Distrust Guide: How to Survive the Cold, Anomalies, Hunger, and Exhaustion

Distrust is an awesome new survival horror game on mobile that feels like an arctic version of This War of Mine but with a heck of a lot more aliens. Your goal is to help guide a group of survivors through six different zones of frozen wasteland as you hunt for vital supplies and discover what you need to do to get to open the door to the next zone.

Meanwhile, a variety of, quite frankly terrifying, alien beings known as anomalies hunt you down. Each of these has a different weakness or fear that you can exploit to stay alive, but you’ll have to figure out what it is first.

In this guide, we’re going to try and make your stay in this arctic wasteland a little bit more comfortable. We’ll give you a few survival tips and tricks, including how to combat hunger, anomalies, exhaustion and cold.

How to survive in Distrust

• Head straight for the zone exit: When you start a new game or enter a new zone, we recommend sending one of your survivors straight to the zone exit. It’s highly unlikely that they’ll be able to open it immediately, as you usually find the tool you need to unlock it within the zone itself, but it will guide you on what to look out for.
• Check your map if you need a resource vitally: If you’re running low on a specific resource, check your map. It actually details what’s inside each building so you can easily track down items you’re short on. This is also handy for finding items you need to exit the zone.
• Send the right person for the job: Before you begin a game, you can select which survivors you want to bring with you. This is much more than a cosmetic option, as each survivor is better at specific things. When selecting tasks, choose the survivor that’s best equipped for the job. As an example, if one of your survivors can handle the cold better, send them to do the outdoor activities.
• Multitask: Though it might feel scary to split up in a dark, abandoned arctic wasteland, you really will get a lot more done that way. Send your survivors into different buildings and swap between them as soon as you assign one a task. This way, you’ll absolutely power through each zone and have plenty of resources on hand. Besides, if one survivor runs into trouble, at least the other one will be able to make a quick escape.
• Don’t ignore your stamina, hunger, or warmth bars: Your stamina, hunger, and warmth bars aren’t just there for fun so neglect them at your own peril. If any of the three drops to zero, you’ll start taking damage. So whenever you have a spare moment, check through each of your survivor’s bars to make sure any aren’t in danger of emptying. If they are, do something about it – and quick!

• Always wear a jacket: In an ideal world, your survivors could spend all of the time in the safety and warmth of the indoors, with a nice log fire burning. You won’t achieve much if you don’t get stuck into each of the different buildings though. So our advice? Wear a jacket as soon as you can find one. Even the lightest jacket will mitigate enough heat to keep you alive a little longer.
• Sleep with one eye open: We’re not sure exactly what triggers anomalies to appear, but every time we’ve gone to sleep so far one of them has started lurking outside of our window. So we think it’s a pretty safe bet to say that sleeping triggers an anomaly. Our advice is to make sure the you provide enough fuel for the electricity and boiler to keep running well before you wake up. Each anomaly has a different fear, so sometimes that heat or light can be the difference between survival and death.
• Cook whenever you get the chance: As you gather up resources, you’ll start to pick up frozen vegetables, cans of soup, coffee, and more delicious food stuffs. We recommend cooking everything you have to hand every single time you find a stove. That way, you’ll have a bunch of food readily available when you next need it. And you will need it.
• Play on challenging mode: There are two different playing modes in Distrust and we highly recommend that you play on the challenging mode. Sure, it’s going to be more difficult but this is a survival game. The chances are you didn’t play this because you expected it to be easy. More importantly than that though, you don’t unlock any new content while playing easy mode. Challenging mode introduces you to new survivors and the like so make the jump as soon as possible.
• Pick up everything: We’re not entirely sure whether or not you can run out of inventory space, but we sure as heck didn’t on our first few attempted runs. So with that in mind, we recommend picking up literally everything you can find. You won’t really be sure what you need until you need it, so it’s a solid strategy. Besides, if you run out of space you can always drop that mouldy food you’re carrying around.

Glen Fox

Head of Editorial

Glen has over a decade's worth of experience in gaming journalism, writing for Pocket Gamer, Pocket Tactics, Nintendo Life, and Gfinity. When he's not badgering everyone about the dangers of passive text, you can probably find him playing Wild Rift.