Anyway. This post is just a wall of text describing it.
Project Winter is one of those Resistance-style games where everyone's trying to escape, but some people are secretly out to prevent the rest from doing so. Games usually involve 8 people with a 6 survivor/2 traitor split, but can go down to 4/1 at a minimum. As you'd expect there are also roles you might randomly spawn with, like being able to access traitor loot, see others' health, or resurrect dead players. There's also a wildcard role that can steal the role of any dead body.
♪ Survivors and traitors
Each game lasts 30 minutes at most, with play focussed on the survivors trying to complete 2 tasks before calling and reaching a rescue vehicle. Those 2 tasks involve "fixing" stations, and each one is selected randomly from a small handful. The different tasks push different team strategies; sometimes the survivors need to loot together, sometimes individuals can dig up pieces alone, and so on. The map, tasks, loot and roles are randomised every game.
Traitors on the other hand need to ensure zero survivors make it out. They can communicate secretly from the start, can access passages and loot the others can't (easily), and can sabotage stations, switches, and bridges. While survivors must reach specific goals, traitors can do whatever they want as long as the escape vehicle ultimately stays empty. Kill everyone directly, sabotage actively out of sight, or play along while wasting time like a boss just to outlast everyone caught in the final storm; it's a much more freestyle game. Sometimes the survivors might even just be bad survivors and fail or die early without your help, though honestly the reverse is more common. On rare occasion you can also find yourself as a lone traitor against 7 survivors. This makes for a tough game, but it's also so uncommon that you can really mess with their minds.
♪ Survival
Supporting all this is the survival game. Food, warmth, and health are the 3 stats you have to manage, while harvesting, looting, crafting and cooking all have a place but only to a light degree. Animals will kill you, lakes will destroy your warmth, and inventory space is extremely limited; only 4-5 spaces with a max stack of 3 items, making moose prized kills for the opportunity to add that precious 5th space. All the survival mechanics complement the espionage/escape game very well, tuned to be just enough effort to keep things tense, to force decisions constantly, and to provide excuses when you need them. It's truly amazing how easily people will forget to keep an eye on you when you "need berries".
♪ Control mechanics
Run around, explore, cut down stuff, eat stuff, and activate whatever the current goober is in the environment that you need to activate. Punctuate that with bursts of melee where you charge up your swings, and shoot outs where you charge up your aim. Motion and combat are not FPS-fluid; they're pokey. You can heal while running but it slows you down, running with empty hands is faster, and you can throw anything at anyone to slow them down. You'll punch someone accidentally trying to knock a tree down, 2-vs-1 fights often result in friendly damage, and there's a random but rare daze you can fall into that messes you up for a few seconds. Killing a bear on your own isn't too difficult, but that doesn't mean it isn't risky; you can't just control combat into being a predictable thing. All players can lay traps, plant mines, and apply poison, but it's the traitors who will get access to these items much more easily. Getting poisoned forces you to stop and puke, so it's almost guaranteed to make you dead if it happens during a tense moment. Player names are concealed behind objects just like anything else so hiding is a legit thing. Even hiding in sound comes into play; moving secretly around the power station isn't impossible because of its noise, while talking via radio doesn't reveal your name. You can even be really graceful and plain drown out the dying screams of your victim so people can't hear them call your name, lol. Another very useful touch, so obvious that in today's gaming scene you won't notice it at first, is the practicality of tracks in the snow. Hunt wanderers. Lure innocents. It works well; even a dropped item will very slowly become hidden under the snow.
♪ Events
Mixing up the overall escape game you have events: blizzards, teleportation, global exiles, or you all turn into a rabbit. A psycho, creepy rabbit you control while screaming is heard in the background. This is when you get your purge on while no-one has an identity.
DLC mixes things up more with a supernatural night theme, new map, more items, weird roles and weird events. With one role you can even see the ghosts of dead players as they run around. They can hear you but you can't hear them, turning things into this cool game of trying to communicate with the dead, empowered as they are. Ghosts can teleport to anyone and see everything but unless take charge and know which ghosts to work with, they're going to find it very hard to relay any info to you. Meanwhile the other players alive value you since you are a literal medium, and it's just really cool to keep playing your game while seeing other players' ghosts running with you. You know they're talking about you, you know they're hearing you talk to them, and hanging around because you're their best connection to the living game. (Disclaimer however: once you're a ghost you're basically done playing, stuck in a spectate mode that has tiny amounts of interaction with the living. If you don't wait out the rest of the whole game as a ghost you don't receive any rewards.)
♪ Trust no-one
Above (or under?) it all you have, of course, trust issues. Trust issues for daze. Players can cast a vote whenever they like to exile someone from the game's safe-zone, ending their ability to heal for free and craft at all. You've got public chatter based on distance, radio channels, truth serums, body stealing, and so on. Even the text-based chat partially blanks out words with distance, which is an excellent touch, and you can still text-communicate through radio channels. I've been playing pretty solidly for a few days now and the different situations that can arise really do keep amusing. I've been the lone traitor with the same radio channel as the survivors, running for my life from 2 survivors attacking me on screen while in the same moment spinning misinformation to them as the "one of them" over the radio. I had been all game without them knowing.
Removing repair parts from the thing being repaired is fun, especially as you can hide them behind that very same building, then report the loss and sow that doubt. Take a deliberate take a hit off your own trap and use it. This once led to a hilarious scenario where myself and the other traitor both watched the whole mob flip instantly and chase the wrong guy down and kill him right next to us. It was glorious (and it was the same game as the massive scenario written at the end of this post).
♪ Presentation
Presentation-wise, things are low-poly and simple. The camera stays at a fixed height except for the occasional building interior, and the UI is basic without quite hitting the depths of indie gaming. It's nothing to write home about at all, but I don't find it unpleasant at all either.
♪ Online
Many reviews will mention the low playerbase from their time. I can say confidently that isn't an issue currently. The recent free weekend multiplied the numbers by about 20. That was a week ago, and SteamDB is showing the current count to be about 5x what it was before the free period. I easily find games on Australian servers until about 1am, after which (night owl here) I use US servers and again have no problem. Ping issues aren't an issue; I can only assume where it applies because I don't notice a difference.
On the subject of online play, the community is surprisingly good. [Interjection here because I realise that by now it's sounding like I'm pimping the game quite a bit, so I feel that I should confirm that these are legitimate impressions.]
I can only assume that the environment PW creates - 8 people in a trust situation for 30 minutes only - lends itself to people playing properly and only playing properly. Bad eggs are very infrequent, maybe 1 a day that will be a problem for 5 minutes. You do want to have an understanding of the Aussie culture s*** talk that happens from time to time, but it's easy to imagine that anyone reading this surely will. Super-cutting, super-tongue-in-cheek stuff that gets pretty hilarious when the whole camp is going off.
♪ Loot-boxes
The final feature I'll mention is the game's rewards and customisation system. This is completely cliche. Actual loot-boxes, character and equipment skins. That's pretty much it, it's all cosmetic, but it works. And you can sell the stuff you find on Steam (mostly 5 - 50 cents, with one $2.50 item I've found). It's so simple and low-poly, and many customisations are so plain, but it's surprisingly nice to have. I want that cool shiny cape... weird. Maybe I'm just new to it. There's some progression system for rewards too based on challenges but I haven't much looked at it yet. You can make skinny, normal and fat avatars. The fat ones look the funniest but they also stand out more than you want to.
♪ Conclusion
Overall I didn't immediately find the hijinx that this post and many reviews like to suggest. But after a couple of days it definitely started to blossom and now I'm finding it to be pretty good not just for lols, but also a bit of a unicorn in the world of online gaming: something very communicative yet not a toxic wasteland, despite a foundation of lying and backstabbing.
Woohoo. Wall of text pretty much done so here's a scenario I'll end with (which is another wall of text). I had to relay this to a friend on facebook afterwards. Hide tags for space saving.
♪ Scenario