There’s a new survival crafting game with a twist that instantly has my attention: it’s also a straight-up horror game where you’re tasked with surviving the elements and the relentless stalking of a Wendigo.
Heat or Die, as it’s aptly called, was just announced from Brazil-based solo developer Dylan Maffeis of Mounpeak Games. Maffeis tells me in an email exchange that the game is still very early in development, but that it takes inspiration from open-world survival game The Long Dark and investigation/survival hybrid Kona. Mounpeak’s debut title, Heat or Die is a “short but intense” game in which you’re lost in the middle of the forest during a snowy winter, and just as luck would have it, your only living company is a starving Wendigo.
If you haven’t heard the urban legends, tracing back to Algonquian folklore, the Wendigo is a malevolent spirit taking on various, mostly bipedal forms, but with long limbs, sharp claws and teeth, and its signature feature, horns. In folkloric tales, they often possess humans and curse them with a hunger so insatiable that they murder and eat other humans. So yeah, pretty messed up.
However, that’s exactly what draws me to Heat or Die and has the potential to pull me away from games like Palworld and Enshrouded. Not only am I fascinated with these kinds of urban legends, but also the idea of taking the stress and anxiety of an open-world survival game and amplifying it with the presence of a terrifying monster biologically inclined toward killing and eating you. Are you even a horror fan if you don’t have slightly masochistic tendencies?
