Cyberpunk 2077 meets Fallout and Rust in this free download

This relatively well-received early access shooter on Steam just got a free demo to try out, if you’re not entirely sold on paying for a game that’s still in development, and the reviewers are comparing it to everything from Cyberpunk 2077 to Fallout 4 and Rust.

I’ve been watching The Forever Winter for a while now. I remember when I first saw some snippets of the gameplay back in early 2024, and I was kind of suspicious of how great it looked.

That isn’t to say that I expected that the game would turn out rubbish, but rather that I couldn’t believe it was Fun Dog Studios’ first game. It looked like the kind of thing a huge AAA publisher was working on, not a small team of 20 devs.

Well, The Forever Winter finally dropped as an early access title back in late 2024, and it’s garnered some pretty positive reviews since then.

It's currently sitting at a "Mostly Positive" score on Steam, with over 16,000 unique reviews. Still, as impressive as that is, there are enough negative reviews in there that I thought I’d hold off until the full game dropped… until now, that is.

That’s because The Forever Winter just dropped a free demo to try out, so those who aren’t yet sold on a 72% positive review score can see what the fuss is about for themselves.

To be fair to the team at Fun Dog Studios, even the negative reviews for the game are somehow still pretty positive. Most of the reviewers think the core gameplay loop of The Forever Winter is extremely solid, but they’re just taking issue with a lack of content and a few bugs.

I genuinely think this one could be something special when the full release drops. There’s no word on exactly when that will be, but I’m excited to try out the demo until then.

I’m rooting for you, Fun Dog Studios. After the resounding success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, it’s clear that even a small dev team is capable of producing one of the best games ever made.