Winter-Over

Is there a better setting for anything than Antarctica? It’s obviously aces for horror: the isolation and existential precariousness of the Ice ramps up the social-paranoia body horror of the Thing and the cosmic vertigo of At the Mountains of Madness. It’s just as obviously the ne plus ultra for wilderness adventure, from Shackleton’s thrilling journey of survival to Scott’s dramatic narrative of, er, not survival. Now Winter-Over demonstrates that the South Pole works just as well for a psychologically-driven whodunnit. What’s next – sitcoms? Reality shows? Infomercials?

This choice-based game wastes little time on setup or backstory laying out your life before coming to Antarctica – all that matters is that you’re something of a veteran and used some of your connections to bring your brother, who’s a bit of a screw-up, along on your latest expedition. So when he turns up dead one evening with an unexplained head-wound, of course you’re not going to take the base administrator’s advice and just wait ten days until an investigative team can fly in from New Zealand – despite the fact that the mental pressures of spending a whole winter at the bottom of the world were already starting to get to you, you launch your own search for the killer.

This makes for a classic setup, but the polar milieu helps justify many of the genre’s conventions. Nobody’s cell phones are connected to the Internet, for one thing, cutting out a whole lot of needed contrivances, and the isolation of the facility means that the cast of suspects can be kept manageable and close to hand once the progress of your investigation drives the murderer to take a more active role. The paranoid, desperate vibe that comes from knowing you’re sleeping mere feet from whoever killed your brother also helps increase the urgency, and justifies the game’s light self-care mechanics – an always-visible bit of the interface tells you your current stress level, which you can manage by sleeping or doing some non-investigative activities; I never let it get too high, so I’m not sure if a game-ending breakdown is actually possible, but a lot of the descriptions do shift based on elevated stress to underline how ragged you’ve become, which feels like an elegant way to incorporate the mental toll of the investigation. Contrarily, there are a few times when you need to build rapport with a suspect before they’ll trust you with a clue. It’s a logical enough turn to take the plot, but the relationship-building mechanics felt a little too bare and transactional to me – if you were always choosing who to hang out with, it might come off more natural, but since that stuff takes time away from the investigation I pretty much only made a gardening date or shared a stock-room shift with someone when I was intending to pump them for information.

Outside of those few exceptions, though, most of what you do during your time on the base is talk. There are a dozen or so people around, but many of them have verifiable alibis, so your investigation quickly comes to focus on five key suspects. Interviewing them to find out about their whereabouts on the night of the murder, and probing for any hidden motives or animosity they might be harboring, takes up the first few days of the game and opens up a bunch of new leads – going to the non-suspect personnel to verify the things they’ve said. There are a few puzzles involving computers or physical evidence, but even these are resolved through social means, since you’re typically forced to ask for the assistance of characters with the relevant skills to progress. There are points in the game where the amount of information all this talking turned up was a little hard to hold in my head; fortunately, there’s a handy sidebar that summarizes everything you’ve learned, including breaking down the names and schedules of all of the characters. I didn’t need to use it much, but I appreciated having the security blanket there in case I did.

As for the characters, they’re a nicely-rounded lot. The dialogue trees aren’t especially sprawling, and a few of them definitely are just playing bit parts, but the authors do a lot with a little, efficiently communicating Christian’s slight awkwardness or Victor’s incipient mania without laying things on too thick. I especially enjoyed the grounded humor the doctor, Matt, brought to the table:

“Everything was okay between the two of you?” you press. “You hadn’t fought recently or anything?”
“No,” he says. “What about you?”
“Me?” you say (sounding kind of stupid even to yourself). “What do you mean?”
“I’m just asking you the same thing you asked me,” he says.
“Yeah, but why?” you say, unable to keep the frustration from your tone.
He shrugs. “I don’t know, why did you ask?”
You sigh. “You know what, forget it.”

And yeah, there are jokes. While the plot and overall mood is grim, Winter-Over isn’t too heavy; the death of your brother is even slightly underplayed, I suspect intentionally because depicting it with all the shades of psychological realism would make for an intense, unfun experience at odds with the Miss Marple gameplay on offer. Still, there are moments of real threat, especially in a few gripping scenes where the murder tries to turn the tables on you, and the ending, where the protagonist finally opens themself back up to feeling the entirety of what they’ve gone through. I wouldn’t have minded a few more opportunities for the game to play up its brooding setting – there are one or two memorable set pieces that take advantage of being in Antarctica, but locations like the observation deck go mostly unused in the main gameplay, meaning you spend most of your time wandering around corridors that could as easily be on a spaceship or under the sea as at the pole.

The mystery itself, meanwhile, is a good one, with methodical investigation yielding up secrets as well as red herrings; it plays fair, too, with a solution that doesn’t change based on your actions. It’s perhaps tuned a bit easy, since I cracked the case halfway through the ten-day time limit, but I did get slightly lucky in the order I attempted things (Spoiler - click to show)(look, if you introduce one of the scientists by saying they hang out with the boss a bunch because “fiftysomething white guys need other fiftysomething white guys with whom to discuss football or how weird it is that their young relations aren’t buying houses or whatever,” of course I’m going to suspect one or both of them of being the baddie), and spending the remaining time running down other leads remained engaging. The ultimate motive is perhaps a little deflating, and the fact that the killer seems reticent to directly harm you at first when they’ve just brutally murdered your brother feels a bit strange, but it’s all put together reasonably enough to reward logical deduction (the only goof I noticed is that (Spoiler - click to show)even after I’d twigged that Jack was the killer by showing him the threatening note, the narration still gave him the benefit of the doubt when he lied about the ruler piece used to wedge my door closed).

All told this is a smooth, satisfying whodunnit. Sure, some of its mechanics might be more robust than others, but it executes the tricky feats of plate-spinning the genre requires with aplomb; similarly, while possibly more could have been done to leverage the polar setting, what’s here is more than enough to make for a memorably claustrophobic investigation. Now, will the streamers pick up the baton, with Death Comes to McMurdo launching on Netflix soon? Only time will tell.

(Oh, and let me close this review with bonus appreciation to the included bibliography, especially the article about the 100-year old “almost edible” fruitcake; call me old-fashioned but in my book something can be “almost edible” about as easily as someone can be “almost pregnant”).