For six of the eight players in a Project Winter team, the goal is surviving a chilly wilderness long enough to escape. For the other two, the goal is deception: it's about blending into the team and then, when the moment presents itself, betraying your allies, stopping them from escaping. It's a fascinating concept, and this week it finished its three-month Early Access stint with a 1.0 update that added new weapons and maps.
The new weapons are the crossbow and the tranquilizer gun, both of which are near-silent ranged weapons. The tranquilizer is particularly interesting for traitors because it will stop players using proximity chat, text chat or radio chat when hit (emotes will still be a comms option). If you're one of the two traitors—both know who the other traitor is—it could be a last-ditch option for silencing anyone that rumbles you, stopping them exposing you to the rest of the team.
One place to find these new weapons will be the armory, a new building that only spawns once per map, and has a high chance of containing ranged weapons. The 1.0 update also adds three new maps, each with potential sabotage spots.
The dev team at Other Ocean Interactive says they'll be slowing down new content releases to monthly, rather than every two weeks, to give them "a bit more breathing room and [to] make sure we release polished features". Bug fixes will come more regularly.
The next major update, in which they're aiming to improve repair objectives, add ragdoll physics, give each player a stats page, and more is scheduled for June 20.
Project Winter costs $20/£15.50 on Steam. It's slightly more expensive on the Humble Store.
