Frostpunk

Genre: City-building Survival
Developer/Publisher: 11 bit studios
Release Date: April 24, 2018
Platform: PC
Time Played: 19 Hours

When an entire society’s survival is threatened, what sacrifices are you willing to make? Do you send the children to work in factories? Force people into twenty-four-hour shifts, knowing some may not survive? Do you heat workplaces to keep the healthy working or the medical facilities to help the sick survive? If people are hungry, will a bit of sawdust in their food make them feel more full?

I picked this up because I had a craving for a city-building game, which this is, but I found the survival aspect of this to be an interesting surprise. I’ve played through the main campaign and the first two of the four additional scenarios that are currently available. I’m taking a break now, but I could see myself coming back to those last two scenarios later in the year.

This takes place in an alternative steampunk nineteenth century. The world has already been devastated by climate change, a global cooling brought on by volcanic eruptions and, I’m assuming, human factors. In the main campaign, you are the leader of a group of hungry and freezing Londoners who have fled the city in search of a new home. There are old generators positioned around Europe that were established in preparation for an event like this, and you find one to make your home.

The base of the game is your standard balancing act of resources – gather enough wood and stone to build the structures you need to support yourself while still managing to feed and house each person. Factors will change that will prompt you to shuffle priorities. Where this really differs from other games I’ve played in this genre is needing to respond to changes in the weather. The central generator that the city is being built around is the main source of heat, which will only heat the structures fairly close to the center of the city. There are heaters for individual buildings and steam hubs for smaller areas that are available for buildings out of the range of the core generator. For heating and resource generating, they tend to give you a few options and let you pick your own path, which is always great.

Managing the temperature of buildings is incredibly important in the game. You can see what weather changes are coming, and knowing that the temperature is about to drop ten or twenty degrees in a few days when you’re barely hanging on already really invokes a sense of dread, especially on the first playthrough. Once people start to get cold, they can get sick, which in turn affects production, making it more difficult to provide medical support, and it can be difficult to bounce back from that downward spiral. Once you understand the mechanics and how important it is to research the proper heating technology early on, those drops in temperature become manageable, but man are they a shock to come across at first.

I do wish they provided information in a clearer way. For example, there doesn’t seem to be a quick way to search for buildings, so once things get crowded, you can spend a while digging through the city in search of what you want. You can find some in a roundabout way through the statistics menu if I remember correctly, but it’s not as simple as it should be. Oddly, there’s a prominent search function for specific civilians, and I’m still not sure when you’d actually want to use that. I also found it annoying that there was no indication of which buildings need to be heated. You have to make logical assumptions, never knowing if you’re right and whether people are getting sick because of it, or you have to look it up online. This information allows you to place buildings outside of the heated zone, saving valuable space for buildings that require heating, so it’s quite important.

The campaign and the four scenarios provide, I’d guess, twenty to twenty-five hours of playtime, and there’s a lot of replay here for those who want it. I found I was done with it before I finished all of the scenarios, at least for now, but I am easily distracted. It sounds like with the higher difficulties, the achievement list, and the different ways to attempt everything, this can keep you going for well beyond that.

Above everything, they nailed the tone of this game, from the visuals, which are beautiful, to the occasional story element, to the decisions you’re forced to make. The use of music is subtle but effective, dark orchestral ambience with sweeping cinematic highs. Everything contributes to the sense of foreboding and the significance of the situation.

For a genre I don’t touch that often, I thoroughly enjoyed this.