Info about Distrust: Polar Survival: Official game description: A helicopter crash left a group of explorers stranded near an Arctic research station. The survivors will have to resist the nightmares of dead frost and hunger. As they try to escape the dangers of the long dark polar night and find the way to the shelter of the abandoned station, all they are doing is sinking deeper into a nightmare scenario. When they fall asleep, they attract a terrifying force that sucks the life out of their bodies, but the longer they battle exhaustion and stay awake, the less likely they are to survive. Guide the explorers through a randomly generated station, overcome the severe climate and fight the unfathomable! MYSTERIOUS ANOMALIES WAITING IN THE WINGS ----------------------------------------- They come out of nowhere and disappear instantly. They may be faster than light or may crawl slowly till they get near enough to strike. What are they? What do they want? THE ENDLESS NIGHT AND EXTREME CLIMATE ------------------------------------- Explore and research the abandoned station, gather and craft the tools and open the supply boxes so you don’t starve from hunger and cold. PLAY WITH A FRIEND IN A CO-OP MODE ---------------------------------- As you struggle for survival and face the challenges that the environment throws at you, a helping hand may be your last hope. Play Distrust together in a COOP mode! PROCEDURAL GENERATION --------------------- No matter if you stick to a singleplayer or play with a friend in a co-op mode, a randomly generated base turns every new playthrough into a unique adventure. 15 SURVIVORS TO CHOOSE FROM --------------------------- Every character has unique skills and abilities to fit any survival strategy of yours. AN ABSORBING NARRATION WITH TONS OF PLOT TWISTS AND QUESTS TO COMPLETE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- What is that force that inhabits the station? Is that an alien from the outer space or a mythical ancient creature from the from the depths of the centuries? Or is that a result of a failed scientific experiment? Survive to learn the answer! ALTERED PERCEPTION OF REALITY ----------------------------- As the explorers try to sleep just enough to stay alive, they slowly go mad and eventually reach the point where they can no longer trust their senses and tell the difference between reality and a hallucination. Release date: 23 Aug, 2017 Categories: Survival, Cooperative Multiplayer, Resource Management, Roguelike, Exploration, Psychological Horror, Character Collection - Hardware Profile: No data Feature extractions: - Community Price: No data - Playtime Metrics: No data - Time-to-fun: No data - Player Archetypes: No data Below are summaries of things people say about the game per category. Each point is assigned a weight that represents how often it is mentioned across all reviews. What players like: - Simple, Engaging Design (weight 0.84): Reviewers consistently praise the game's well-executed concept and design, noting its ability to deliver a simple yet engaging and challenging gameplay experience that is both fun and dynamic. - Immersive & Eerie Atmosphere (weight 0.24): The game excels in creating a strong, memorable atmosphere, often described as pleasant, suspenseful, and conveying a sense of solitude, fear, and hopelessness. This is significantly enhanced by excellent sound design, including ambient sounds, eerie effects, and a fitting soundtrack. - Robust Co-op Mode (weight 0.17): The cooperative mode is a significant highlight, allowing up to three players to share the challenging survival experience. Its availability and continuous refinement by developers are seen as a major plus, extending the game's lifespan. - "The Thing" Inspired (weight 0.12): The game's plot, atmosphere, and aesthetic are strongly reminiscent of John Carpenter's 'The Thing', appealing to fans of the movie. This inspiration contributes significantly to the game's unique feel. - Intense Hardcore Survival (weight 0.11): The game delivers a challenging and high-pressure survival experience, forcing players into difficult decisions and making them "suffer" in various ways. Real-time strategy elements contribute to the constant tension. - Strategic Resource Management (weight 0.08): A core gameplay element involves challenging resource management, forcing players to prioritize, micromanage, and calculate risks. The game skillfully blends survival with strategic elements, often feeling like an RTS. - Accessible & Low Specs (weight 0.07): The game is highly accessible, playable with just a mouse and suitable for laptops due to its very low configuration requirements. This makes it available to a broad audience. - Extensive Language Support (weight 0.07): The game offers robust multi-language support, including official Chinese, Polish, and Turkish localizations, and Russian voice acting. This broadens its appeal to international players. - Clever Madness Mechanic (weight 0.05): The game features an original and engaging "madness" mechanic, where characters can go insane, leading to unique and clever distortions. Exploring these symptoms is highlighted as an enjoyable aspect of gameplay. - Active Developer Support (weight 0.05): The developers are praised for their continuous refinement, bug fixes, and attentiveness to the player base. This responsiveness, including the addition of features like co-op, is seen as a positive sign for the game's future. - Difficulty Becomes Easier (weight 0.05): While initially challenging, some reviewers note that the game becomes significantly easier after a few hours of play, once core mechanics are understood. This suggests a potentially short learning curve or a drop in long-term challenge. - Excellent Value for Price (weight 0.05): Many reviewers emphasize the game's excellent value, especially when purchased on sale or at its budget price. It's considered a high-quality survival game that offers significant entertainment for its cost. Common complaints: - Repetitive, Shallow Gameplay & Story (weight 0.97): The core gameplay loop quickly becomes monotonous and repetitive, lacking depth, variety, and meaningful progression. The narrative is largely absent or underdeveloped, failing to engage players or provide a compelling reason for continued play, leading to low replayability. Balance issues and uninteresting character mechanics further detract from the experience. - Lacks Horror & Tension (weight 0.55): Despite its setting and inspiration, the game fails to deliver a genuine horror or tense experience. Monsters are not scary or threatening, and the expected psychological elements of paranoia and isolation, akin to "The Thing," are absent, leading to a lack of dread. - Severe Technical & Co-op Bugs (weight 0.54): The game suffers from significant technical issues, including severe lag, frequent crashes, and game-breaking bugs, particularly in cooperative mode. These issues, such as inventory lag, invisible items, and inability to loot downed teammates, severely hinder or completely prevent enjoyable multiplayer experiences. - Unfair Randomness (RNG) (weight 0.14): The game relies too heavily on random number generation (RNG) for critical elements like resource availability and event outcomes. This often works against the player, leading to situations where survival or progression is determined by luck rather than skill or strategy, making choices feel meaningless and leading to frustrating, unwinnable scenarios. - Restrictive Co-op Item Management (weight 0.13): Cooperative play is severely hampered by restrictive item management, including the critical inability to loot downed teammates' inventories for essential items like healing or revival materials. Players also cannot easily share or drop tools, and the common inventory, while convenient, paradoxically affects strategic item distribution and immersion. - Illogical Heating Mechanic (weight 0.12): The game's heating system is unrealistic and frustrating; characters can freeze even near a working stove if a single window is open elsewhere in the building. This illogical mechanic makes managing character warmth overly difficult and counter-intuitive, leading to frequent, unavoidable deaths. - Co-op Mode Limitations (weight 0.11): The cooperative mode is significantly limited, lacking options to change difficulty and restricting character unlocks and achievements primarily to harder single-player modes. This design choice, coupled with poor network optimization and matchmaking issues, diminishes the co-op experience and replayability. - Unimpressive Monster Design (weight 0.1): The game's monsters are consistently described as unthreatening, uninteresting, and even cartoonish in appearance. Rather than instilling fear or paranoia, they are often perceived as mere annoyances that can be easily bypassed, significantly detracting from the intended horror atmosphere. - Clunky Controls & UI (weight 0.09): Players frequently report that the game's controls are unintuitive, inconvenient, and unresponsive, leading to mis-clicks and frustration. The user interface is also described as difficult to use, hindering smooth gameplay and command execution. - Frustrating Anomaly System (weight 0.08): The anomaly system is poorly implemented, with monsters either instantly killing players or acting as passive, annoying obstacles. Their unpredictable behavior and tendency to cause deaths due to bad luck rather than player error make them a source of frustration rather than engaging threats. - Flawed Sleep & Monster Spawning (weight 0.08): The sleep mechanic is illogical and frustrating; monsters consistently spawn and attack during any sleep session, regardless of duration, making rest a dangerous endeavor. Additionally, players can only sleep in specific, intact beds, further limiting strategic options and adding to the game's artificial difficulty. - Subpar Solo Play Experience (weight 0.07): The game's solo mode is widely criticized for being unengaging and overly demanding, often devolving into a "multi-tasking frenzy" to manage multiple characters simultaneously. This makes playing alone confusing and significantly less enjoyable than the intended cooperative experience. Gameplay feedback: - Strategic Survival Management (weight 0.63): The game is a survival/resource management roguelike set in a harsh Arctic environment. Players control a small team, strategically managing their warmth, hunger, stamina, and sanity while scavenging for resources and making critical decisions to escape. - Varied Playtime & Replayability (weight 0.54): Individual playthroughs are short (2-3 hours), but the game offers significant replayability through multiple endings, unlockable characters, and randomly generated maps and objectives. The initial high difficulty and roguelike elements encourage learning and repeated attempts. - Scavenge & Advance Zones (weight 0.48): The primary gameplay loop involves quickly scavenging for limited resources within randomly generated buildings. Players must find specific items or complete tasks to unlock the exit and progress through a series of 5-6 increasingly difficult zones. - Sleep-Triggered Anomaly Threats (weight 0.34): Hostile "anomalies" are a primary threat, uniquely appearing only when characters sleep. Different anomaly types have specific weaknesses (light, heat, traps, bullets) and behaviors, requiring varied countermeasures to avoid damage, sanity loss, or death. - Diverse Unlockable Characters (weight 0.3): The game features 12-15 playable characters beyond the initial few, each possessing unique attributes, skills, and traits. These characters are unlocked by completing achievements or successful playthroughs, adding strategic depth and replay value. - Debuffs & Mental Illnesses (weight 0.25): Characters can acquire various debilitating or humorous debuffs and mental illnesses when their survival stats are low. These effects range from visual and auditory hallucinations to impaired gameplay, adding a layer of challenge and unique flavor. - Shared Team Inventory (weight 0.12): All controlled characters share a single, common inventory, regardless of their distance on the map. This design choice simplifies resource management and allows for instant use of any item picked up by any team member. Performance notes: - Severe Performance & Stability Issues (weight 0.11): The game frequently suffers from severe technical issues including crashes, freezes, significant lag, and disconnections. These problems are particularly noticeable in later zones or when multiple anomalies are present, severely impacting the gameplay experience. - Workarounds for Technical Issues (weight 0.05): Players have identified workarounds for some technical issues, such as restarting the game to fix lags. However, some problems persist, like the inability to reconnect after a crash, leading to player-devised strategies such as transferring important items before restarting or waiting for all players to load before interacting with item bags. Recommendations: - Recommended on Sale (weight 0.31): The game is generally recommended, especially for fans of the survival/strategy genre, but many reviewers emphasize purchasing it at a significant discount or low price point to maximize its value. It offers hours of entertainment and replayability for its cost. - Player Guidance Recommended (weight 0.08): Reviewers advise new players to complete the tutorial, research tips and guides, and start on simpler difficulties. This suggests a steep learning curve or complex mechanics that benefit from preparation. - Best Played Co-op (weight 0.07): The game is strongly recommended for co-op play, with many reviewers stating it should not be played alone. Playing with 2 or more people significantly enhances the experience and convenience. - Improve UI/Controls (weight 0.04): Specific suggestions include making interaction icons clearer (e.g., showing durability, different colors) and adding advanced control options like sequential commands (e.g., ALT key functionality). These aim to enhance usability. - Suggests Feature/DLC (weight 0.04): Players suggest specific new features, such as allowing partners to scavenge from knocked-out friends. There's also interest in supporting paid DLC, particularly for content inspired by "The Thing." - Manage Game Expectations (weight 0.04): Players are advised not to expect a game like "The Thing" or a strong story-driven adventure. This highlights that the game focuses more on survival mechanics and atmosphere rather than narrative or specific horror tropes. - High Stress Gameplay (weight 0.03): The game is noted for requiring players to resist anxiety and be prepared for stressful situations. This indicates a challenging and tense gameplay experience, likely due to resource management or survival elements. - Appeals to Niche Audience (weight 0.03): The game is described as being for a specific niche market, appealing to players who enjoy tense resource management, psychological horror, or games similar to "Don't Starve." This indicates it's not for a general audience. - Suggests Language Support (weight 0.02): A specific request was made to add PT/BR language support. This indicates a desire for broader accessibility for non-English speaking players. - Weak Atmospheric Music (weight 0.02): The game is not recommended for players who value strong atmospheric music. This suggests that the audio design in this specific area might be lacking or not contribute effectively to the game's mood. Other player notes: - Appealing Minimalist Art Style (weight 0.23): The game features a concise, beautiful, and often minimalist art style with a muted color palette, which effectively creates atmosphere and runs smoothly. Graphics are generally praised for being well-drawn and visually appealing. - Atmospheric Sound Design (weight 0.11): The game's sound effects and soundtrack are widely praised for being perfect, enhancing immersion, and effectively creating a tense and pleasing atmosphere. The music is noted for intensifying the experience without being annoying. - Localization & Developer Origin (weight 0.1): The game offers official localization in languages like Korean and Chinese, though the Chinese localization has minor typos. The developers are noted to be from Siberia/Russia, which some reviewers felt influenced the game's harsh environment depiction. - Boring Roguelike Progression (weight 0.04): Despite initial fun, some players found the game's roguelike elements and monster encounters disappointing, leading to boredom over time. This suggests a lack of long-term engagement or variety in its procedural aspects. - High Difficulty Curve (weight 0.04): The game is perceived as having a high frustration curve and significant difficulty, evidenced by low achievement rates. Some players attribute this to a 'skill issue,' while others find it genuinely challenging. - Initial Promise, Later Disappointment (weight 0.04): Many players were initially impressed by the game's basic idea and concept. However, this positive impression often diminished with increased playtime, leading to growing disappointment as the game's limitations became apparent. Emotions: - Satisfaction (weight 0.25): Players feel satisfied due to the game's engaging and challenging survival gameplay, often enhanced by strategic elements and a captivating atmosphere. The co-op experience, high replayability, and perceived good value for money also contribute significantly to positive sentiment, alongside appreciation for developer responsiveness. - Frustration (weight 0.25): Frustration primarily stems from numerous game-breaking bugs and technical issues, particularly in multiplayer. Players are also frustrated by illogical, overly punishing, or poorly explained survival mechanics, coupled with excessive reliance on random generation for progression and resource availability, leading to unfair or unwinnable scenarios. - Disappointment (weight 0.23): Disappointment arises when the game fails to meet player expectations, particularly regarding its 'The Thing' inspiration, promised horror elements, or story depth. This is often compounded by poor execution of otherwise interesting concepts, leading to shallow, repetitive gameplay, uninteresting enemies, and a general lack of content or replayability. - Enjoyment (weight 0.05): Players experience enjoyment from the game's overall positive experience, particularly when playing with friends. The challenging survival gameplay, combined with a captivating atmosphere, good graphics, and sound design, contributes significantly to this positive feeling, encouraging replayability. - Boredom (weight 0.05): Boredom is primarily caused by the game's repetitive core gameplay loop and a perceived lack of engaging content or meaningful interaction. This is often exacerbated by a slow pace, repetitive environments, and unbalanced or annoying enemies. - Excitement (weight 0.04): Excitement is generated by the game's challenging hardcore survival experience, which includes tense resource management and encounters with supernatural enemies. The immersive atmosphere, suspenseful concept, and captivating story, especially when combined with co-op play, further heighten this feeling. - Joy (weight 0.02): Joy is derived from the game's overall fun and addictive nature, often highlighted by a positive co-op experience and a surprisingly cozy atmosphere. Players describe it as an unforgettable and highly enjoyable experience. - Anger (weight 0.02): Anger stems from severe technical issues, particularly unplayable co-op due to freezes and crashes, which are perceived as developer oversight and lack of testing. This leads to ruined playthroughs and a strong feeling that time invested was wasted due to illogical mechanics and game-breaking problems. - Annoyance (weight 0.01): Annoyance is caused by monotonous gameplay, coupled with underwhelming or irritating enemies. The inability to issue commands during a paused state also contributes to player frustration. - Curiosity (weight 0.01): Curiosity is driven by the desire to uncover missing game elements and explore various endings. The game's intriguing mechanics and atmosphere also pique players' interest, hinting at deeper thematic elements to be discovered. - Amusement (weight 0.01): Amusement arises from observing a friend's struggles and despair within the game, as well as the humorous variety of mental debuffs characters can experience. - Despair (weight 0.01): Despair is evoked by the constant struggle for survival and the feeling of impending death, particularly when characters fall into a coma, highlighting the game's unforgiving challenges. - Appreciation (weight 0.01): Players express appreciation for the inclusion of built-in language support, particularly Chinese, and for the game's immersive atmosphere, recognizing the developers' efforts in creating these elements. - Dread (weight 0): Dread is caused by the persistent and imminent threat of characters freezing or starving, creating a constant sense of danger and urgency. - Love (weight 0): Love for the game stems from its engaging challenge and high replayability, indicating a deep appreciation for its core gameplay loop. - Hope (weight 0): Hope is expressed for future content, specifically the release of downloadable content (DLC), indicating a desire for continued engagement with the game. - Desire (weight 0): Desire is specifically focused on the co-op experience, highlighting its importance to players. - Confusion (weight 0): Confusion arises from the experience of playing the game alone, suggesting that the game's design or mechanics might be less clear or intuitive without a co-op partner. - Delight (weight 0): Delight is experienced due to the game's pleasing aesthetic and engaging gameplay, indicating a strong positive emotional response to these core elements. - Humor (weight 0): Humor is found in the game's extreme difficulty and the frequent, often absurd, instances of character death, suggesting a dark comedic element for some players.}