Erzurum

I went into Erzurum with genuine curiosity, because a solo-developed winter survival game rooted in Turkish geography is exactly the kind of oddity I want to root for. The setup is quietly interesting: protagonist Taylan is stranded on foot in the bitterly cold city of Erzurum, a region struck by a meteor that has triggered a military evacuation, and your job is to figure out what happened and get out alive. That premise has texture. The execution, unfortunately, is thinner than the snow it keeps piling on your screen. The survival loop follows four gauges: body temperature, energy, hunger, and thirst. You gather firewood or coal to light stoves, sleep in found beds, scavenge loot across a roughly 9-square-kilometre open world featuring more than 30 locations, and craft tools ranging from basic gear up to electronic equipment. There are three modes to choose from: Story, which tracks Taylan's fate through objective markers; Sandbox, an open-ended loop with respawn saves; and a Challenges mode that piles on harder conditions like endless storms, colder temperatures, more aggressive predators, and timed objectives. You can also switch freely between first-person and third-person camera at any time, which is a nice quality-of-life touch. The dynamic weather system cycles through morning frost, heavy snowfall, and blizzards with reasonable authenticity. Here is where I have to be honest with you. The map itself is repetitive, mostly a snow-blanketed forest where one stretch looks very much like the last, and the story mode's objective-marker design is bare-bones. Wildlife like bears can feel unfairly punishing, particularly early when weapon maintenance is a barrier. The game draws obvious inspiration from The Long Dark but does not match its environmental variety or level craft. Where it does find its own personality is in the cultural detail: interiors decorated with regional paintings and textiles, and a cooking system that lets you prepare dishes like cag kebab, tarhana soup, and Turkish coffee over a stove while a blizzard rattles the windows. That specificity is genuinely lovely, and the image of a roaring fire illuminating a colorful local rug while snow falls outside carries a warmth the survival systems themselves cannot always match. The hardest thing I have to tell you is this: development is permanently finished. The solo developer behind Proximity Games, Fatih Uzun, hit an Unreal Engine version conflict in May 2021 that made the project impossible to continue, and version 1.06 is the final build. A planned second episode set at the Palandoken ski resort, along with full voice-over and new soundtracks, was never released. The game you buy today is the complete game, no more patches coming, and the Steam community sits at mixed reviews hovering around the 40 to 46 percent positive range. Eyes open on that. For the right player, there is still something here. If you find peace in the ritual of survival games, the cultural wrapping gives Erzurum a distinct personality that most winter survival clones cannot claim. The cooking system, the Turkish-flavored interiors, and the atmospheric snowfall all point to a developer who cared about the world they were building. The skeleton of ambition is visible throughout. But as a finished product, it is rough at the edges, perpetually unpatched, and unlikely to hold experienced survival fans for long. Approach it as a short, flavourful curiosity from a single dedicated developer rather than a sustained survival experience, and it becomes much easier to appreciate.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

Be the first to comment on Erzurum.