together in groups of 8 players, with a live audio chat to help encourage teamwork during the game.
Fans of Among Us will find similar mechanics shared with Project Winter. There are three types of players in the game. Survivors are the primary player type and their goal is to survive and escape the wilderness, with roles that can be assigned at the start of each roundthat offer a special ability they can use during the round. Traitors have the goal to kill as many Survivors as possible and have the ability to jam radios and open Traitor crates and airdrops that contain weapons and other items that help them kill Survivors. If a Survivor or a Traitor die, they become Ghosts, which can interact with other players by offering them heat or food. They can also cause harm by freezing living players when they are away from shelter.
The ultimate goal for Survivors is to escape the wilderness, which can only be done by completing the game's required objectives for the round. Together, the Survivors will work to do things like repair the Power Station, or repair a battery, in order to unlock the ability to call in the Rescue Team. If the Survivors all die before they are able to escape, the round ends and the Traitors win, while if the Survivors manage to escape, they win. The process of winning is complicated by the addition of survival elements that affect both teams, including staying warm, and eating enough to prevent starvation.
To help Project Winter Survivors and Traitors accomplish their objectives, they will need to craft items and cook foraged food to increase its effectiveness. Similar to mechanics in The Long Dark, players can collect resources in the wilderness like stones and wood, which can be crafted into Axes, Pick Axes and Scythes to speed up the collection of resources or used as weapons.
One of Project Winter's mechanics is meant to be a tool, but often creates confusion instead. Blue and Yellow Radios can be found in Wooden Crates, Supply Crates and Secure Crates, and any players with the same colored Radio can talk to each other without others hearing. Red Radios are for Traitors, and spawn into the round with them if there are multiple Traitors in a game. While the Red Radios are crucial for Traitors to communicate, the Blue and Yellow Radios can become an audio traffic jam. Between the Radio communication and the general chat, it can become difficult to hear what others are saying on each different line, making the tool much less useful for Survivor strategy.
While Project Winter has many fun features, one of its biggest setbacks is the number of required mechanics a player must juggle in order to participate. There is a lot going on during a round, and at times, the balancing act of wilderness survival, social deduction, puzzle solving and team communication can roll into an overwhelming blur. Creating good strategy and working with online teammates over the chat can become stressful and frustrating, and Project Winter would benefit from adding gameplay modes where players could select a "Wilderness Survival" round, a "PVP" round, or a "Classic" round the includes everything. This would allow new players to take the game in bites, or give long term players the option to focus on an aspect of the game they prefer while also offering the harder juggle of every mechanic available.
Project Winter is a challenging social strategy game with an interesting setting and engaging gameplay. Players who enjoy other social deduction games like Among Us would likely enjoy the fast paced, PVP elements and careful teamwork that is required to succeed during a round. The integration of survival mechanics in Project Winter adds another layer of peril to what it will take players to survive, making escape from the wilderness rewarding for Survivors, and defeat of opponents gratifying for Traitors.
Project Winter is available on the Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC. An Xbox One code was provided for the purposes of this review.