Indie game takes players to 1980s Czechoslovakia to distill illegal alcohol

Your uncle is behind bars, the village is freezing and your best prospect of raising money involves sugar, yeast and an illegal still. Welcome to Winter Batch, an upcoming Czech indie game that gives countryside survival a distinctly boozy twist.

Set in December 1988 in Czechoslovakia, the first-person life simulator challenges players to keep themselves alive while producing and selling illicit alcohol. The objective is to earn enough money to get their uncle out of prison—without losing a batch, alienating customers or freezing to death.

The game is being developed by Infinity Entertainment, a two-person Czech team, and is listed for release on Steam in 2027. English interface text and subtitles are planned alongside Czech text and full Czech audio.

The premise combines the familiar demands of a survival game with the less conventional responsibilities of a village bootlegger.

Players must manage hunger, thirst, bladder needs and stress while contending with subzero weather. Alongside those everyday concerns, they need to gather ingredients, monitor fermentation, operate a homemade still and bottle their product in secret.

According to the developers’ description, mistakes can spoil a batch, putting both supplies and potential earnings at risk. Staying fed and warm matters just as much as keeping production moving.

The surrounding village supplies customers, odd jobs and other opportunities to earn money. Players will deal with suspicious residents and eccentric locals while trying to establish a reliable source of income.

That creates a potentially entertaining tension: the long-term goal is rescuing a relative, but the immediate priorities may be finding ingredients, making a sale or simply dealing with an increasingly urgent bodily need.

Infinity describes the game’s tone as including crude humor and slapstick violence. Its mature-content notice also lists alcohol production and consumption, smoking, cannabis and mild swearing.

The December 1988 setting places the action in the final winter before Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution. The developers promise the routine of an isolated village during the socialist era.

Infinity Entertainment describes itself as two friends from Czechia working toward making game development their full-time occupation.

František Svoboda handles programming and game design, while Tobiáš Štefl works on 3D art and game design. The studio lists Unity as its game engine and Blender among its production tools.

In an Aug. 16 development announcement, Svoboda introduced the project under the working title Project Moonshine. At that stage, the team said it was in preproduction, preparing its design document and working out the core mechanics.

That announcement gave a target release window of the first half of 2027. The Steam listing currently provides the broader date of 2027, with no specific launch day or price announced in the supplied information.

For now, Winter Batch offers an unusual variation on the rural life simulator: keeping a small business afloat while hoping nobody takes too close an interest in what is coming out of the shed.