The Forever Winter Interview – New Take On Survival Horror

Fun Dog Studios: Formed in 2022, Fun Dog Studios has grown to 30 full-time game developers and is fully remote. From a design perspective, we believe gaming needs to be harder to be fun, worth your time and your money. No one tells stories about beating the boss on their first try!

Fun Dog Studios: Any other game would position the player as the chosen one, the only one who can stop the war. The Forever Winter is not that game. In our world, you’re not the hero – you’re a survivor, and you have to act like it. This shift in positioning also helps reinforce the concept at the heart of the game: going in guns blazing isn’t always the best option. The odds are stacked against the player – it’s adapt or die.

Fun Dog Studios: The Forever Winter’s dynamic environments and AI make it so no two runs are the exact same. And while you’re constantly building your skills and learning the game’s rhythm, you’re never too good to die. And if your squad dies, you lose everything – resources are gone, and you start the run anew. Best way to avoid this? Build up a stash back at the base to stockpile resources for later sessions. Or just try to not die.

Fun Dog Studios: Limited resources are just that: limited. When you die, you lose everything – say goodbye to the gear, the ammunition and the supplies you’d gained. More important than any bullet, though, is the water. Without it, you and all other scavengers die – and there’s a ticking clock that tells you exactly how much you have left. Find and retrieve water before your supplies dwindle, or it’s game over.

Fun Dog Studios: We’re a team of artists, so we are never short on fresh ideas. The beauty of The Forever Winter’s world is that the narrative benefits the setting itself. Every day, the war takes the land apart, and every night, a rapidly decaying AI puts it back together again. This concept allowed us to constantly push the boundaries of what the world could look like – nothing is set in stone.