Permafrost: the moon shattered, winter is endless, and your friend can stay in bed

The moon was shattered. Not damaged, not eclipsed: shattered. It is the last in a series of catastrophes, and Earth has since entered a winter that does not end.

That is a premise deserving a great game. Permafrost is not one yet, but it is not far off, and interesting things are happening inside it.

What you are asked to be

You are a Rook. An engineer. Somebody with the skills to rebuild, but with no wilderness experience, drawn into this frozen world by a radio signal from a long-lost friend.

I like that character choice a great deal. Most survival games make you a survivalist by default, competent from minute one. Making you somebody whose profession is useful but whose instincts are bad is an elegant narrative justification for your opening incompetence.

Alone or with up to three friends, you explore frozen cities and wilderness, you face brutal weather, you cross faction-controlled territory, you hunt, scavenge, craft, and build a network of shelters.

The promise, and it is clear

There is a line on the store page I want to quote, because it states an intention and the intention is good.

A tense, grounded survival experience shaped by silence and scarcity. No constant gunfire, no fantasy tropes. Just winter, isolation, and resolve.

In a genre that has drifted towards a shooter with bandit camps, announcing that you will not do that is brave. And progression is gated by exploration rather than a skill tree, which pulls the same way: you do not advance because you banked points, you advance because you went somewhere.

And now the three problems

107 positive reviews out of 149, barely over seven in ten, with nearly five thousand people playing at once. That is a solid start with a loudly complaining community, and they have reasons.

Problem one: co-op is broken in principle.

This is the most serious complaint and it recurs across several independent reviews. Loot is shared, only the host gets a dog, and crucially: the quest progresses for everybody regardless of who does it.

One player sums up the consequence in a sentence: his friend could literally go AFK while he finished the questline on his own.

For a game sold on four-player co-op, that is a design flaw, not a bug. And it is the second game in two days where I have written the same thing, after Neon Abyss 2 and its host keeping the unlocks. There is clearly a trend, and it is a bad one.

Problem two: the technical side, for some players.

The reports are spectacularly contradictory, which is information in itself.

On one side, crashes during world creation, three or four attempts needed, one run where the sound did not work, complete freezes with no identified cause.

On the other, players in 4K at 75 to 80 frames per second without a single incident, turning up to say they do not understand the negative reviews.

When a game runs perfectly for some and refuses to launch for others, that is not a power problem, it is a configuration problem. It gets fixed, and usually quickly. But on launch day it costs refunds.

Problem three: the comparison that stings.

One player writes that this is nothing like The Long Dark, and more like a winter reskin of Medieval Dynasty.

That line is nastier than it looks once you know Permafrost is published by Toplitz Productions, which is to say precisely the publisher of the Dynasty series.

I am not adopting it as my own verdict: it is a player's impression, not a verifiable fact. But it points at a real tension. Toplitz has a very identifiable signature, built on slow construction, gathering and community management, and Permafrost carries that DNA. If you arrived hoping for the glacial, minimalist dread of The Long Dark, you will find a game that is markedly busier and markedly less oppressive.

What is good anyway

The players who enjoy it all say roughly the same thing: the pacing is good, the systems make sense without a manual, and progression through exploration works. Having to go and find things rather than finding them everywhere is cited as the main quality.

The animation is weak, the interface is average, and the animals' intelligence is, in a formulation I am keeping, lower than their body temperature. But this is an early access release that went live this morning at 19.99 euros, and several players say exactly that: it is what you can expect from an early access foundation, and the foundation is good.

My view comes in two parts.

There is in Permafrost an idea about a world I had not seen: an Earth that lost its moon, an endless winter, and a hero who can weld but cannot hunt. And an ambition of tone, the refusal of noise, that deserves encouragement.

And there is a co-op mode that lets three people watch the fourth play, which is exactly the opposite of what the store page sells.

At twenty euros, if you play alone and the game starts on your machine, it is a good bet for the coming winter. Four-handed, wait for a patch, or draw lots for who gets the dog.

Managed to play four-handed without one of you becoming a spectator? Explain how on the InsertCoins Discord.