Deep Frost

"The recorder lies. The blood lies. And so do you."

Twelve researchers. Nine days. Something is wearing their faces.

Deep Frost is a Carpenter-flavored social-deduction roguelike set on Halström Outpost 7, a failing Antarctic research station where a parasitic intelligence called the Thaw has begun copying its hosts. One by one, the crew is being replaced. You are one of them. Maybe.

Every run, every trait, every relationship is randomized. Every day a new body goes through the airlock. You have until Day 9 to identify the infected, survive the blood test, and hold the station together long enough for the helicopter to return.

Features

• Full social verb set, chat, ask, plant, defuse, accuse, bribe, specialty, study. Every interaction moves suspicion in a hidden network of 12 contestants.
  
• Round-table interrogation, you get questioned too. Lie convincingly or burn.
  
• The Thaw sync and queen mechanic, infections spread through contact. The queen rewrites the rules.
  
• Anomaly run modifiers — White Noise, Frost Loop, Blood Moon, Recorder Lies. No two runs play the same.
  
• Station-ops missions, patch the reactor, hack the airlock, run the blood analysis. Failures cascade.
  
• Trait-aware rapport, five relationship tiers per contestant. Treat them right and they'll testify for you. Burn them and they won't.
  
• Codex, unlock lore fragments across runs. Halström has lost a crew every eight years. Someone should have told you.
  
• Save / continue, day-boundary autosave. The station remembers.

Twelve named contestants. Not random meeples.

KESH won't meet your eye after Day 6. MOIRA's recordings stop matching the timestamps. Dr. Vance's grudge with the surgeon goes back to a paper neither of them will discuss. Every contestant is named, traited, and procedurally pulled into a web of grudges, debts, and quiet loyalties. You learn them. You start to care which ones survive. You vote one out anyway.

Singleplayer. No baggage.

• No matchmaking queues
  
• No microtransactions, no battle pass, no cosmetics store
  
• No teenage Discord griefers
  
• No cheaters, no smurfs, no "the host left"
  
• No scheduling four friends at 2am

The deduction lives in the procedural NPCs. The lies are written, not typed. One purchase, one game, twelve liars, nine days.

Inspirations

If you loved The Thing (1982), Gnosia, or Among Us and wished for a singleplayer horror experience with more teeth, this is that game. Think of it as a single-player Among Us with a story — and a body count that has names attached.

Tone

Paranoid. Cold. Carpenter-flavored. No jump scares. The dread builds in the silences between dialog options, in the way KESH won't meet your eye on Day 6, in the recorder entry that says you were somewhere you weren't, in the blood test on Day 4 when the centrifuge hums and nobody blinks.

Solo dev

Deep Frost is built and released by AeonGames. Audio sourced under Creative Commons from OpenGameArt and Pixabay (full credits in-game). Visual art AI-assisted. Written, coded and designed by one person.

Controls

• WASD / Arrow keys, move
  
• E / Space, interact
  
• F1, mechanics briefing
  
• Esc, pause