Screenshots
Until the Thaw
Maciej Bugajski · Published by Maciej Bugajski
Content notice: game is about avoiding being burnt at the stake
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
A handcrafted narrative card game with branching outcomes, set in a 17th-century Polish village. Swipe through the winter. You are a stranger who arrived uniinvited to a snowbound village, the lord is dead, and witchcraft accusations don't care about innocence. Can you survive until the Thaw?
Adventure, Indie · 2026 · More free games
About this game
A stranger arrives uninvited at a rural Polish folwark. The lord is dead. His widow is barely holding the estate. The priest left. The roads are buried. Nobody is coming. Suspicions start to grow.
You are the stranger.
Over time, they decide who you are.
Swipe left or right to respond to the people.
Every answer shifts your standing between the manor and the village.
NPCs will react based on who they think you are:
a Simple Man,
a Godfearing man
a Learned Man
Depending on this perception, Your possible choices will change, as well as NPCs reactions to them
You can try and change their minds, but it won't be easy.
Lord has died.
Witchcraft accusations are flying around
That is when you arrive
Everybody judges you.
Nobody lies.
Each decision could produce consequences you didnt intend.
Historically and ethnographically grounded
Features
Reigns-style card swiping mechanic
Single slider balance between manor and village.
An identity system that accumulates across the entire run and constrains your future options.
Text that changes based on who the village thinks you are.
Multiple Endings depending on your choices. You can't save everyone, but you might save yourself
Historically correct, in 17th-century Polish vernacular registers (English translation available).
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Win 10
- Processor: Intel Core i5-2520M or equivalent
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: GeForce GTX 970
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 300 MB available space
- Sound Card: Any DirectX compatible sound card (integrated audio is perfectly fine)
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
Supported Languages
Latest news
AnnouncementsOfficial
Gossip becomes fact
Mechanic "gossip becomes fact": dev diary for a witch-trial Reigns-like.You play my game like Tinder. Two options, left or right. In both, you hear someone's opinion, form your own on top of it, and decide whether and how to answer. Tinder is infamous for making people judge by appearances. That is the entire axis of Until the Thaw.The design problem I set myself: how do you turn "gossip becomes fact" into a mechanic?Let's start with the setting, briefly, because everything follows from it. A village in seventeenth-century Poland. Someone important has died, and accusations of witchcraft start flying around; whoever ends up named the witch will burn. The player is on the defensive from the first card. The game never tells you whether magic is real in this world. It can't. There is no narrator to tell you. Even the illustrations are deliberately vague and dreamlike. You learn the world from word of mouth.Constraint 1: Everything is an opinion. Nothing the player reads is the objective truth. It is all just a person, the lady of the manor, her young son, a neighbor, the village as a chorus, telling you what they think has happened. Your answer is also an opinion, in your own words, addressed to that person. Not to the game, not to a narrator, not to yourself. No correct choice exists. Choices do something socially: deflecting suspicion from yourself plants it on someone else; calming a scene today hands the young master something to report to his mother at the worst possible moment next week. They are not a way to get to the truth. In the end, your past choices are judged the way everyone else's actions are. They just sit in the record, open to interpretation, and depending on how the future unfolds, they can resurface as proof of your guilt or as your accusation of someone else.Constraint 2: Who you are is an outcome of your choices. There are three archetypes the player can be. A learned man, but learned in the pre-Enlightenment sense, the practical reason for perio...Read full article on Community Announcements (Magic)
