Horror survival shooter The Forever Winter has a haunting new map to explore

A new The Forever Winter update adds the Underground Cemetery map and mech boss The Rat King to the grimdark future extraction shooter.

The Forever Winter is a game I’ve had very keen eyes on for a while. Its grimdark future forces you to scrape by in a way that makes games like Rust and Valheim feel like a walk in the park. Likewise, its tense, high-stakes extraction format makes it clear you’re a small fry, demanding much more caution than shooters such as Escape From Tarkov where you can typically rely on your aim to save you. In a new update, developer The Fun Dog introduces another map to explore and a threatening presence with mysterious allegiances.

The first introduction in The Forever Winter update 0.1 is a new map, the haunting Underground Cemetery. A grimy network of tunnels and flooded corridors built around a giant chamber filled with gravestones and burning candles, these halls of the dead might be your best hope at salvation – just make sure you don’t join them. A new unique boss has also arrived in the survival game in the form of towering, skull-faced walking mech The Rat King. Boasting a monstrous heavy machine gun, you’ll have to exercise extreme caution in its presence – but perhaps it isn’t looking to hunt you yet.

The Fun Dog has been hard at work revamping The Forever Winter’s water system and the way supplies are handled. Worryingly, you’ll now have to deal with potential water thieves alongside the other ways you can run out of the wet stuff. The developer promises “more details on water system 1.2 to come next week.”

Lots of other aspects have been tightened up and honed here. Player movement, aim down sights, drones, the revive interface, camera collision, AI recruitment orders, and AI pathing and combat have all been updated in 0.1, along with further audio improvements. Beyond that, you can expect plenty of bug fixes, with scopes, AI spawning, looting, buddy AI control, and weapon customization all high on the list of notable changes.

There’s been some additional tuning made, too, so if you’ve been playing expect to see differences in the headshot damage of certain caliber rounds, along with tweaked vendor buy and sell rates, quest rewards, and loot drop chances. Fun Dog doesn’t give away exactly how these have been changed, so you’ll have to experiment for yourself.

The Forever Winter update 0.1 is out now. If you’re yet to try the game out for yourself but have been curious about its unique brand of survival horror and looter shooter, you can jump into the new The Forever Winter demo.

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