Arctic survival sim The Pale Beyond is as messy as it is compelling

polygon.com:

On my maiden voyage to the middle of frozen nowhere, I’ve made a new best friend: the hoosh pot. It’s survival cooking — hoosh is a sort of Antarctic explorer’s gruel made with whatever’s lying around, from penguins to dead sled dogs, and under dire circumstances, the unsavory products of “the custom of the sea.” As someone with a morbid fascination with weird historical food, it’s easy for me to obsess over the hoosh, but as a stalwart upholder of civilization, I refuse to succumb to cannibalism.

I’m not doing an intense gastronomical LARP — I’m playing The Pale Beyond, a survival-driven adventure that takes a page from tales of late-19th-century polar explorers, and perhaps more recently, the first season of AMC’s historical thriller The Terror (which was, in turn, based on an actual lost expedition). At first blush, it’s a straightforward survival simulator where I expect the worst to happen, because there’s nothing positive that can come from forcibly inserting a bunch of soft, vulnerable mammals into an icebound hellscape that simply does not wish to host them. But really, what are humans without hubris?

The story begins by meeting Captain Hunt, an enigmatic old salt who hires my faceless character, Robin Shaw, as first mate aboard the Temperance. The job is to find the Temperance’s missing sister ship, the Viscount. It’s clear that Hunt is keeping secrets, and once we’re aboard, it becomes even clearer that the captain — while loved and respected by the crew — is totally checked out. Templeton, an uptight biologist who fittingly resembles a steely-eyed draugr, seems to be the only one invested in finding the twin ship. When Hunt goes missing, Shaw must take up the captain’s mantle, at least temporarily, to see