Summary
The Forever Winter is not your typical looter shooter power fantasy. A desperate scavenger looting corpses while titanic machines conduct a war that's consumed the world. You're not trying to fight them; you're just trying to survive, and bring what you scavenge back to regular folk who are hiding from the devastation.
If we can get the player to survey an area, take a moment, and not immediately shoot at everything that they see, that's a W for us. The more noise you make and the more successful you are, the more the machine factions will consider you a threat.
When you die in a mission you lose all your loot, but you still get XP, giving you constant progression. The factions will react not just to what you're doing in that mission, but what you've been doing in previous ones. The team interviewed veterans, including friends of Williams who came back from the Iraq War.
"The Forever Winter" puts a greater emphasis on stealth and tactics. "Every minute of it puts you in a position where you have to make difficult decisions and maintain full situational awareness," says reviewer. "And that is very much something I want in my life," he adds.