HomeReviewsThe Forever Winter
The Forever Winter early access review: a messy extraction shooter that should have stayed in cover longerThe winter of our discontent
The winter of our discontent
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios
Wartorn sci-fi extraction shooterThe Forever Winterhas had a messy launch into early access. For those who don’t know the game, this third-person helljaunt sees its players wandering through the battlefields of an endless conflict between three major world powers. Mechs stomp past you, ignoring you in favour of decimating enemy soldiers. Bug-like drones hover overhead, scanning for prey. And horrifyingmommy harvestersscavenge bodies from the debris. As a collection of imagery, it’s powerful stuff. As a game that you can play (with up to three pals) it is very rough, and not just around the edges.
The Forever Winter - Official Gameplay Overview TrailerWatch on YouTube
The Forever Winter - Official Gameplay Overview Trailer
The Forever Winter’s likeEscape From Tarkov, or the Dark Zone of theDivisiongames. Just swap “PvPvE” for the letters “PvEvEvE”. You have a HQ called “the Innards”, where you prep for excursions into open maps of varying size. You scav around in the bodies of fallen enemies for loot: ammo, weapon attachments, floppy discs that can be sold for cash, cases of tools, cybernetic detritus. You don’t have a whole lot of room in your “rig” (a big steel backpack), so you need to prioritise, often fulfilling requests for goons from different factions.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios
Or! You could just skulk around for a moment. The factional groups perform (often unpredictable) patrols throughout the landscape, and frequently encounter one another. Your coveted drones will inevitably get into a scrape and (if you’re lucky) find themselves exploded. The remnants are yours, if you can grab them without being seen. Make it to an extraction point, and you bring all the loot home. Die, and you are sent back to HQ with your hands empty and all your gear stranded on the battlefield (you can recover it, though, Souls-style).
Conceptually, it is a nice twist on the Tarkov formula. And sometimes an expedition into the eternowar does evoke feelings of being the little guy in a grander conflict, hoping not to get quickly annihilated. Once or twice I felt the buzz of scraping my way out of the trenches, such as the time I made a desperate decision to start a gunfight with a horde of mecha-undead close to the extraction. I had only a few fistfuls of shotgun shells left to my name, but I had to risk it. I got out, barely.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios
There’s another quirk that has upset some players. You need to keep your HQ stocked with enough water for the citizens of your homehole to survive. This means finding water barrels out in the wastes and often prioritizing the extraction of those barrels above other more exciting loot, like lockboxes you can sell for cash, or “gacha” crates with unknown trinkets you can only crack open when you get home. If water runs out, your HQ effectively dies and you lose everything in your stash - all the items you’ve gathered so far evaporate.
This in itself doesn’t sound too bad, and it fits with the theme of survival in a harsh world. The kicker is: water depletes in real time, even when you’re not playing the game. Which no doubt summons for many hellish flashbacks of withered crops in Farmville; the anxiety-inducing countdown timers of social network games of the late 2000s.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios
It’s an instant turn-off for lots of people, even those predisposed to enjoy a game that markets itself as unforgiving. The developers have said they’re looking into how to tweak this mechanic. But to be honest, it’s the least of the problems I’ve encountered with the game: juddering frame rates, wacky bugs, borked network play, loot piles overlapping in a way that makes them impossible to distinguish from one another. This is as early access as early access can feasibly get.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios
This may be intentional, a case of “war makes geography untenable”. But I get the impression of a game where art and design have clashed. Artists like clutter, it makes things look detailed. Designers like tidiness, it makes routes clear for the player. For me, Forever Winter feels a touch too artistically messy. I was moving along routes and climbing material that was probably never intended to be used as a passageway, glitching through meshes and getting trapped in geometry because something in my primate brain said “go that way” even while the game didn’t expect it.
So far, it’s a game of poor affordances: good at looking the part, bad at communicating what it would like you to do. An example of form kicking function into the long grass. Imagine an interior designer was given the keys to the architect’s office and decided to have a go at designing a hotel instead of just dressing one. The result is an interesting-looking building with lots of space for rugs, but no fire escape or toilets.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios
It can be disappointing when a distinctive concept can’t keep up with the mechanical and technical necessities to deliver on its promise. Part of the challenge here is perhaps that there is something very un-gamelike about the Forever Winter at a conceptual level, in that much of it is aboutnotinteracting. You are encouraged to allow other factions to fight amongst themselves, rather than get involved yourself. Some principal verbs of the game are those of inaction: “do nothing” , “don’t engage”, “stay still”.
That’s 100% viable as games go. A cleverstealth gamecan turn these verbs into tense moments within a larger game of hide and seek. And there are glimpses of that here. Sadly, The Forever Winter has some way to go before it can call its stealth chops fully sensible or readable. For the most part, enemies don’t notice you until you fire a shot. You can be three metres from them and they’ll often entirely ignore you, which can make attempts to stay hidden in cover feel a little pointless.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios
Then all of a sudden they take a random interest and you’re the fish of the day at a restaurant for starving cats, with squads of troopers and wonkily animated helicopters raining hell upon your pre-corpse. There are predefined rules about the enemies behaviour (I can tell from the timedMetal Gear Solidquesion marks and exclams above their heads) but their sightlines and priorities are often unreadable and seemingly random. Once again, it feels like the game needs to communicate itself better.
The Forever Winter remains an interesting setting and being the little guy in a big war is an appealing premise. Those rare runs during which I felt the nervousness of survival deep in my gut were extremely promising. So I do hope it gets cleaned up during its early access scramble for survival. But right now it lacks clarity in its moment-to-moment play, and basic functionality in many other respects (see also: tank yeeting across the sky). Yes, it’s in early access, but our thinking at RPS is that of visiting a restaurant: if you can pay money for a meal, it ought to at least arrive warm. The Forever Winter has been served cold.
