Hello everyone!

We’ve been thrilled to see so much interest in Frostrail since last week’s announcement. Thank you for all the questions and comments, and keep them coming – we’re looking forward to hearing what you think, and will be writing to answer as many questions as we can in the coming weeks and months.

This week we wanted to help you get to know us a little better: You may have heard of FakeFish before, but what kind of people are there behind the name? Those who have been following us for a longer time through Barotrauma already know something about our team, but there are developers behind Frostrail who have not worked on Barotrauma, and vice versa. So we believe some introductions are in order.

A picture from a few years back with almost half of the current team.

FakeFish is an independent game studio from Turku, Finland. Our journey started all the way back in 2014, when the team consisted of five university friends, but we only really made our mark when Barotrauma was released on Steam early access in 2019.

That same year was also when the idea for Frostrail began to take shape: it started as our lead designer Ez’s brainchild when he was traveling to his summer cottage along a particularly foggy and deserted highway through the forest, and daydreamed: "Wouldn't it be cool if there was some sort of truck simulator meets Silent Hill or something?". The daydream lingered, changing shape bit by bit and morphing from a truck game into a train game over the years, until the opportunity came to develop it further with a team.

Now that team is almost 30 strong – still a small company, but just about big enough to handle two separate game projects. Our people come from 8 different countries (most of us are Finnish though), and some have called FakeFish home for the entirety of their careers, while others have experience from several different video game companies. The Fish currently working on Frostrail are…

Design team
Ez, Daniel, Jeroen and Riina

Art team
Jonas, Dinh, Iiro, Mappu, Nam-Anh, Sampo and Tomi

Programming team
Sami, Eetu, Jaakko, Juan, Kasperi and Lauri

Audio and music
Jussi

Production and community management
Aku, Kalle and Vilma


You can find almost everyone from FakeFish in the official Discord server[discord.gg], albeit with our Discord nicknames, as well as members of the publishing team at Shiro. Come say hi!

Some more of us up to no good last November.

Greetings wayfarer, and welcome on board.

You’ve just taken your first step on the journey called Frostrail, and we’re thrilled to have you with us! Let’s talk a little bit about this game that we at FakeFish and Shiro Games have been working on for a couple of years already, behind the scenes.

Frostrail is the upcoming second game of FakeFish, the Finnish game studio behind the submarine simulator Barotrauma. Frostrail is an entirely new survival horror adventure through the cold and dark – not an alien ocean, but a post-apocalyptic world of ice and eldritch enemies. The second half of the team behind Frostrail is the French publisher Shiro Unlimited, the third party publishing arm of Shiro Games, known for the multi-million-selling RTS Northgard, the critically acclaimed turn-based RPG Wartales, and the recently announced online space exploration and building game SpaceCraft.

For our very first post, we wanted to introduce you to the world of Frostrail. Namely, what is the game all about, and what will it be like to play it?

Imagine a place on Earth where nearly all life has been bled dry, frozen over and disfigured by a malevolent force at the behest of a warmongering religious zealot. Then imagine you are one of the few people who have so far managed to avoid that fate. You face unfavorable odds with very little by way of arms or resources, but you do have one thing going for you: a train.

Frostrail centers around an armored, steam-powered train, your lifeline and moving base. Traverse the frozen wastes in pursuit of salvation somewhere beyond the northern horizon, and don’t stray too far from your train: it’s your only reliable source of heat, and you don’t want the cold to catch you.

Frostrail is a first-person shooter where ammo is a luxury and fights are nothing to be taken lightly. Besides fighting, or trying to avoid unnecessary fights, you’ll explore the ruins of a former empire, gather supplies, craft clothes, food and weapons. Crucially, you’ll upgrade, maintain and operate your train, and its life-sustaining Eden Engine.

You play as one (or up to four, if you bring friends!) of very few survivors in a disaster-torn world, and along the way you will be challenged by a multitude of enemies known as Revenants. Revenants are connected to and have been twisted by the same entity that is responsible for the persistent cold. Revenants, despite their gruesome shapes and the significant threat they pose, are the cannon fodder enemy – there are worse things to come, later.

Frostrail will begin its Early Access journey on Steam next year, and there is much we’re eager to tell you about the game even before that: stay tuned for playtests, feature sneak peeks, and more in the months to come. Be sure to follow and add Frostrail to your wishlist on Steam to stay up to speed with our news!

If you’d like to meet other travelers as well as the people behind Frostrail, you can now join us on the official Discord server. Click the invite link below, and see you on the other side.

https://discord.gg/KtXN6eQfs3

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3517740/Frostrail/