Permafrost | Ep. 1 – Endless Winter? Right, I’ll Put the Kettle On

A brand-new survival adventure begins! The world may be frozen, civilisation may have collapsed, and survival may depend on gathering every resource we can find — but before dealing with any of that, we’re putting the kettle on. Priorities.

This was our first proper look at Permafrost, and it did not take long before we were juggling freezing temperatures, an overflowing inventory, building mistakes, invisible walls and one very unfortunate decision involving somebody else’s campfire.

❄️ About the Game

Permafrost takes place after the Moon has been partially destroyed and the Earth has been plunged into an endless winter. We play as a Rook, an engineer drawn into the frozen wasteland by a radio signal from Icarus, a long-lost friend from before civilisation collapsed.

Survival means scavenging abandoned settlements and cities, crafting equipment, repairing technology and building shelters while dealing with extreme cold, scarce resources and dangerous factions. We are not completely alone, though, because we also have a dog companion who can help us as we explore the world and uncover what happened.

🧭 Where We Are in the Journey

This is Episode 1, so we are right at the beginning. I had played roughly an hour beforehand purely to make sure the game ran and to get a basic idea of how it worked, but I had deliberately avoided progressing very far.

The game had not actually released when we streamed it. I originally believed it was due out on 8 October, but during the evening we checked and found that it had moved to 9 October. The developers supplied the code free of charge so I could show it ahead of release, but as always, that does not affect what I say about a game. If we like something, we say so; if something is a problem, we point that out too.

🧊 What Happens in This Episode

Once all the embargo business was out of the way, we could finally get into Permafrost properly. The opening sets up a fairly grim world: the Moon has been partially destroyed, fragments have formed around the Earth, sunlight has been disrupted, civilisation has collapsed and the survivors who are left are trying to make a life in an endless winter.

We had several character archetypes to choose from, each with different starting equipment and advantages, but rather than spend half the evening comparing every statistic I stuck fairly close to the default setup and went with the engineer. More importantly, we also got to choose our dog. Naturally, the husky was named Help!!, entirely because of an old Whose Line Is It Anyway? sketch where somebody supposedly called their dog Help and then wandered around a park shouting for it. The mental image still amuses me.

The opening tutorial dropped us into the frozen wilderness after a bridge collapse, with most of our supplies gone and temperatures already well below zero. It introduced the basics of gathering foliage and stone, starting a fire, crafting handles, making a pickaxe, putting together a bow and generally trying not to become another frozen object in the scenery. There was also a small structure that helped introduce opening doors, searching containers and getting used to the crafting menus.

Most of those systems felt immediately familiar from other survival games we have played. The interface in particular reminded me of things like 7 Days to Die and Sons of the Forest — or Sons of the Lumberjack, as it inevitably became known on stream. The one thing I was less keen on was the default keyboard layout. Interact was on F rather than E, while E was being used for companion controls, and every time I had relaunched the game during testing my changed bindings appeared to reset. I swapped them around again because years of muscle memory were otherwise going to have me pressing the wrong thing every five minutes.

That companion key did not seem especially useful once Help!! actually joined us either. Pressing it never appeared to achieve very much, while opening the radial menu and selecting the dog from there worked perfectly well. It was probably the main technical annoyance I had during the evening; otherwise the game was running nicely and, visually, I was already very taken with it.

Once we had the basic equipment together, we headed through the cave toward the wider world. Emerging from it gave us our first proper look at the landscape, with woodland stretching away ahead and the frozen city visible in the distance. Somewhere out there we also saw what looked like a meteor coming down — although given what has happened to the Moon, it was probably one of its remaining pieces deciding Earth had not suffered quite enough already.

I had played roughly an hour beforehand just to make sure the game worked, so I knew that the next part of the tutorial would send us toward Horizon and eventually ask us to collect meat. Rather than wait for the instruction, I decided we might as well get ahead of it. The bow came out, several animals became dinner, arrows disappeared rather faster than expected, and I discovered that harvesting only works when you actually have the correct tool in your hand. This was something I somehow managed to rediscover more than once during the evening.

Horizon itself introduced us to Robin and gave us more of the story surrounding Icarus, the old friend whose message had drawn us into all of this in the first place. The settlement had survived and rebuilt itself, although Icarus had moved on. The residents were also remarkably relaxed about us rummaging through everything they owned, so naturally we relieved them of anything that did not appear to be nailed down.

We cooked the meat for the settlement, slept through the colder hours and prepared to move on. Somewhere in amongst all of this, chat also became an unofficial testing department for the new translation command I had built earlier that day. Swedish, French and Irish were thrown at it, Swedish was apparently doing reasonably well, and then somebody inevitably tried Klingon. Klingon was where the system drew the line. Gary also tried Scottish, which it did not recognise either, so apparently we know where the boundaries of artificial intelligence lie.

Aquinnie then arrived with a raid after playing Permafrost as well and had already reached Hunter’s Glade in both solo and co-op. We were nowhere near that far because I was still busy turning the starting area upside down, but it was useful hearing from somebody who had already ventured further into the game.

Our immediate problem was inventory space. We had become completely over-cucumbered, left useful items behind and were trying to work out what could safely be discarded. This situation was made considerably more ridiculous when I eventually realised that we had already picked up a larger backpack and I had simply forgotten to equip it.

The sensible solution was to establish our own shelter, build some storage and then come back for everything else. Before that, though, we headed into the cave again, dealt with the bear from the safety of higher ground, collected the meat and finally befriended Help!!. From there we emerged into the area where the game wanted us to establish a proper camp.

A quick session of deforestation provided enough timber for a very basic two-by-two structure. I immediately made the mistake of trying to make it slightly nicer than the tutorial expected by putting windowed walls around it. The tutorial, however, specifically wanted five ordinary walls. Rather than dismantle what I had already made, five entirely regulation walls were temporarily slapped down wherever they would fit so the game would be satisfied.

Some building pieces ended up the wrong way around, some resources found their way onto the roof, wood kept running out and chat quite correctly questioned whether one of my roofing choices looked suspiciously like a floor. Eventually, though, we had a functional little shelter with windows, a door, a bed and storage chests. It was not going to win any architectural prizes, but it was warm enough and, most importantly, we could finally empty our pockets.

That allowed us to go back for the loot we had abandoned earlier. We searched the vehicles around the area as well, which reminded me of Funnel Runners, although at the time I could not remember what the game was called. We continued gathering materials, returned to the cave for flint and stone, and started pushing the crafting side forward with a smelter and better tools. There were also resources such as coal and gold that we could find but were not yet really in a position to make full use of.

We explored the nearby frozen village for as long as the temperature would allow, then found another little structure built into the side of the cliff and emptied that of whatever useful supplies we could carry. There was a staircase continuing upwards, but we left that for another time and headed back to base to unload again.

As the story progressed, we also built a radio station and finally heard from Icarus. His broadcast promised shelter, water, food, warmth, protection and the beginnings of a new civilisation at Hunter’s Glade. It all sounded very reassuring, which naturally made me immediately suspicious because I have seen enough Resident Evil films to know how well broadcasts promising a safe haven tend to go.

The game clearly wanted us to head toward Hunter’s Glade. I decided we should go south and look at the city instead.

I had briefly run down that way during my earlier test because I wanted to see what the larger environment looked like, and I wanted everybody on stream to get a glimpse of it as well. Almost immediately we discovered something I had completely missed before: a massive crevasse in the landscape. After nearly introducing ourselves to the bottom of it, we went around and continued south.

Another settlement appeared along the route. For a moment it looked as though somebody was standing above the entrance, but on closer inspection they were considerably more frozen and less alive than expected. We searched the place and wondered whether abandoned settlements might eventually be reclaimed or repopulated, something along the lines of the settlement system in Fallout 4.

From there we reached the frozen river and the first major invisible wall. Whether that was because we were playing before release, because those areas were deliberately unavailable, or simply because the story had not advanced far enough, I do not know. Rather than turn around immediately, we followed the boundary south and kept exploring whatever the game would let us reach.

The city eventually opened up around us, and this was the landscape I had wanted everyone to see. Frozen streets, abandoned buildings, vehicles buried in snow and temperatures dropping toward minus 45 made it a very different environment from the relative safety around our shelter. We poked around inside one building and spotted supplies in another, although we could not immediately work out how to reach them.

Cold resistance from a small bottle of vodka helped a little, and a medkit bought us some extra time later, but it became increasingly obvious that we had travelled somewhere we probably were not meant to be yet. The character was becoming dangerously cold, stamina was suffering and the search for the world’s most valuable resource began: two ordinary stones.

That was all we needed to make a campfire.

There were no stones.

We found things that looked like stones. We found rubbish. We found plastic junk. We found just about everything except the two rocks that would have allowed us to stop and warm up. For future reference, Permafrost has therefore taught us a valuable survival lesson: wherever you go, take two stones.

We crossed a bridge into another section of the city and hit yet another invisible barrier. My plan was to avoid retracing the entire route by heading north and then cutting back west toward the shelter, but virtually every road we tried eventually ran into another blocked section. By then the sun was disappearing, the temperature was dropping again and the sensible option was becoming less “explore the city” and more “find a way out before something drops off.”

Eventually we accepted defeat and began backtracking along the route we had originally taken. The cold had been the obvious danger all evening, but one question kept coming up: were there actually hostile human NPCs in the world?

Then we saw a campfire.

Given how badly we needed heat, I headed toward it in the hope of warming up for a moment. Unfortunately, the person standing beside that fire did not appear to believe in sharing. The answer to our NPC question arrived very quickly: yes, there are hostile survivors, and we were nowhere near equipped to fight them.

A couple of quick shots later, we were dead.

Still, as Vvoornth quite rightly pointed out, we did not freeze to death.

We respawned back at our little shelter and initially thought we might have got away with keeping everything. A closer inspection revealed that our hotbar and tools had survived, but most of the inventory had not. Opening the map showed a death marker a considerable distance to the south, meaning our supplies were presumably sitting on our body somewhere in the city waiting for us to make the return journey.

That seemed like an excellent problem for future-us.

The evening finished with another community Hunger Games running alongside the aftermath, which somehow ended with me winning by apparently tying the other competitors into a giant human knot while a mysterious plum-tax situation unfolded elsewhere. Chat immediately disputed the legitimacy of this achievement, but history will show a victory nevertheless.

That was where we wrapped up our first proper look at Permafrost. We had reached Horizon, met Help!!, established a shelter, built storage and a smelter, upgraded our equipment, constructed the radio, heard from Icarus, explored well beyond where we probably should have been and confirmed in fairly dramatic fashion that dangerous factions are very much part of the world.

Despite the death loop, I really liked what I saw. I love the frozen scenery, the survival systems have plenty of potential, and having a dog companion automatically improves matters. This was only meant to be an early look rather than the start of the full playthrough, so we will be coming back to it properly. When we do, there is a corpse full of equipment waiting in the city, Hunter’s Glade is still calling, and I will hopefully remember to bring two stones.

At the end of the night we raided into OurChickenLife, bringing our first expedition into the endless winter to a suitably community-minded close.

🎥 Watch the Episode

You can see the complete first look, including the building problems, city exploration and our extremely brief introduction to hostile survivors, here: Watch Permafrost Episode 1.

You can also follow the series through the Permafrost Playlist and find the rest of my videos on YouTube. If you enjoy the episode, please leave a like, let me know what you think in the comments and subscribe so you do not miss the next one.

🔴 Join the Adventure Live

The videos show what happened, but the live streams are where chat gets to watch me forget backpacks, test questionable translation commands and walk willingly into places where the temperature is minus 45.

Come and join us live on Twitch or YouTube. Aquinnie dropping in with a raid during this stream was another reminder that the community around these games is part of what makes the live version so much fun.

Tuesday is also our multiplayer night. Before returning to Valheim, we are heading back to an old favourite with Star Trek Online on 13 October. Check Discord and the blog for the latest schedule, especially once Halloween starts interfering with everything.

🌐 Community & Links

If you want to keep up with the streams, videos, music and everything else between episodes, there are plenty of places to find us once we have escaped the frozen wasteland.

Live — Catch the streams as they happen and become part of whatever goes wrong next:
Twitch | YouTube

Community — Keep up with the schedule, chat with everyone and see what is coming next:
Discord

Socials — Follow the various bits and pieces that escape between streams:
TikTok | Bluesky | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | X

Music — If you want something to listen to while searching for those two missing stones:
Spotify | Apple Music

Support — If you would like to help support the streams and everything around them:
Fourthwall | Teespring | Streamlabs

More — There is considerably more going on outside the gaming side of things as well:
Business Centre | Download the Brochure | About Me | Blog

🔥 At Least We Didn’t Freeze to Death

For an early look, I really liked what I saw of Permafrost. The frozen environments are probably the biggest attraction for me, the survival systems gave us plenty to work with, and having a dog companion certainly does not hurt. We still do not know what the final price will be, but I hope it lands somewhere sensible rather than following the pricing of 7 Days to Die, which I simply did not enjoy enough to justify what it costs.

We will come back for a proper playthrough rather than leaving it at this short first look. Hunter’s Glade is still waiting, our missing inventory is sitting somewhere beside a corpse marker in the city, and next time I intend to carry two stones.

— Dr Ravenholm