You've got to suspend friendships to play certain games. Street Fighter can generate lasting resentments when players fail to temporarily turn off friend-mode, fume about whatever cheap-ass bullshit their momentary non-friend has put up, and then reactivate friendly relations once their scrub rage has passed. As a teenager, I stormed out of a friend's house over such a case of Street Fighter 2 bullshit.

Project Winter is much more insidious. It isn't cheesy move spamming that hurts you, it's the lies. Among your group of eight survivors—and I highly recommend playing with people you know—two are traitors. As a survivor, not only do you have to avoid being killed or set back by the traitors, you have to survive a frigid, moose and bear-infested wilderness, which is hard enough without liars among you.

It's another attempt at bringing the basic concept of party game Werewolf—you may know it by its Mafia variant—into a multiplayer videogame. It's a tough thing to do. For one, everyone has to play along. It's no fun if the secret traitors just say "haha, I'm a traitor" at the start. And two, the full experience of sitting in a circle trying to suss out liars among your friends can't be replicated in a game, at least until mainstream VR accurately reproduces facial expressions and body language.

Project Winter's adaption succeeds by replacing face-to-face communication with lots of subtle ways for the traitors to hinder the survivors, which also gives the survivors lots of subtle hints as to who the traitors are. The top-down view means that, if you can't see someone on your screen, they can't see you, giving traitors privacy when they want to open special, traitor-only crates that contain weapons, traps, and poisons. But if a survivor stumbles upon an open traitor crate, they may remember who it was that wandered up that way "looking for berries." 

Or not. There's a lot to keep track of outside of sussing out rats. The survivors have to first get a power station up and running, which means looting or crafting materials to drop into it. The traitors usually help during this stage to avoid being found out. Meanwhile, hunger and cold are eating at everybody, and there's not much time to dedicate to interrogating your temporary non-friends about their whereabouts and intentions. And when players are cut off from each other—the area voice chat only carries so far—stories begin to conflict.

In one game, as a traitor, I was called out by a survivor who noticed that I'd left valuable resources sitting in a crate instead of shepherding them to the power station. Rather than protest, I simply walked away and found two other survivors who'd gone on an expedition to find the next objective. 

When I returned with the two of them, who'd seen or heard none of this, this nosy survivor was still on about how I was probably a traitor. I claimed not to have any idea what he was talking about, and accused him of being a traitor, since clearly I'd been helping these other two while he threw accusations around.

To my surprise, my party backed me up. It worked for a little bit, but I tend to crack under pressure given long enough. I'd make a terrible spy.

More often than not I'm the one being fooled. In one game, while warming up inside the starting cabin with two other players, we heard an argument outside. Two players were shouting toward the cabin that the other was the traitor. One had tried to kill the other. No, it was actually an accident. One had said he was the traitor. No, he was joking. Naturally, the three of us in the cabin figured we were witnessing two traitors trying to throw us off by feigning discord. We banished them, and let them kill each other in the cold.

Of course, I'd been warming up with the two real traitors the whole time. Bastards.

Traitors can sabotage access panels to loot bunkers, drop traps, play sneaky games with walkie-talkies—the only way to communicate over distances—encourage risky treks and then run back to the cabin claiming to have gotten 'lost,' and all sorts of other devious things. The best games see a combination of tricks. The worst see the traitors play it too safe at first, so that they have no choice but to pull out guns late in the game and chase the survivors around. That's still fun, though.

Project Winter is one of the few games where I don't mind spectating if I die early. As a ghost, I can teleport around the map to watch everyone else struggle—sometimes overhearing them wonder if I'm still out there, or if I died, or if I was a traitor. Sometimes I know who one of the traitors is—because she killed me—but can't tell them directly. I can only provide ghostly healing, heat, or damage according to what I think I know, and hope they observe my indirect communication. Watching the remaining survivors struggle while having more information than them makes for excellent drama.

I'm sure there's fun to be had with the right group of strangers, but so far I've only played Project Winter with people I know. The post-game chats ("Oh, that's what happened to you!") are one of the best parts of it—just so long as you're able to reinstate friendship-mode after being poisoned to death by a filthy liar.

For six of the eight players in a Project Winter team, the goal is surviving a chilly wilderness long enough to escape. For the other two, the goal is deception: it's about blending into the team and then, when the moment presents itself, betraying your allies, stopping them from escaping. It's a fascinating concept, and this week it finished its three-month Early Access stint with a 1.0 update that added new weapons and maps.

The new weapons are the crossbow and the tranquilizer gun, both of which are near-silent ranged weapons. The tranquilizer is particularly interesting for traitors because it will stop players using proximity chat, text chat or radio chat when hit (emotes will still be a comms option). If you're one of the two traitors—both know who the other traitor is—it could be a last-ditch option for silencing anyone that rumbles you, stopping them exposing you to the rest of the team.

One place to find these new weapons will be the armory, a new building that only spawns once per map, and has a high chance of containing ranged weapons. The 1.0 update also adds three new maps, each with potential sabotage spots.

The dev team at Other Ocean Interactive says they'll be slowing down new content releases to monthly, rather than every two weeks, to give them "a bit more breathing room and [to] make sure we release polished features". Bug fixes will come more regularly. 

The next major update, in which they're aiming to improve repair objectives, add ragdoll physics, give each player a stats page, and more is scheduled for June 20.

Project Winter costs $20/£15.50 on Steam. It's slightly more expensive on the Humble Store.

At a glance, Project Winter is reminiscent of The Long Dark, but surviving its low-poly snow fields is only half the battle. At the beginning of a game, two of the eight players are designated as traitors. They each know who the other traitor is, and are tasked with preventing the group from escaping. The non-traitors must suss them out before being shot in the back.

It's a fun-sounding idea, though a tough design challenge. Playing the similar party game Mafia (or Werewolf) is always a good time, but I've never been all that attracted to digital versions of the game, because lying directly to your friends' faces is where the fun's at. In that respect, Project Winter provides multiple communication avenues: "proximity-based voice chat, private voice chat radio channels, text chat, and emotes."

A lot of Project Winter's success will hinge on the effectiveness of those tools and the quality of the playerbase. It's a game that's easy to ruin, since it relies on everyone committing to acting.

Right now, reviews are mixed on the Early Access version, but it seems like many of the complaints are simply that there aren't enough players in the game, not that Project Winter fails in its execution, which is promising.

Recent reviews are more positive. When Project Winter releases in 1.0 form on May 23, maybe it'll get a little boost in player count. We'll plan to check it out then to see how it's come along since its Early Access launch.

Mafia, Werewolf, Kane and Lynch 2 multiplayer—deception and paranoia are great fodder for games, so I’m rather looking forward to Project Winter’s upcoming beta weekend. The game of co-op survival and backstabbing launches in Early Access next week, but first it’s hosting an open beta from tomorrow and ending on February 3. 

Stuck in a chilly wilderness, eight players will need to work together to fend off bears, gather supplies, make repairs and, if they’re lucky, escape with their limbs and lives in tact. Unfortunately, not everyone is in it together. Lurking among the survival buddies are two traitors with a single goal: stop the others from escaping. Check out the gameplay trailer released a couple of weeks ago.

This sounds very much like my kind of thing. Communication is key, says developer Other Ocean Interactive, so players will be able to use proximity chat, emotes and walkie-talkies to stay in contact even when they’re out chopping down trees alone. Expect arguments, accusations and murder. 

You can sign up for the open beta here, and Project Winter will hit Steam Early Access on February 7. The plan is for it to run for three to six months, adding polish, additional map layouts, new items and more.

Co-op survival games, as the name suggests, generally require players to work together in order to avoid the grim specter of death. Project Winter is a little bit different. The cooperative angle is there—eight people have to pull together to gather resources, repair structures, and complete other tasks to stay alive in the midst of a ferocious, freezing snowscape and ultimately make their escape—but two of them are actually conspiring in secret to murder everyone else. 

The "traitors" in the group will start the game in a relatively weak state, so they won't be able to immediately go to town on everyone else. But they'll gain strength as the game progresses, and more importantly they'll be known to each other from the start, so they can more effectively coordinate their mayhem.

All players will be able to communicate through proximity-based voice chat and private "radio" channels, as well as text chat and emotes, which will facilitate survival and murderous duplicity in equal measures. And trying to sneak away and escape on your own won't get you far: Even if the traitors don't gank you once you're safely out of sight (and the proximity-based chat means you can forget about screaming for help), the harsh environment and dangerous wildlife will. 

"Unlike other survival games which you must stay alive to win, in Project Winter you require the cooperation of other players to help you make it out alive," Other Ocean Interactive boss Ryan Hale said. "In-game player communication is a key element to playing the game, in which no one can be trusted." 

Project Winter is expected to hit Steam Early Access early this year, and an open beta is also on the way. Find out more at projectwinter.ca.