"'Project Winter' Is the Best Game About Betrayal This Year"

Cameron Kunzelman for Vice:

Project Winter, a game of survivors and those who want to kill them in an arctic hellscape. Each game is made up of eight players: six survivors who have thirty minutes to find a way to escape and two traitors out to stop them by any means.

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The most brilliant part of Project Winter is how all that communication comes together. Proximity chat is built into the game, meaning that anyone within a distance of about two “screens” can hear you talking. The further away you are, the more faint your voice, and getting good at the game requires understanding this communicative distance as best you can. There’s nothing more awful that hearing a friend being slain by a traitor at the very edge of your hearing and not knowing what direction they’re in; in a panic, you run the wrong way, and you don’t even hear who they accuse of the killing.

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I regret to inform you, though, that people who play this game in random matchmaking are kind of terrible. If you’re not getting meme language spammed at you, you’re getting called slurs. Any perceived slight is generally met with the childish temper tantrums of a gamer not getting their way, and the vast majority of players seem to think that “weird behavior” and “constantly cursing” are the best ways to hide their role in the game. If you’re going to play this game, find a group of eight people

Via my favorite video game newsletter.