WINTERING

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WINTERING is a short top-down survival action game for Windows, with a free demo you can play in your browser on this page: the first three days of the winter. You are a lone trapper with one winter to survive on a taiga. Warmth, food and light drain in real time; you hold a button to chop, dig and gather, make tools and fires from a recipe ring that never pauses the world, and fight wolves and boar that show you what they are about to do. The paid download is the whole ten-day winter, with two blizzards, a bear on the ridge, a beacon you can build and light, and the thaw. Hand-written HTML5, no engine, made by Core Systems Asset Factory using AI tools.

A winter is a budget

Every trip away from the fire is a bet. A day is two and a half minutes of light and then a night that drains your warmth nearly twice as fast and brings the wolves out. Wood is close to the hut; food is not. Go far enough to eat and you have to get back before dark, or carry a torch, or build a fire where you stand.

We tested both obvious plans with bots. Staying by the fire and chopping the nearest tree starves you. Ranging out and fighting everything freezes you. Neither reached the thaw in twelve tries each. The way through is in between, and it is yours to find.

Beasts that tell you

A wolf circles before it commits. When it drops low and still, it is about to lunge across your path, at where you are going. Sidestep and strike while it recovers. A boar paws the ground and charges in a straight line; put a tree behind you and it hits the trunk and is stunned. Once you have fought a beast, the journal remembers its tell and the game draws the line of its attack for you.

The journal and the chest outlive you

When the cold takes you, the next winter starts from your hut. The field journal keeps what you learned: which beasts you have fought and how they move, which plants are poison, the places you have found, and the five caches the last trapper hid under hollow logs far from the hut. A cache you have found is marked on your screen in every winter after. Whatever you stored in the hut's chest is still there.

What is in it

• One hand-built taiga: spruce and pine forest, a frozen river with fishing holes, a fen thick with berries, a granite ridge with a beacon cairn, an abandoned camp, your hut.
• Ten recipes in the demo (stone axe, flint spear, torch, campfire, fur cloak, snowshoes, bandage, fishing line, roast meat, grilled fish), plus the beacon brand in the full game.
• Wolves, boar, badgers, deer, foxes and small animals; a brown bear in the full game.
• Two endings in the full game: the thaw, and the beacon.
• Keyboard, gamepad and touch. A winter you live through takes about half an hour.

Free demo and full game

The browser demo on this page is the first three days. The paid download is the full ten-day winter for Windows (64-bit), as a zip you unpack and run. Windows may warn you the first time you run it: the build is not code-signed.

Made from our own packs

Every tile, sprite, effect, font, sound and track is from our own asset packs on this page's creator profile: Verdant 41 Taiga and Verdant 28 Deep Forest (tiles), the Wildmark and Kithfell sprite families (the trapper and the beasts), Sparkfall 02 (effects), Lantern and Tallow (type), the Frostfall album (music) and the Longhaul, Footfall, Steel and Bone, Haymaker, Squall and Skald sound packs. AI disclosure: the code and the text were written with AI; the art comes from our AI-generated asset packs; the sound and music are our own procedural and composed packs, with no generative audio model.

Paid, from the same studio

• CRYPTMARCH, a Gauntlet-style crawl for one or two players with levels and a town merchant ($4.99).
• HOLLOWAY, a top-down sword adventure through a wood and its dungeons ($7.99).
• BOLTHOLE, a single-room twin-stick keep defence ($6.99).

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