Planned Release Date: Q2 2027

About This Game

The world is dead. Something down there isn't.

The ocean has frozen over, and sunken cities lie beneath the ice. Your nuclear icebreaker is the last warm home in a frozen wasteland. Break through ever thicker ice, drop a tiny sub into the dark and bring back whatever keeps your crew alive.

UNDER THE ICE

Sonar shows which nearby areas hold the most salvage. Down below lie ports, roads, houses and high-rises fading into the dark. The sub's claws feel for the cargo on their own and lift recognizable wreckage — crates, cars, trucks. What is too heavy to lift, you cut apart with saws right on the seabed. Back in the hangar, the receiver's teeth chew the haul into resources.

SOMETHING HUNTS IN THE DEEP

It rises out of the dark and circles your sub. A moment before it lashes out, the water it is about to strike lights up red — get out of it, or its tentacles wrap the hull and drag you to the seabed while your battery drains away. Switch your saws on and cut it apart. Or kill the lamp and the engine, sink to the bottom and play dead. Most of the time it loses interest and leaves. A wounded one may not believe you: it knocks on the hull, lies down beside you and waits.

TOWNS ON THE SEABED

People still live down there. Underwater bases are small towns whose windows glow in the black water: residents work and care for the sick, while a virus slowly claims those lying in bed. Take samples, develop a vaccine in the lab and save as many as you can — every patient needs a dose of their own. Cured residents send supplies to the ship, and among the survivors you will find new crew: a soldier for the AA gun, an engineer for the workshop, a scientist for the lab.

Come too late, and something may burst out of a dying patient and eat the whole base. Go back in with a flamethrower — or leave it to grow.

IT GROWS

The monster has a life of its own. It lairs in the base it emptied, then leaves for the sea around it and hunts every dive, and in the end it grows into a giant that grabs the icebreaker itself and pulls it under the ice. There are many ways to die in ICEWAKE, and the ship can be lost for good.

YOUR SHIP

The icebreaker is shown in cross-section: bridge, reactor, engine, workshop, lab, crew quarters. The captain walks the decks, plots the route on the globe and takes the ship through the ice. Metal, electronics and polymers go into upgrades for every compartment and the sub — more arms, a stronger engine for heavier salvage — and the workshop prints AA ammo, repair kits and batteries. On the way, helicopters raid the ship: the sirens wail and the captain runs up on deck to the AA gun.

FEATURES

• A nuclear icebreaker as your mobile base, shown in side cross-section
• Sub dives with claws and saws into the drowned ruins of civilization
• Underwater fights: read the red strike sectors, dodge, cut — or play dead in the dark
• A monster with a life cycle: it hatches on a base, hunts the sea and grows into a giant
• Living underwater towns, a virus, and a vaccine that saves people
• A crew of rescued specialists
• Air raids, AA guns and many ways to lose the ship
• Pixel art and a cold, dark atmosphere beneath the ice

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

I can't afford professional localization, so I used machine translation (I hope players will later help me proofread and fix the text). Sound effects are generated procedurally in an editor that was made with AI. Part of the game's code was written with the help of AI.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

ICEWAKE contains violence and horror. A monster attacks and devours people (pixel-art blood), the captain shoots armed fanatics, characters die - including patients in failed vaccine trials - and corpses stay on screen. Alcohol and tobacco appear as gift items. An optional romance with a crew member includes a short scene under a blanket with no nudity; it can be turned off in the settings.