Near Death

• Added two new difficulty levels: Hard and Condition 1. If you’re one of those “eh, Near Death didn’t seem that hard to me” folks, we have a new challenge for you, along with shiny new achievements if you can escape Sutro Station in utterly merciless conditions.
  
• Added version information to the bottom right corner of the Options menu.
  
• Fixed bug where players could accidentally place their heater on the other side of a door just after forcing it closed.
  
• Fixed issue where in rare instances you can get duplicate quests after placing objects on the snowcat.
  
• Miscellaneous small fixes to rare cosmetic bugs.
  

• Fixed an issue where you could place the Long Range Transmitter or the Radar Scope on the snowcat if you had previously picked it up but had then dropped it. Now the game checks to make sure they're in your inventory before you can place it.
  
• Fixed a bug where games saved on Linux systems using a comma-based format for floats would not load properly.
  
• Disabled non-stereo sound options until we can work out a solution for some players having crashes with surround sound.
  
• Increased the chance of finding solder in containers.
  
• Decreased the chance that outdoor crates would provide no items when searched.
  
• Updated the motion sickness warning page to mention that the game’s FOV can be adjusted.
  

• Fixed a bug where you could click a disabled ‘Create’ button on the crafting tab and disable other recipes if you didn’t have the ingredients for the current item.
  
• Significant optimization to rope trail performance, which also addresses the “massive slowdown after loading a game” bug in most cases.
  
• Improved world collision in many places, including the gondola.
  
• Improvements to objective flow clarity.
  

• Fixed bug where crafting an item while carrying an object would cause the carried object to disappear off-screen. Players can no longer craft items while holding a large object.
  
• Added an FOV slider to the video options panel.
  
• Added a VSync toggle to the video options panel.
  
• Fixed issue where items in the video resolutions dropdown list could be cut off at the bottom/top of the dropdown when a controller was in use.
  
• Added our intrepid PR team to the game credits — sorry, Felix and Dana! We love you!
  
• Reduced the shininess of the player’s arm.
  
• Minor optimization to pool ball sound effects.
  
• Fixed issue where the controller icon for equipping items wasn’t being displayed in the help panel.
  
• A certain penguin is hiding somewhere in Sutro Station, if you’re playing on Linux.
  

Other “lonely games” can feel like delivery mechanisms for nonlinear narrative, games in which the point of moving from place to place is to experience a new drop of story. Near Death is more consistently focused on the interactivity of doing things. In that way, it is more akin to dialogue-light survival movies like the desperate one-man high seas sailboat disaster movie All Is Lost or the one-challenge-after-another problem-solving depicted in The Martian. The story is less about what anyone says but about what happens to you and what you do about it.

The narrow focus of Near Death is appealing. Its designers succeed in presenting a refreshingly simple game about a straightforward struggle to live. They simply pit you against the cold, and they have erected an arduous and interesting interactive obstacle course you must overcome to survive.