Barotrauma Developer FakeFish Launches Frostrail Closed Beta on Steam Today Ahead of Q4 2026 Early Access

Frostrail, the brutal co-op survival FPS from Barotrauma developer FakeFish and publisher Shiro Unlimited, opens its Closed Beta on Steam today, August 31, 2026. The beta runs inside Steam's PvE Survival Crafting Fest and gives prospective engineers their first real shot at climbing aboard the game's centerpiece: a steam-powered locomotive that doubles as mobile base across a frozen post-apocalyptic wasteland.

FakeFish set the studio up in Turku, Finland in 2014 and grew it into a roughly 30-person team, with Barotrauma's 3 million-plus unit sales since 2019 shaping its appetite for high-pressure co-op simulation. Frostrail is the most direct translation of that DNA yet: alone or in squads of up to four, players drive the train across a never-ending blizzard, stop at the remnants of dead mining camps and villages, and descend into subterranean vaults for weapons and loot. Between stops, they upgrade the locomotive's defenses and arsenal with whatever they scavenged.

The Closed Beta is the first live public test of that loop. Sign-ups are open through the Frostrail Steam page, and Shiro Unlimited has been pushing the game's wishlist past 300,000 since the announcement. A wider Steam Early Access launch is planned for Q4 2026 on Windows PC, with English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified Chinese supported at launch.

Frostrail is one of the more distinctive co-op survival pitches of the year because the train is genuinely the only persistent shelter — every minute outside is a fight against cold, visibility, and the Revenants that hunt players who linger too long in the snow. Today's beta is the first chance to see whether FakeFish can turn that high-stakes setting into something more than a Barotrauma reskin.