DaRmaZat Released this week in Early Access on Steam, Permafrost is a story-driven survival sandbox set on a near-future Earth plunged into an endless winter following a series of global catastrophes. It invites you to venture into this frozen world alone or team up with up to three friends, scavenging, crafting, hunting, and building shelters to stay alive. You play as Rook, an engineer with the skills to rebuild things but little experience in the wilderness, who finds himself drawn into this frozen, unforgiving world by a radio message from an old friend.
Before starting a new game, you can either create a private world or host or join a public server. You also get several options to customize your engineer’s background and specializations, while you can give your dog a look of your choosing and even pick its name. There are also two difficulty modes, Story and Survival, with Custom Mode arriving later. Permafrost‘s story kicks off through colorful comic-style panels, explaining how a meteorite shattered the moon ten years ago, triggering a devastating cold wave on Earth. Fragments of the moon also fell to the planet, and the world has been stuck in a deep freeze ever since.
When you receive a message from your old friend Icarus, you’re persuaded to look for him near the city mall. What follows is a snowy survival experience where dealing with the cold and finding food are just as important as crafting better tools and gear. The opening quests feel a little messy and fetch-heavy, with plenty of back-and-forth between the starting area and Camp Horizon. Once you reach the camp, you’ll meet Robyn, its leader, along with her assistant, The Mule, who also serves as the camp’s trader. Naturally, they’ve got plenty of tasks lined up for you, allowing you to do them a favor in return for their help with your search for Icarus. Truth be told, at this stage, the game does little to disguise the fact that each objective, whether crafting-based or not, is simply part of a somewhat forced tutorial.
Scavenging dictates every waking minute in Permafrost. You’ll constantly need to weigh up which resources to collect and which ones are worth carrying with you to ensure your survival, all while gradually improving your equipment and survival skills. You’ll need to gather resources such as wood, coal, and stone, craft axes and weapons, and unlock recipes for more advanced equipment. There’s a crude bow for hunting or combat, while a primitive shiv comes in handy for skinning animals you’ve killed.
As you’d expect, crafting a campfire is one of your first tasks. It’s useful not only for warming yourself up or keeping warm while you sleep, but also for cooking. Thankfully, navigating the main UI is a breeze, making it fairly straightforward to craft tools, unlock recipes, and make clothing such as boots and trousers. Setting up shelters is just as straightforward, thanks to a clear and easy-to-use building mode. Trading, on the other hand, is a little more cumbersome. Managing your currency, for instance, requires you to keep clicking until you reach the desired amount, rather than simply using a slider or holding down a button.
Skill progression reminded me a little of an older The Elder Scrolls game, with skill points accumulating as you perform the relevant actions. Running and crafting, for example, contribute to your progression as you play. Blueprint points work in a similar way: craft an item a certain number of times and you’ll unlock new recipes in the UI, allowing you to make more advanced items such as ropes. Surviving the cold is a constant challenge, as temperature changes can trigger various status effects. Fog and snowstorms also reduce visibility, making it surprisingly easy to lose your bearings and end up freezing to death. You quickly learn that setting off on a long journey late in the day is a bad idea, and that finding somewhere safe to spend the night can make all the difference. Day and night also have a noticeable impact on survival, although thankfully, you can fast-travel between discovered zones.
Certain quests require you to repair damaged structures, such as bridges, which can open up shortcuts and make getting around less of a chore. Furthermore, exploration actually pays off. Abandoned camps and buildings, for example, can reward you with useful loot and World Recipes that unlock improved equipment and cosmetic decorations for your base. None of Permafrost‘s mechanics is particularly groundbreaking for the genre, though. The same goes for the crafting and survival loop, which feels familiar from the outset.
Even the dog you find in a cave while staying at Horizon doesn’t add all that much to the experience at this stage. Yes, the dog companion is clearly a work-in-progress feature. For now, it mostly functions as extra mobile storage. It doesn’t have any real survival needs or help out in combat, and it has a habit of wandering off or disappearing altogether.
As expected from an Early Access build, combat and animations can be a little glitchy, but nothing I encountered was particularly shocking. On modern hardware, Permafrost handles its workload reasonably well, with support for upscaling technologies such as DLSS, FSR, and FMG helping to maintain overall visual fidelity and image sharpness. Shader compilation at launch is fairly quick, and performance is generally decent, although occasional stutters do crop up. The soundscape is another bright spot, with relaxing ambient music and decent voice acting. Not every character is voiced, with some relying on floating text above their heads instead. When characters do speak, though, the voice acting is decent enough.
One of my biggest problems with this Early Access build, though, is that some quests don’t work as intended just yet. Sometimes a quest marker fails to appear or disappears, while in other cases, you arrive at your destination only to find that the relevant NPC or item isn’t there. This can potentially bring your playthrough to a complete halt. Even in an Early Access game, this really shouldn’t be happening, or at least not within just a few hours of playing.
Preliminary Thoughts
Overall, Permafrost is clearly a work in progress. It feels like another fairly standard survival crafter, with familiar mechanics and a tutorial that sometimes goes on for longer than necessary. The occasional framerate hiccups aren’t the biggest issue, but the possibility of your playthrough grinding to a halt because of broken quests definitely is.
That said, that’s always the gamble with Early Access, and there’s still room for the game to grow. The UI is clean and accessible, the snowy post-apocalyptic world has a certain appeal, and the rewarding exploration and rebuilding mechanics offer some potential. Permafrost just needs more polish, better quest reliability, and a little more of its own identity before it can really stand out from the crowd. For now, it’s worth keeping an eye on, but there’s no need to rush headfirst into the snow.
Additional Information
Release Date: October 9, 2026 (Early Access)
Previewed On: PC. Download code provided by the publisher and PR agency.
Developer: SpaceRocket Games
Publisher: Toplitz Productions
Relevant links: Available via Steam.
