The Forever Winter is dirty, unwelcoming, painful to look at, and I really like it.
The game immediately hooks you with a deceptive sense of simplicity. The opening tunnels are relatively straightforward. You'll run into a handful of enemies, and dealing with them isn't particularly difficult. The game doesn't really reveal itself until you leave those sterile corridors behind.
Outside is absolute hell.
Without exaggeration, the world is one giant active war zone with very little room to maneuver. There are so many enemies that stealth becomes your primary means of survival. Fortunately, the different factions spend just as much time fighting each other as they do hunting you down, if not more, so you're often able to slip through the chaos unnoticed. The world itself is a burned-out wasteland built on the ruins of destroyed cities, covered in an almost painfully red color palette. You have very little health, die in seconds, and there are no shields or second chances. Death means losing everything you brought with you. To be fair game does have a Dark Souls-esk loot return system, but it's buggy and doesn't work properly.
Combat is functional, but resources are always limited. Ammunition takes up a huge amount of inventory space, so you can never carry much of it, and your backpack barely has room for loot as it is. Speaking of loot, most of what you find is exactly that: junk. Scrap, broken equipment, random debris to sell later. That's essentially the gameplay loop of Forever Winter.
To survive, you have to understand when to fight and when to disappear. Open combat rarely works in your favor, but careful positioning, using cover, picking enemies off one by one, and avoiding stronger opponents gives you a chance. The game does an excellent job of making you feel insignificant. You're not some legendary soldier. You're just another scavenger crawling across an active battlefield while armies and giant war machines settle their own conflicts around you. Your only hope is to pick through whatever scraps they leave behind.
That atmosphere is easily the game's greatest strength. It's strangely beautiful in its hopelessness, another case of finding beauty in something ugly. The actual gameplay during raids is solid too. Enemy AI can be questionable at times, and the shooting isn't nearly as responsive as something like Helldivers or ARC Raiders, but it's reliable enough that most deaths feel like your own fault rather than the game's.
The music is excellent, although I'd argue it comes dangerously close to imitation rather than inspiration. The soundtrack clearly takes heavy influence from Silent Hill and, even more noticeably, Cyberpunk 2077. I genuinely like the music, but there are moments where it feels a little too familiar.
The worldbuilding, is just fantastic. I really like that the conflict is still built around recognizable nations and political alliances rather than completely fictional factions. It makes the setting feel disturbingly believable. Character dialogue is surprisingly strong. Everyone has their own way of speaking and their own worldview, even if they're all understandably miserable.
The only artistic choice I never really warmed up to is the character artwork and design. This is entirely subjective, but while I love the environmental art direction, I really dislike the character portraits. I understand the intention. People surviving the end of the world shouldn't look glamorous. But to me they don't look like desperate survivors. They look like a group of homeless people standing around a burning barrel. The artist is clearly talented, and I don't mean any disrespect. The style simply doesn't work for me.
Unfortunately, the game is also full of major flaws.
Movement and traversal are easily the weakest part of the entire game. It's obvious that the developers were aiming for the fluidity of ARC Raiders, but they completely miss the mark. Every character feels awkward to control, and navigating the ruined city is a constant struggle. Walking along intended paths works well enough, but the moment you try climbing onto higher ground, taking an unusual route, or finding a creative hiding spot, the game falls apart. Collision is terrible. You constantly get caught on debris, clip into geometry, or discover invisible objects blocking your path. This goes well beyond the usual "it's Early Access" excuse. In its current state, traversal simply wasn't ready to be put into players' hands, and fixing it should be the developers' highest priority.
The base interface has a similar problem. I understand what they were going for. Everything is supposed to feel dirty, rusty, oppressive, and uncomfortable. That works during actual gameplay. It doesn't work when you're trying to organize your inventory. Managing your stash, buying items, and navigating menus constantly feels like you're fighting the interface instead of using it. Since the game is still in Early Access, this is easier to forgive, but it's still something that absolutely needs attention.
Another issue is the value of loot itself. Almost everything you find is just more junk to sell. You aren't discovering exciting weapons or rare equipment. You're carrying around scrap after surviving some incredibly difficult encounters, only to sell it for relatively little. Considering how brutal extractions can be, the rewards simply don't feel satisfying enough and the economy could use some balancing pass.
The reputation system is just a missed opportunity. There are several factions in the game, with three of them actively fighting each other throughout every mission. The system itself is wonderfully simple. Killing soldiers from one faction improves your standing with the others, while the Scavengers are essentially your own people and remain friendly throughout most of the game.
The problem is that reputation barely changes anything. Higher reputation only gives you discounts at faction vendors. That's literally all it does. The same faction that calls you a friend at the shop will still shoot you on sight during missions. They won't ignore you, help you, or even hesitate before attacking. It's ridiculous that defending yourself against a faction that attacked you first actually lowers your reputation with them. It feels like the system is missing half of its intended functionality.
I mentioned that briefly above but game is also extremely buggy. I'm not exaggerating when I say it feels like it's constantly falling apart. Items sometimes disappear after you pick them up. Equipment you brought into a raid occasionally vanishes from both your inventory and your stash. Enemies clip underground. You get stuck inside rocks and buildings. Sometimes successful extractions simply fail, delete all of your loot, and throw you back into another raid instead. The list goes on. While awkward menus can at least be blamed on questionable design decisions, this amount of technical problems simply can't. Early Access explains unfinished features. It doesn't excuse a game constantly breaking in ways that make you lose progress.
At the end of the day, Forever Winter is a game that's very difficult not to admire, but equally difficult to recommend. Its atmosphere, worldbuilding, and overall art direction do an incredible amount of heavy lifting, and the core gameplay during raids is genuinely enjoyable. Unfortunately, the technical state of the game is simply too poor. It's hard to recommend a game that constantly fights the player on a technical level, especially when the developers are already selling cosmetic DLC instead of spending that effort improving stability. I genuinely hope the game gets there one day. In its current state, though, I just can't recommend it.
