BONES IN ICE
The creators of this unique game are the British studio Mojo Bones , a developer born in 2011 and who has specialized especially in games of casual and more colorful type, in the line of small but fun games of puzzles like Ravenhearst or Azada , both distributed by Big Fish Games .
Apparently, Mojo Bones has decided to jump into the pool of “big games” aided by Bandai Namco , and this time he has immersed himself in a dense, serious and meditative title that differs a lot from his old works.
Despite its failures, of which we will talk later, Impact Winter is a good first step for this developer to grow and face more serious projects over time. Potential seems to have.
AN ADVENTURE UNDER ZERO
The premise of the game is simple in principle, very much in line with any random movie of natural disasters: an asteroid of considerable size
has fallen in Nelson , a US population , killing most of its inhabitants. After the impact, a huge cloud of dust has been suspended in the air for months, blocking the sunlight and causing a kind of glaciation whose extension is unknown.
In the midst of all this chaos, Jacob , a man who has lost his wife and daughter and four other survivors with different abilities and personalities find refuge in an abandoned church that seems to have remained relatively intact. With the passage of tim
e they find BD-750, a curious robot-drone they will repair and baptize later as Ako-Light . One day, the robot will intercept a transmission of what
appears to be a rescue team, which ensures that it will rescue us in 30 days. Now, the biggest challenge is to survive until they come to pick us up, which will not be easy, since they need fire to warm themselves and not die because of hypothermia, and the supplies run out …
In this title there is a curious mixture of styles that make it at least difficult to classify it. Evidently it is a game of survival; but with an aesthetic (semi-zenithal view, scenarios …) and controls that vaguely remind of more experimental graphic adventures like the always forgotten Sanitarium by ASC GAmes , and with certain brushstrokes of role that are
appreciated in the system of levels of Ako-Light , though curiously these levels only serve to lower the time needed for rescue and not to gain new
skills. Also the management of time and resources plays an important role, following the long shadow of The Sims and other similar games.
PLAYING IN THE SNOW
The game proposes an interesting survival challenge in which we will have to manage the resources of the church to keep our group alive, which in the long run will keep us alive.
This is an essential point, because although we can simply “survive” until the rescue arrives, it will be practically impossible to explore this pa
rticular world buried by snow without the help of our colleagues, since they are the only ones capable of improving our team , create infiltration or s
urvival tools or improve our robot to perform different tasks. To create such improvements we will have to venture into the frozen surface of Nelson
, which is now known as “The Void” to locate houses buried by snow, caves that we can access, supply trucks, injured vans or maybe another s
urvivor eager to exchange food or information with us, thanks to what we can do with the essential pieces that our companions.
Thus, with a large can, a pipe, some screws and a little imagination, our partner Maggie will be able to create a small boiler that will allow our fire to endure a few valuable minutes more. These improvements will eventually prove to be essential, since as the game p
rogresses, the cold intensifies, hunger increases in the absence of the most basic food and energy and energy descend at an increasingly vertiginous pace.
This is the most complicated point of the game, since the exploration itself would be simple if we are able to orient ourselves in the enormous white wilderness that is “The Void” , but the rhythm of the game is modulated by the needs of our refuge compan
ions , as well as their own. In the case of Jacob , our taciturn protagonist, it is simpler, since he can go on eating and drinking as he finds things, so the only needs that we will have to worry about more often will be his energy, his temperature and the Drone coun
ter of our drone. Going back to the companions … well, that’s something else; which leads us to one of the blackest points of the game.
During our incursions abroad, our four colleagues will continue to execute the tasks assigned to them, and they will continue to act accordin
g to the roles we have decided for them, thanks to which they will have a beneficial effect at the cost of a negative effect. The problem comes
when these actions of creation end: our companions will show a manifest uselessness, reaching the point of not eating if they do not have assigned food or not being able to light the fire again if it has been extinguished
or adding fuel. Nor are they able to go out to look for resources in the vicinity or take objects from the store if necessary … to give
an example: one of the possibilities is that Christophe is electrocute while fixing some of his electrical junk. When this happens, You will need a bandage to heal and to be able to continue working. The problem comes when the bandage is in the
storage area just 10 meters from the computer pain, and we get an event message warning us of the event … being about 15 km walk from the shelter. And of course, until we return, Christophe will continue to be injured and will not have continued his work.
