Don’t Cold is a free-to-play simulation game from bigrando420. This minimalist survival game tasks you with building a base to protect yourself from the cold and survive for as long as you can. Featuring simple monochromatic blocks, you control the player, pick up items, and create your shelter. This game is deceptively simple, though. Even the slightest mistake can end your run, and you’re left wondering if it’s by design or by bugs.

Still, once you get the hang of it, Don’t Cold becomes a fun casual game that tests your patience. It’s a lot like its fellow indie Windowsill.

Try your best and don’t cold

The first thing about Don’t Cold is that it doesn’t give the players anything. Aside from the simple WASD controls for movement and the space bar for interacting with objects, it doesn’t give the player anything. You go in blind in terms of the premise and the gameplay mechanics. Even the title doesn’t seem to make sense. You will have to go through a couple of tries to understand.

In terms of visuals, the game uses minimalist designs. Its barebones appearance makes it reminiscent of old games for the MS-DOS, which also explains its small 4.73 MB storage requirement. Again, since the game doesn’t offer tips or guides, it’s up to the player to discover what blocks of varying colors and lengths do, and how they will help you survive longer.

Also, the game is not optimized. Expect a couple of bugs, which adversely affect the gameplay experience. Some of them are random, such as picking up and dropping off certain blocks killing the player, while others are more serious. For example, attempting to run the game in fullscreen mode with the Windows command, Alt + Enter, causes the game to freeze, requiring you to restart your PC.

An acquired taste in indie gaming

While a market for retro and indie games remains, Don’t Cold is still an outlier. It’s a fun, challenging game for a very specific audience. It doesn’t provide information on how to play it or what the game is about. You’ll inevitably have to go through a couple of test runs to see how objects respond. Even then, there are a lot of bugs to contend with.