Release Date: 24/04/2018
Played On: Win
Available On: Win
Time Played: 12h 10m
Progress: 2 Main Campaign Playthroughs
Developer: 11 Bit Studios
Publisher: 11 Bit Studios
Enter the obligatory line about how the hottest city builder / management game right now is one about survival during a near-future ice age. Although, there's no denying that Frostpunk is one hell of a well put together game from the makers of other well put together titles like This War Of Mine.
In fact, I loved This War Of Mine so much that I picked up Frostpunk without a whole lot of investigation. The former title was an excellent game of desperate survival in a war-torn country, which still resonates with me today.
I only played through This War Of Mine once, even though it's built to be played many times over. However, my first playthrough went pretty well and ended in tragedy when one of my survivors was gunned down while searching for scraps. It would have been easy enough to fire up a new run and try again, but at the time it felt like a betrayal to the original group I'd nurtured through hardship and such bleak times.
It was the game's ability to elicit a genuine streak of empathy and compassion for its characters that really solidified This War Of Mine as an excellent experience. I guess it's no real surprise then to find out that Frostpunk shares a lot of similarities, while carving out its own niche to continue a catalogue of quality titles from this developer.
If I was going to be a bit disrespectful, I'd say that Frostpunk is a mix between This War Of Mine and Banished, another city builder with a focus on population survival. Actually, it's probably fair to draw a direct line from Banished to Frostpunk, as they definitely occupy the same space. Don't take that as a slight on the game, as Banished is one of my favourite city builders of all time, so we're onto something awesome here.
The main premise of Frostpunk is that the world has be thrown into something of an ice age. We follow a group of former London inhabitants who have set out to find a new home in the north.
Turns out that they discover a crater which serves as the perfect spot to set up a massive steam generator and settle down in the glow of its warmth. The temperature starts at -20 and only drops, so the days ahead need to be spent fuelling the generator and taking care of the meagre population.
For the most part, Frostpunk operates like its contemporaries. Resources are scarce and only available at certain nodes and through certain technologies that must be researched and developed. Every building requires workers to operate, which are pulled from the population, but they need food and shelter to be productive. Once basic needs are met, there's a layer of ancillary requirements, like entertainment for morale, or utilities to raise living standards.
So far, there's not a lot of difference to a game like Banished. Each resource relies on a production chain involving other resources, which then require further chains of their own. For example, the people need food to survive, so hunters can be tasked with hunting at night. The raw food is then cooked in a cookhouse to create rations, which are then give top the people to eat.
Each system is a variance on this type of complexity and flow-chart of resource gathering and processing. What's more, there are variations in the results of each link in the chain as well. If people are starving, they might start eating the raw food before it gets cooked, but that will probably make them sick, so it's off to the infirmary for them. While a citizen's sick, they are unable to work, so wherever they worked will be less productive until they recover. This can have some interesting knock-on effects when the dominoes start to fall out of control.
While all of these systems in Frostpunk are excellently designed and put together, there's still that nagging though that it still doesn't seem all that different to Banished. Even with the frosty theme, the bread and butter gameplay is pretty much on par up to this point. Thankfully though, that's where the similarities end. There are two or three main systems that really gives Frostpunk a unique spin, and cements an identity far from any comparisons with other games.
The first is the generator that sits at the heart of your city, and acts as the main source of power, heat, and essentially life itself. By gathering and burning coal, your city is able to create a network of steam power that everything else relies on. It is the one system of the game that is an essential ingredient to every other system and production chain.
From the start, it's clear just how important the generator is, as your citizens huddle around it for warmth. As you upgrade its potential and feed it more coal, it grows in both its temperature and area of effect. Although, every upgrade costs more and more fuel, so you better be mining enough coal to support its voracious appetite.
In this way, the generator becomes one of the main protagonists of Frostpunk's story. Its presence is forever dominant in the game, as it constantly sits in the centre of your world, sucking in resources and dishing out life to the city. You're always on the razor's edge as you try to expand the city while increasing resource production to feed the generator and expand its influence.
Inevitably, you'll run out of coal at some point, as the city expands and the generator's heat gets sapped sooner than it can replenish its life-giving steam. Whenever this happens it's like the city has had a heart attack and you're desperately keeping the life support going long enough to recover. The amount of tension that comes from the entire city shutting down because the generator is out of fuel, is palpable.
This leads to a much more intense bit of management than other games. After playing Banished for long enough, survival and growth became a simple loop of copying production chains to new locations. In contrast, Frostpunk feels like a constant struggle to keep every little element in the air lest they all come crashing down.
Perhaps it has something to do with the linear nature of Frostpunk's narrative, which divides the main campaign into three distinct acts. No matter how many times you play through the campaign, the main story beats and challenges will be exactly the same. This might seem a bit boring on paper, but it serves the game well and allows the experience to maintain a heightened level of difficulty.
It's why I prefer tailored experiences to procedurally generated ones, or in this case a linear timeline over a sandbox free-for-all. You still have the option to do whatever you want along the way, but the key events that throw up challenges will always arrive at the same time.
In my first playthrough I almost made it to the end, but was defeated during one of the final and most difficult events in the game. On my second attempt, I was successful and managed to get all the way to the credits. Despite playing through the same narrative twice, there is enough choice about how to approach each situation, that I was eager to try a different approach. What's more, one of the other key systems in the game is a great way to make replays interesting and different.
Up until now, Frostpunk appears to be all about production chains and flow-charts. Even if the generator presents a unique challenge, most of the city building aspects are within the realm of expectations. On its own, this would be enough to be enjoyable, but Frostpunk has another ace up its sleeve in the form of a meta political layer.
At regular intervals, you are given the option to enact laws that will change the way your society operates. Although, just about every law you can pass has a list of pros and cons ties in with it. The game even hints at the duality of this system when it states that sometimes the most effective way to get things done, might not be the best way.
I have to admit that this element really spoke to me on a personal level, as I'm fascinated with sociology and invisible systems of power that govern our collective lives. It's a common ethical illustration to say that the most effective way of achieving something is often the most immoral, which plays a big part in Frostpunk.
For instance, one of the earliest decisions to make is whether you allow children to work, or if they should be cared for during the day when their parents are at work. This is a desperate society where resources are scarce and everyone has to make sacrifices, so it would definitely benefit everyone to have more workers available. Then again, if unskilled children are forced to work, some of the population might grow discontent with the resulting accidents and issues that arise.
Similarly, another decision can be made whether or not to have infirmaries care for patients who are gravely ill and don't have long to live. They are taking up precious beds after all, and consuming scarce rations without being able to contribute in return. There are many more decisions like these to be made throughout the game, and each will influence the level of discontent and hope in the city.
This might be one of the weaker systems in Frostpunk, as it didn't always provide much of a challenge, but balancing discontent and hope is central to the narrative. Certain actions raise or lower each bar, and each will create different results when it reaches extreme levels.
When discontent is high, people might refuse to work, or steal rations and resources from stockpiles. If hope is high, controversial decisions can be made without too much disruption, as people will accept small sacrifices in the name of survival. Along with choosing laws for the city, there are buildings that can be researched and built to passively and actively change the level of either discontent or hope. The way that you go about it though, is driven by other decisions you make around the nature of society itself.
I'd love to go into more details about the intricacies of this meta-layer, but its dancing a little too close to spoiler territory. This is a credit to the game, as the decisions you make are tied in with other systems well enough that they are far from arbitrary. The laws and policies you choose will have real implications on the society you are trying to protect. As with real life, the pros and cons of most decisions may push you to choose paths that would otherwise be abhorrent.
The combination of the all-encompassing generator's presence and questionable moral choices, combine to give Frostpunk depth and identity. As challenges arise you become more invested in the outcomes, as every little step matters if you want to continue surviving in the ice.
Finally, there is an exploration layer that involves sending scouts into the wilderness to scavenge for resources and find other survivors. It seems the main function of exploration is to build the story and drive the narrative forward, as there is little to the system other than telling scouts to visit nodes on the map.
I would even argue that the exploration layer obfuscates one of the most essential resources in the game: people. At first it seems like exploring is good for finding resource caches and bringing them back to the city, but along the way you rescue survivors and encounter refugees.
Of course there is a need for population growth, but more people require more resources to support. A large portion of refugees and survivors could be ill, or they might simply be children who may or may not be able to work in your society. No matter how much they can contribute, each and every citizen will need food and shelter, which are always in high demand.
With all of these elements existing in unison and being shaped by one another, growth and success never feels assured. Unlike its counterparts, Frostpunk does a great job of making every moment in the story feel desperate and dire. I never once got comfortable in either playthrough, as I always felt like I was one mistake away from complete disaster. This is the real genius of the game, which sets it apart and happily raises the stakes.
The tension and fine balance of keeping a society together when they're on the brink of ruin, is driven home hard in Frostpunk. It's rare that a game feels as compelling as this one, but I ran my first playthrough in a single sitting. Once I'd loaded it up for the first time, I couldn't put it down.
I haven't even mentioned the fantastic presentation of a post-industrial steam-punk English society, but hopefully the screenshots will speak for themselves. Suffice to say that the whole game looks even better in motion, which is further enhanced by excellent audio and a minimalistic soundtrack. It's pretty much what I was expecting after the beautifully depressing aesthetic of This War Of Mine, as these developers seem to know what they're doing.
There haven't been many new titles recently that have piqued my interested as much as Frostpunk, which managed to deliver on every front. It's an expansion on the genre that ups the ante on its systems and the fine balance of survival. Turns out it's a lot of fun to live in the shadow of a giant steam generator.