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❤ Carefully Manage Scarce Resources

Players must carefully assign crew members with specialized roles - engineers to maintain the furnace, scouts to gather supplies, sailors to hunt animals, and scientists to produce medical supplies. However, there may not be enough crew to handle all necessary tasks, so players must prioritize and make tough decisions. Rationing food and fuel can help conserve supplies, but this comes at the cost of crew morale. Running out of critical resources can lead to disaster, with crew members succumbing to frostbite, scurvy, and other hazards. Players must constantly monitor and adjust their resource allocation to ensure the expedition's survival.

❤ Face Difficult Moral Dilemmas

The game frequently presents players with difficult moral dilemmas. For example, players must decide how to respond to crew requests, resolve disagreements, and address other events. These choices can significantly impact the loyalty, safety, and well-being of the crew. While the game's "branching decision tree" is not always clear, reviewers note that the weight of each choice and its impact on the story and crew is a key aspect of the gameplay experience. Some decisions may not have the expected impact, but the emotional investment in the characters makes these choices meaningful.

❤ Develop Relationships with Crew Members

Players get to know the individual crew members, each with their own personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and personal stories. Maintaining crew morale and keeping the crew loyal is crucial, as discord and mutiny can have disastrous consequences. Reviewers praised the depth and complexity of the crew characters, noting that they feel like real, three-dimensional people rather than just game mechanics. Players can develop relationships and connections with the crew, which adds to the emotional investment and significance of the choices made.

❤ Manage Permadeath and Replay the Game

The game features permadeath, meaning that if a crew member dies, they are permanently lost. This heightens the stakes and consequences of players' decisions, as they must weigh the survival of the entire expedition against the potential loss of individual crew members. The game's replayability comes from the desire to try different approaches, make different choices, and potentially achieve better outcomes for the crew. While the overall story arc may be linear, the branching paths and variations in the ending provide enough incentive to return to the game for multiple playthroughs.