Impact Winter – The future’s snow good

While we hate to rain on your parade so early in this preview, there’s a cold hard reality we need to address. Species-wise, there’s a good chance we’re all going downtown. We couldn’t tell you when and how, specifically. But it’s in our nature to destroy ourselves, we still think it’s cool to fight over oil and islands, and we recently handed most of the nukes to a reality TV star whose shtick was firing.

And this is assuming the universe doesn’t just do the job for us with a random asteroid fender bender. It wouldn’t take much of a heavenly body to sort us out, either; you’d only need an ocean to be hit by a piddly rock or comet 5 ks in diameter. The resulting debris cloud, radical climate change and mass plant and animal extinctions would do the rest. “Impact winter” is the cheery name scienticans give that scenario. It’s a concept that terrifies us to our very core. It also makes for fantastic video game entertainment.

Although Impact Winter has obvious survival mechanics and inspirations (stats, crafting, environment effects, resource management etc) it also has an equal blend of RPG/Adventure (team members, story paths, roles, definitive ending etc.) It’s not a ‘live-as-long-as you-can-’em-up’ it’s survival with a story and a heart. Upon starting the game, Ako-Light (your robot companion) intercepts a scrambled radio transmission that hints at help arriving in 30 days. Your objective to guide yourself through that month seems simple enough. However, plot-twist: sitting on your butt, deciding who should be eaten first, won’t advance time.

A key part of the gameplay loop takes inspiration from classic RPGs where you earn ‘experience’ and ‘level-up’. In Impact Winter, you’ll be rewarded for your discoveries and choices, and this will strengthen Ako-Light’s signal and lower the Rescue Timer considerably.

We loved our hour’s worth of hands-on time with this. The art direction skews a little comical and the lighting effects ooze atmosphere. Better yet, the soundtrack is made up of triumphant ‘80s synth. (Why this genre ever died out is beyond us.)

Impact Winter looks incredibly in-depth from the get go, but in no time the tutorial caught us up to speed and taught us how to avoid the many snowpitfalls of this procedurally-generated world and its three main narrative threads (which equals a ton of replay).

Heading out aimlessly into the white is more or less suicide. Better to invest in the lives of your fellow survivors to earn new equipment, upgrades, and abilities to make your life easier, and a going concern. Your team is mercifully autonomous; moving, eating, drinking, sleeping and keeping themselves occupied. Your avatar isn’t given direct control over them, rather you organise their rations, choose what gets built, and sometimes choose sides in their arguments. If the drama escalates, somebody might leave and take half your stuff. Avoid this. Nobody wants to play Divorce: The Video Game.

Don’t let the blizzards trick you; Impact Winter is hot property that needs to be bleeping strongly on everybody’s shitty, VaultTechesque radar.

Posted in Blog, Games