Impact Winter is a game about an asteroid strike, but rather than focus on the impact itself, it depicts the plight of the survivors, those left to make a living in a world enveloped in snow. Players take the role of Jacob Solomon, holed up in a church with a handful of fellow survivors, and tasked with keeping the group alive until help arrives. Balancing hunger, thirst, fatigue and morale amongst the group, Jacob needs to venture out into the frozen wasteland in search of resources in an attempt to ensure that the group is still alive by the time the rescue group get to them.
The initial estimated time for rescue is 30 days, though completing quests can reduce this and acquiring upgrades for your gear or for communication equipment in the area. Funnily enough, these 30 days feel like an eternity, but each day in isolation feels like it’s never quite long enough. You’ll find yourself praying for an extra 20 minutes of daylight, for your fellow survivors to hold off on mealtime for just a little longer, or for a particular building to be 15-20 footsteps closer. Impact Winter does a great job of making survival feel like a struggle, and the fact that you have an extra four mouths to feed and minds to occupy makes you feel responsible for more than just your own well-being.
Each time you venture out of the church, your objective isn’t just to gather food, water and fuel to keep your friends alive. There are quest lines for each character, and each survivor has their particular area of expertise. Wendy, for example is the group’s cook, and so she’ll ask you to find recipes or ingredients to create more nutritious meals for the group. Blane is a survival expert, Maggie is a mechanic, and Christophe knows his way around computers. Completing quests for each character will either improve your skills or unlock new items for crafting, making survival that much more likely and making your ventures into the wilds easier.
You’re joined on your travels by a small robot called an Ako-Light, which can scan the area, provide light, and drill into the ground to find buried resources. The Ako-Light also functions as your inventory, which, like the Resident Evil games, is laid out in a grid, and is never quite big enough to carry everything that you’d like. This means that space and weight are also resources, and that your trips out are often full of tough choices, such as whether food, water, fuel, or that key piece of equipment are the most important thing to take back to the church. There’s a great sense of satisfaction and relief when you find a cache of resources that you desperately need, and this is often followed by the struggle of figuring out what you need more desperately than what you don’t.
Impact Winter is a game best played in longer sessions, as this gives you time to sink into the experience and really feel as if you’re Jacob, working to save the rest of your team, and uncover the secrets of the snowy wasteland. However, I found that after a while, the problems of Impact Winter began to show themselves. At a base level, the game stutters a lot, leaving movement to feel juddery and wrecking the sense of immersion that the game otherwise does such a great job of building up. I also found multiple issues of items not being where I needed them, or locked doors that required lock picks with nothing around to craft them from. I get that this is supposed to be a difficult, bordering-on-realistic experience, but when I’ve made my way across the map to my destination and found that I can’t get through the door that I need to (on multiple occasions), then it just starts to feel a little like I’m wasting my time. Admittedly, this is on me as much as the game for not going prepared, but the fact that there doesn’t seem to be anyway of redeeming my mistake without resulting to lugging everything back home felt a little redundant and like a mechanic that gaming had long left behind.
Largely, though, I had a good time with Impact Winter, even though the experience that it presents can’t exactly be described as fun. This is the kind of game that you’ll want to set an afternoon aside for, so that you can really get into the atmosphere, and if you have a decent pair of headphones, they make the immersion that much greater. It isn’t a perfect game, with issues both mechanical and design-based, but if you can see past those then you’ll get a game that is reasonably unique and fairly memorable. Impact Winter is a bit of a slog, but it’s meant to be, and the sense of responsibility and ownership of your group of characters is unlike what most other games offer.
