These thought-provoking choices, layered on top of a solid management sim and city builder, is what makes Frostpunk stand apart from other recent city games. Like 11-bit studios’ previous game, This War of Mine, Frostpunk puts a human face on these decisions and forces you to evaluate survival on both a personal and humanitarian level. For instance, employing a child workforce resulted in an accident and a despondent mother. Throughout each game, these emotion-heavy events made me face the consequences of earlier decisions. Making laws is one thing responding to personal requests is another. Will you stretch food supplies by intentionally making awful-tasting soup? Will children be forced to work? What will you do with the gravely ill and the corpses of the dead?
They’re often fascinating moral scenarios that have long-lasting consequences. Many of these come through the crafting of the “Book of Laws,” a tree of edicts that shape the face of your society. As the leader of the city, you’ll be forced to make some hard decisions. This restraint is important, as in addition to managing a workforce, rationing a dwindling supply, and constructing buildings, Frostpunk demands political action, too.
Most buildings and streets are placed within rings around a central heat-providing generator, and this thematic touch provides a structure that keeps the city-building gameplay from stealing all of your attention. Like resource collection, this part of gameplay is tightly focused, thanks to a careful selection of buildings and the radiant nature of the city. This is where the city-building aspect of Frostpunk comes into play: buildings process goods and provide heat or housing. Of course, these workers are humans with needs, so the resources they gather will be used to keep them alive. Also making this task difficult is a novel day/night cycle citizens will only work during the relatively warm daylight shift. In fact, managing the finite number of workers is key to keeping the city going there will never be as many of them as you’ll want or need. I appreciate that Frostpunk limits the number of resources to around five, as there is room for supply chain complexity while still avoiding burdening us with an overabundance of different types of goods.ĭetermining how many workers to send to each stash is a decision you’ll make quite often. This aspect plays out like most real-time city builder or survival games, and your workers will trudge through the snow to bringing coal, steel, and wood back to the city center. Hope and discontent serve as metrics to indicate how you are doing.Īs the leader of this last city, the most basic task you have is to direct the workforce to gather supplies to keep the community going. Rather than selfishly building power over a tropical paradise, here you make decisions for all of what remains of humanity in the midst of a frozen wasteland. It’s in the gameplay, though, where Frostpunk shines, mixing up bits from various familiar strategy games into something like an inverse Tropico. Frostpunk is something like an inverse Tropico. But these issues disappear after playing for an hour or so. For instance, it took me a while to find the button to build streets. Menus are typically clear, though certain functions and iconography are a bit unintuitive. Workers carve paths in the snow as they walk, the sunrise splashes across the city, and fires illuminate the buildings around them. Though the graphics challenged my GeForce GTX 880M-powered AlienWare PC, they are bleakly beautiful. In fact, the sound of a cold wind is the first thing that greets you when launching a new game. Likewise, the sound design and voice acting pushes the harshness of the landscape. The overall aesthetic reminded me of a Victorian Game of Thrones, complete with lots of gears and swirling snow. Throughout, Frostpunk’s art style is effectively minimalistic and washed out, making each bit of color seem like a touch of warmth in the snow. This story is told through outstanding animations that help set a stark tone.