Frostpunk
All that glisters is very cold
ALT-HISTORY STEAMPUNK city building? We’re there. Prospective metropolitan planners should beware, however, because Frostpunk isn’t quite the chilly SimCity it might at first appear to be.
For a start, there’s that name. It tells us nothing, apart from that things are frosty. The story goes that, in the 1800s, Earth froze over. One group of survivors set out from London, UK, and established a new city, huddled around a coal-fired heat generator, inside the sheltering walls of a crater. This didn’t stop the temperature regularly falling to -40 C, nor constant snowfall building up on the roofs.
As the captain, or supreme dictator, of this new settlement, believed to be the last city on Earth, it’s your job to keep everybody alive. You start out with 40 homeless citizens and a single steam boiler to keep them warm, but both these figures rise over the course of the game. You begin carrying out the usual city building and management tasks—constructing houses, gathering resources—when the game hits you with a question. Do you want to make children work?
Obviously, as a 21st century, relatively civilized person, the answer would be “no.” But you’re from Victorian London, a place where children regularly carried out chimney cleaning and industrial work, for which their small hands were perfect, even if it meant losing a finger or two. Of course you’re going to put them to work. At least you’re given the option of not sending them into the most dangerous jobs. This is the future of humanity you’re safeguarding here, after all. COLD COMFORT Frostpunk requires, at times, for you to be as cold as the wind that blows more snow into your crater. It’s a trait the game has inherited from its developers’ previous work, ThisWarofMine, in which the ugly consequences of your actions were not shied away from. Frostpunk is the same. Make poor, or at least unpopular, decisions and you’ll have a riot on your hands. Be seen as a benevolent ruler, and a group of disabled people and amputees will offer to work in your cookhouse if you fashion them basic prosthetics. The fact that you have to refuse through lack of research and resources is just too bad.
Teams of scouts, sent out into the wider wilderness to scavenge for supplies and look for more survivors, are your only contact with the outside world. Losing a team that’s laden with booty before it can make its way back to your city is a punch in the gut. Setting your municipality on the road to fascism by enacting laws designed to promote public order and keep the red Discontent bar from filling is something you think about long after you’ve stopped playing. The gradual progress of the blue Hope bar, on the other hand, soothes your panic, and makes you feel that just maybe you’re going to come out of this OK.
It’s not a difficult game, as long as you stay on top of the need for constant resources, and it’s beautiful to look at— the trudging of your citizens through chest-deep snow and the spindly legs of the Dishonored- like robots you construct to automate production contrast nicely with a game that’s mostly shades of white, gray, and orange. And unlike many city management games, it has a defined ending, with no endless mode. What it is, however, is difficult to forget.
Frostpunk
CHILLY Moral decisions resonate; intricate graphical style; not very difficult to finish.
SILLY Road building is awkward; occasionally not clear how to achieve goals.
RECOMMENDED SPECS 3.2GHz quad-core CPU; 8GB RAM; GeForce 970, Radeon RX 580, or equivalent, with 4GB of VRAM.
$30, http://frostpunkgame.com, ESRB: M