Frozen Survivor – Camellia | A Kingdom Death Beta Content Review

Trembling, Camellia's frozen fingers wound the wrappings, applying precise intensities of pressure with each revolution. Slowly, the variable compression adjusted her circulation, a spreading warmth rose from her toes, lingering under the pelt wrapped tight around her shivering body. – Camellia Lore

At time of writing still available at: https://shop.kingdomdeath.com/products/frozen-survivor-camellia

Note: I've been very ill this week with flu, including when I re-recorded the narrative for the Frogdog video review. If I get things wrong, or have once again defaulted back to 1.31 rules understandings; bare with me and please, kindly point that out!

Camellia is the third frozen flower survivor we've had released through the beta content line, so now we have and at this point I'm going to take a risk and predict that we're due one more male frozen survivor and then we've got an entire roster of starting survivors for some cold environment campaign. For now I'll call it Kingdom Death: Frozen Seas; because that sounds bad ass.

Like the other two Camellia comes with some cold orientated gear, as a brief refresher, Hellebore turned up first and came with this frozen dagger.

I like this dagger.

After that came Galanthus, who came with this piece of gear.

I like this gear, but it needed support.

You'll notice that the core thread between these two releases is the “insulated” ability and Camellia continues to expand on that particular mechanic. We'll get more into it shortly, but first of all let us look at the miniature.

The Miniature

I have personally reached the point where I do not paint the photoresin miniatures any more, this is because they've turned out to be too brittle to use on the board. However, this is a phenomenal sculpt. I love everything about this model, from the use of the Cold Face Dagger through to the frankly superior lantern design1 and all the way to the clothes this model is an incredible sculpt and I wish we knew exactly who in “Team Death” was responsible for this artistry.

In particular, Camellia's sculpted expression is delightful and really sells the concern/despair that living in such a frozen, hostile environment, where you have to battle not just the elements, but horrific monsters that probably look like Cronenberg's idea of a polar bear.

It's a really, really good sculpt and a diorama of these frozen survivors battling against some horrendous, furry, many limbed, bloated opponent in the midst of a biting blizzard is an incredible image to consider.

All three of these frozen miniatures convey vulnerability in a way that that is frankly delightful and I do genuinely hope that we get to see an exploration of their home environment, Iceborne was a fantastic expansion to Monster Hunter: World, but it didn't have the level of exposure and jeopardy that is expressed here.

Yeah I really like what's being displayed in this frozen miniature line; it's absolute artistry. I hope it comes back in a more play-friendly material.

The Gameplay

Crafting Costs: 1x Endeavor, 1x Cloth

Before we get into this further, a quite refresher on “Insulated”:

Insulated

A survivor is insulated if they have 6 or more gear cards that grant them armor points.

That means a survivor needs a full armor set plus an accessory, shield or similar, the armor points cannot come from abilities or departing bonuses, it has to be generated by gear. It's also worth noting that if you have the warming pelt from Galanthus then the threshold to become insulated is only 3 pieces of gear. So we are highly incentivised to use this alongside the gear from the Galanthus and Hellebore releases. That means if you've been collecting them all, this has a lot more value than if you missed the previous two. If you did miss them, this isn't really worth picking up, but to explain why let us explore the gear card and then consider its synergies with the previous release. (I'm also going to predict that the fourth survivor will come with the insulated arm wraps that will be 1 armor point, heavy, cloth, have a left facing blue affinity and provide an ability bonus for being insulated, maybe accuracy).

These Thermal Wrappings are a fairly cheap and quick craft, this is another option to spend your cloth on, cloth's a bit of an expensive resource, we're heavily limited in the number we have because they only come with the starting prologue survivors. Is it time for 6 survivor prologue showdowns to become the norm? /jk.

What we're offered here is a set of footwear that gives each hit location heavy armor +1 armor points and as these tootsie covers are heavy themselves that means they also benefit. Snowdrop's Warming Pelt (see above) is also heavy and due to its damage reduction ability so there is some solid synergy there. There's also a potential synergy with the Impermanism philosophy which has the unburdened ability:

“Unburdened

A survivor abillity. You may only wear Cloth (no other armor or accessories). Gain +2 strength from your resolve.”

Of course, that depends on if "Cloth" here refers to to the gear card or the keyword. I cannot remember if we've had a clear definition on this one or not, the living glossary didn't have information when I looked. The reason I'm asking this is because "Bloody Cloth" really muddied the waters.

So yeah, there's definite value involved in these, if we're combining these cards together. Which is not surprising given that is the mechanical and thematic design intent.

The extra movement is also REALLY good, movement is by far and away the strongest stat in the game, so getting +1 movement early on as a part of your armor “set” is a great boon for the wearing survivor.

The only downside here is the need to run heavy armor in each location, but there are some excellent heavy armor options one can put in the head, body and waist if you're not being Unburdened. I like the Gorment Mask for the head in particular due to its very strong ability.These combos also don't have a true armor set bonus so we end up being able to use them together with Clothed & Satiated something like this:

 This loadout above has the following armor point line

• Head – 4

• Arms – 4

• Body – 3

• Waist – 4

• Legs – 3

Of course, we really don't need to run anything more than the third piece of armor keyword gear (which should certainly be a hat of some kind due to how dangerous head hits are and the White Lion Helm is an acceptable alternative), but we benefit from the Wrappings bonus more if we can slap a heavy armor gear card to each hit location.

And in addition the Warm Pelt is providing that massive damage reduction meaning that this armor set has a lot more damage soak than it looks on paper when you move onto monsters that deal around 2 damage per hit.

So yes, this is an excellent piece of gear if you have Snowdrop's Warming Pelt beta box content, it's not that great without it, but I would absolutely consider using it with the other Gorment Armor set pieces and a shield if I didn't have access to Galanthus' box because Gorment Armor has frankly disappointing boots. I wouldn't use these boots with the White Lion Armor as much (except as a temporary stop gap) because White Lion Boots are one of the best parts of the armor set.

Final Thoughts

It's evident that if you've bought Galanthus previously this gear is building on that structure, Hellebore's dagger isn't as useful, but it is good early game synergy if you have it as well and can afford to sacrifice a Founding Stone for it. Also if you've bought this (like I did) I suspect you're priced into purchasing next year's member of the frozen seas starting quartet because if I'm right, it'll be a third piece of gear to round out the 3 piece “set” and complete the survivor side of the prologue picture in a satisfying manner.

Most of all I'm hopeful that these pieces represent the next main area the game's setting will explore and therefore get a reprint in plastic. If they don't I do think it's quite a big loss for the world of Kingdom Death overall, because I do like the thematics and mechanics that these Frozen Flower Survivors are giving us a peek into.

1 I low key hate the inverted S “Scribe” lantern design, this is so much cleaner and attractive for my tastes)