Damn Londoners
Frostpunk mixes survival and city building genres with a steampunk imagining of the late 1800s during the onset of an ice age. You are ‘The Captain’ of a refugee expedition that has fled London to resettle in the extreme north and have made your stand against the cold at the site of a large coal-fired heat generator; a heat source that becomes the hub and focus of your attempts to survive.
The starting population is small, and you must make choices about how you will use your people to collect the resources you need. Everything takes place on a 24-hour cycle with resource collecting, sleeping, and building all taking time. In addition to influence of the cold, everything you choose to do also impacts on the ‘hope’ and ‘discontent’ values for your city. When these values end up at their negative extremes for too long, the stress on your city will reach breaking point with outcomes that will threaten to make the situation spiral out of control.
Every 18 hours you get to enact a law that forces people to change their behavior. Often this codifies a compromise (child shelters vs child labor for instance). The range of laws available range from righteous to barbaric and at around about the mid-game diverge into ‘faith’ and ‘order’ based sub-trees. Once you’ve chosen one of these, the entire other tree becomes unavailable.
Tech tree choices are available once you’ve constructed and staffed a workshop facility and these lead to many upgrades and new structures for use in the management of your city.
Periodically you will also be informed via pop up messages about developments in the city. These snippets often relate to further humanise the relationship between your choices and outcomes. Decisions almost always force a compromise. Every action has costs and benefits and the consequences of your leadership choices (both intended and unintended) are frequently revealed via these alerts and the hope/discontent system. The game does an excellent job overall of pushing the player to make ethically and morally grey resource use, legal, and ethical decisions in the pursuit of the higher goal of group survival. The game play loop is addicting in a ‘just one more decision’ kind of way, but it is this moral exploration of leadership that stood out to me here.
Frostpunk is extremely addicting and maintains its intensity all the way through to its dramatic crescendo. Highly recommended.
