Strap in, folks; it’s yet another Early Access survival sandbox game with co-op elements. Brave the icy apocalypse and survive solo or with your friends in Permafrost. Is this yet another game in the long line of its peers destined to gather dust in your Steam library? Or does it have enough about it to rise above the chaff?
Yes, You Can Pet The Dog
I love a crafting sim. They’re a lot of fun, and it’s very satisfying to see what you’ve created using materials you’ve gathered by hand. Satisfactory and Subnautica are both games I can point to as great comparisons to Permafrost, as all three have dense worlds with unfolding plots that progress the more you explore.
In contrast, Permafrost seems to lean more into the co-operative aspect of the experience, more like Valheim. This is crucial, as your inventory fills up incredibly quickly, so exploring with four people is more enjoyable than exploring alone, which often leads to tedious trekking back and forth to your base.
Thankfully, this is somewhat mitigated by your helpful dog companion, who, aside from being simply precious, can also be petted, will poop randomly, and can carry a whole extra set of items for you. You get your dog early in the adventure, so you don’t have to worry about storage for long.
Expand your horizons
Like any good survival crafting game, there is a dense network of blueprints and upgrades you can gradually unlock through either points or discovering them in the world. Exploration is usually rewarded with gear better than what you can craft at the time, side-quests, or lore in the form of recordings scattered throughout the world. This helps you to naturally explore the local area and promotes doing so with how well you’re rewarded.
Side-quests are also generous with their rewards, making them well worth your time. Trading with NPCs, however, is rarely, if ever, worth it. They usually only stock things you already have in abundance, and there’s little variety.
The game also looks and sounds gorgeous, with the ambient soundscape drawing you in and the visuals helping the world feel alien, icy, horrifying, and beautiful at the same time. It also has a very clean, easy-to-understand UI and menu system; I never found myself getting lost.
You level up skills by using them rather than using skill points. So if you want to get better at axe handling, better chop down some trees. If you want to take a hit, get hit. If you want to spend hours running across the map, well, you’d better have that shift button ready. It means you get better depending on how you play, but since you’ll inevitably have to engage with everything at some point, you’ll likely find them levelling pretty evenly as you progress. Permafrost also has pretty in-depth settings to adjust your experience, though it lacks accessibility features. It also has native controller support and full button remapping built in, which is helpful.
However…
This is where the praise ends, because there are a LOT of caveats to what I’ve said previously.
Firstly, the graphics. Yes, they look pretty, but they’re stitched together poorly, with huge swathes of land completely untextured but still with collision physics. Speaking of physics, dear lord, are they bad. Your dog companion will get stuck or disappear endlessly, and as I mentioned earlier, with inventory space at a premium, not being able to use your extra storage reliably is incredibly frustrating. I have had to quit the game multiple times because my dog or I got stuck, and the unstuck command in the menu didn’t fix it. Oh, but it gets worse.
The quests are bugged too. So while I could spend ten hours exploring the map, doing side quests, and seeing the sights, I couldn’t progress without completely restarting the game and making a new save. This happened multiple times while I was reviewing the game: once with a main quest and twice with side quests.
Early Access Woes
This is where I get to my main problem with Permafrost: it shouldn’t be released yet. Even in Early Access, it’s still so broken and aggravating that it becomes unfun to play. And who knows what would happen if you were playing as a group but one member couldn’t complete a quest for some reason. It’s a hollow facade. It looks very pretty on the outside, but inside it’s completely hollow. The systems start to get boring quickly; the janky physics make traversal a lottery as to whether you’ll make it where you want to go, and the sheer number of bugs means you could have to completely restart hours in, making the whole experience frankly miserable.
Sound mixing is another aspect that’s completely all over the place. NPCs aren’t balanced, so some are louder than others, some are completely silent for parts of their dialogue but not others. Some are quieter than the ambient sound, which also hasn’t been balanced.
Does Permafrost need more time in the oven?
This isn’t even half-cooked; it’s still raw. It has many design elements and the potential to be a great game, but it will take years of work to get it there. I will say, I fully intend to return to this game if they make a major update, and throughout this early access period the developers have been constantly putting out updates and bug fixes, so I hope that means the future is bright. But I think they’d be better off making a functional game and making it pretty later than trying to make this pretty but broken mess playable. If the developers stick at it, I can see this becoming a very successful game.
Developer: SpaceRocket Games
Publisher: Toplitz Productions
Platform: PC (Steam)
Key provided by Press Engine
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