German indie developer Octofox Games officially announced on March 6 that the third biome for their co-op action-adventure game Wild Woods, Snowsickle Peaks, will be released on Monday, March 9.
This update marks the largest content addition since the Steam Early Access launch in December 2024. It includes a snowy new area , new survival mechanics, new boss battles, and enemy variants .
What is Wild Woods? The adventures of four cute cats.
Wild Woods is a cooperative action-adventure game for 1 to 4 players. Each player takes on the role of a brave kitten, tasked with guarding a wooden carriage as it traverses a perilous forest. During the day, they explore the forest, collecting resources to upgrade their carriage. At night, they must defend it from thieving rabbits, hedgehogs, and wild boars that swarm from the darkness.
Supporting both local play and online multiplayer, the game focuses on resource management and teamwork. Based on Steam tags, the game combines cozy, casual, action-packed, roguelike, and hack-and-slash elements, making it highly accessible even for non-gamers, including family and loved ones.
Third biome: Frozen mountaintop ‘Snowsicle Peaks’
After passing through the existing biomes of Ever-Emerald Forest and Razorleaf Marshes, you’ll reach the snow-covered mountain range of Snowsicle Peaks. The development team designed this area as “a dangerous, frozen place that feels like the top of the world.”
The biggest changes to this biome are the frozen resource and torch systems . Resources buried in snow cannot be harvested directly; players must craft and place torches in their wagons to melt the ice to obtain them. Torches serve as both a resource gathering tool and a crucial device for night vision.
The development team said that they received feedback from early tests that excessively cold environments were causing constant stress to players, so they refined the system to balance the cold and safe spaces .
New bosses and enemy variant monsters appear
A new boss fight has also been added. A new, formidable foe awaits the cat team, who have so far surpassed the first biome’s Brokk the Bandit Bruiser. The boss’s name has not yet been revealed, but the development team says it’s designed to keep even the most coordinated teams on their toes.
Five new enemies, including variants of the hedgehog, badger, boar, and rabbit, will also be added, with new combat patterns appearing across all stages, including the original 1 and 2 biomes. Even familiar enemies from the past won’t let their guard down. An improved soundscape, four Steam Achievements, and two unlockable cat skins will also be added.
Five Hamburg graduate students’ graduation project becomes a Steam game.
Octofox Games, the creator of Wild Woods, is a small indie studio based in Hamburg, Germany. The studio began as a team of five graduates from the Master’s program in Game Design at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW Hamburg), who created the Wild Woods prototype as part of their coursework.
Although the game started as a school project, it was recognized for its completeness and won the Best New Student Award at the 2019 German Developer Award. In 2020, it was selected as the first team to receive support of 80,000 euros in the prototype funding program of Gamecity Hamburg.
With this funding, full-scale development began, and a publishing deal was signed with Daedalic Entertainment in 2022, ultimately leading to a successful Steam Early Access launch in December 2024. The collaboration between these two Hamburg-based teams made Wild Woods’ Steam debut possible.
Users say this is the update they’ve been waiting for.
The game currently holds a “Very Positive” rating on Steam, with 80% of 1,268 reviews giving it a positive rating. Steam Spy estimates the number of players owning the game to be between 50,000 and 100,000 . However, reviews from the past 30 days have shown a somewhat mixed reception, with 56% positive , so any changes following this update are noteworthy.
The community has high expectations for the third biome. The development team revealed that when they solicited “cold biome ideas” from the community last year, fan suggestions were surprisingly aligned with the actual development direction, which led to this update.
He also commented, “We designed the third biome to feel noticeably different from the previous two areas, both visually and gameplay-wise,” and “I think the torch and ice melting systems really nailed that goal.”
From what began as a graduation project in a Hamburg graduate school classroom to a game that reached Steam Early Access and now includes a third biome, the five developers at Octofox Games have steadily moved forward, one step at a time.
Throughout this process, the community wasn’t just consumers, but partners in development. The fact that fan-proposed ideas have come to life in the actual game, under the name Snowsicle Peaks, is proof of this. Gamers are eager to see what new milestones this update, scheduled for release on March 9th, will mark for the cooperative adventures of Wild Woods.
Steam Store Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1975580/Wild_Woods/
