41 | WINTER-OVER
41 | WINTER-OVER
by: Emery Joyce
co-written by: N. Cormier
Progress:
- I completed the game in around 1h03m. So just about spot on with the estimated gameplay time.
Things I Appreciated:
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I absolutely love the setting and atmosphere. I find Antarctica fascinating, along with the sort of accidental social experiment of people living together in the pressure cooker of isolation for that amount of time, so the mood of the game was right up my alley. I found the setting details very believable, as well as the kinds of people one might plausibly find there.
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I really enjoyed the notes system. While I did take my own notes as well, I really appreciated clicking back to that screen for a reminder of information that might help me decide who to talk to next. It was especially helpful to keep track of the character relationships with each other—who was having issues with whom, and why. In a mystery game with a lot of suspects, the suspects can just kind of become interchangeable names on the page, so having it tracked for me helped mitigate that.
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I thought the writing was polished and I appreciate the moments where the killer strikes back to disrupt your investigation. It makes the paranoia of the game more palpable and there were moments where I wasn’t sure if I wanted to spend time alone in a room to ask some of the characters questions later in the game in case they turned on me.
Feedback/Recommendations/Questions:
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[Massive spoilers, do not click this before playing the game! It’s a mystery game!] During my playthrough, I hyper-fixated on Jack as a suspect from my first conversation with Christian (where Christian suggests a data replication issue) and I wrote in my notes, “I’M ONTO JACK’S DATA FAKING ASS. HE IS OVER.” Combined with the fact that he was the hardest character to reach (I only ever found him in the astronomy lab in the afternoon) and his answers were the most useless, it only made me more sure that he did it. After talking to other people, I was able to rule out every other suspect for plausible reasons (handedness, height, opportunity to be at the scene of the murder, and so forth) so my confirmation bias only got worse.
. So I had a strange experience of this game where I felt like I was pointed at Jack so early that I was wondering why it was taking me so long to get to the accusation phase. It seemed like the game would give a new major event after unlocking a certain number of dialogue clues/questions, so I ended up spending a lot of the last few days wandering around the station checking to see if any new dialogue had opened up, compared to earlier in the game where I was more logically following up on leads. -
There was a moment I found a bit frustrating. This was when the protagonist is outside reading a note and has to come up with a creative way to retrieve the key without getting frostbitten. My mixed feelings on this are: this was a really cool way of integrating the frigid setting with an interesting solution, but also, I felt like it was really unsatisfying to watch the narrator auto-solve a puzzle while I was powerless to do anything. I’m not sure how you’d realistically be able to implement it as a puzzle given that this isn’t a parser game, but I felt a bit let down that something really interesting happened that I was sidelined for, especially because it’s such a tense moment in the narrative where the threat is getting more intense.
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I found the stress mechanic interesting, but it became unthreatening a bit too quickly. The stress mechanic feels important in-universe to make it more plausible that the protagonist is struggling to cope with the death of their brother in this extreme isolation, and to pit the stress mechanic against the ticking clock where you aren’t sure whether or not to use up a turn de-stressing that could be used to talk to someone to get a clue. In practice, though, I felt like there were turns where no one I wanted to talk to was awake/around, and also, you are (as far as I can tell) required to de-stress with Amanda to advance the ability to unlock the phone, so I never felt like I was under enough pressure when making choices. It was also slightly immersion-breaking in during the ending attack when it still said “Stress Level: Manageable” at the top of the screen while my character is fighting for their life. So overall: an intriguing mechanic, but it didn’t feel as consequential as I hoped.
What I learned about IF writing/game design:
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Later in the game, I noticed that the room descriptions had shifted to show the protagonist’s mood. Most memorably, this terse observation: “The atrium is empty. You feel exposed.” Because so much time is spent wandering around the same rooms over and over, changing the text that you’ve become so used to becomes a nasty surprise—it’s an escalation of the tension. So I’d note that as a good writing technique here: with repeated room descriptions that the player eventually starts skimming over and feeling comfortable with, changing them unexpectedly can destabilize the reader and underscore the heightened stakes.
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Another game mechanic I want to highlight is the fixed schedules. No NPC is perfectly available—there will always be gaps in when you can talk to them, and where. I like how this was tracked in the notes, showing only places/times where you’ve confirmed you can find someone. It made me a bit paranoid that I might run into someone at the “wrong” time and place and cause an event to unfold, because I don’t know for sure what they’re doing during the gaps in the schedule. Additionally, it caused me to think more strategically about when to sleep or de-stress, lining those actions up with times where the person I wanted to talk to next wouldn’t have been available anyway. So I liked the gamification of character schedules that aren’t too challenging to figure out, but also aren’t given out for free either. It’s immersive to feel like the other characters are living their lives and not bending to exactly what is convenient for the player.
Quote:
- “You stop by the shop to grab a crowbar.” (!!!)
Lasting Memorable Moment:
- The first incident where your keycard gets stolen! That’s when the game is like, alright, you’ve had enough time to get comfortable with the mechanics, it’s time to turn up the pressure. From then on, you can’t help but get paranoid about how this is going to escalate. And it does continue to escalate.