Frostpunk (2018)

Article: Frostpunk Review - A Frigid, Unrelenting Survival Success

Score Report: 8.75 / 10

"Rarely does an interactive experience keep me awake at night wrestling with big decisions. Frostpunk did this on multiple occasions and made me feel squeamish when forcing edicts upon society instead of building consensus. Extraordinary circumstances call for desperate measures, and all I can do is ask for forgiveness from those trampled by my headstrong approach."

• Matt Bertz

I was told this game has been used quite a lot in classrooms, as it explores the themes of ethical choices, politics, and has a nice storyline in English. This can probably work, but I found it to be a quite mediocre city building game, not very much out of the ordinary. I am not a teen anymore, though.

A cool part of the game was the endgame, and how the game said what would happen in advance. The graphics, and the way the storyline was told, were also quite beautifully done.

What I found less appealing, was the "Book of Laws", where the normal city building operations got intertwined with a deeper political dynamic with laws to execute in the city: "choices" on which direction I would lead in; Faith or Force. The idea is good, but I barely used it and it had a very little say in my game. Here I would prefer it had a larger say in the game, and it would be nice if it was vital to win it.

Also, outside the city building, there is an opportunity to explore the outskirts of the city. I found this also to be quite half-baked - and it never really got to anything, and there was not really much choices to be made.

Last, I got a bit confused about the timeframe. It had days and nights, with no working at nighttime, for example. That was quite neat. But then they had research facilities that used 2 days to research steam engined steel factories, and 6 hours to build them. I would prefer if they had solved this clock issue differently.

All in all a nice sitting. I think Steam told me I used about 16 hours.

i kept seeing this on sale and then realized it was already in my gog library. i like the narrative conceit of "snowpiercer: the game" and especially the way that it makes scenario-based challenges stem organically. beyond the plain mechanics, but i find the law mechanism to be a bit heavy handed. i think it's sort of clear from the outset that "sacrifices need to be made" but it would probably be more interesting for people to codify laws based on your administrative malfeasance than for you to propose, say, child labor, and then let the city run with it. that said, even trying to play morally, i only lasted a week before getting sent away.

fun, but it really chugs away on my m2 macbook air in ways that seem unrelated to any specific graphics settings. will probably give it a few more tries but might just have to try on pc.

Frostpunk is a pretty straight forward traditional city builder with ressource management and problem solving. It's rather its tone and setting that make it unique in its own way. The harsh post-apocalyptic surroundings, snow covered steam machines and politically narrated tech trees of revolution and authoritarianism blend in into what the game itself set out to create as 'frostpunk'-genre, correspondant to other xy-punk retrofuturism styles.

The whole mix works well and is fun for one play through, i. e. 10 hours.

Now, this game fits my mood for 2 reasons:

1. Winter is coming soon and I live in Ukraine. Last week, russian missle strike caused a blackout (no water, heating or mobile network connection) for almost a day here. Got me thinking "what if this happens during the winter and our engineers don't repair everything in one day? That would be cold and tough."
   So I decided to play the game about dreading the upcoming cold times, while dreading the upcoming cold times.

2. I recently resigned from my job due to burnout.
   And to my surprise, this game relies heavily on pushing people to work overtime, and than using various bullshit workarounds to manage their discontent, so they don't quit on you.

3. And as a bonus, in the lategame it, not so gently, nudges you into totalitarian politics. You don't have to pass oppressive laws, but they sure make the game easier.

I saved majority of the people, but I didn't know how much resources I'll need to survive the coldest days, so I always tried to "max out" my production and that required some tradeoffs.

In the end the game gave me the quote:
‘The city survived. But was it worth it?’

Maybe I'll try another playthrough one day to get a better ending.

The world has basically frozen solid, and most of humanity has perished. The game feeds you a few very intriguing scraps of story, sometimes with a demand or a decision attached, but that’s frosting. The main thing is you trying to make the best out of what you have, while the environment shows you just how little that accomplishes.

The world building sprinkled through is excellent and puts a very unique spin on a couple of steampunk tropes. The art direction is great: the city and the encompassing ice are rendered in exquisite detail, and the splash screens telling the story of the different scenarios feature some very evocative art. The sound scape is sparse, but very appropriate and very well realized. The UI is mostly excellent, with a couple of minor flaws.

Who is this game for? People who enjoy making decisions under pressure and optimizing the crap out processes. And if they like a bit of great apocalyptic storytelling and social experimentation, all the better.

Playtime: 6h29m

Intro

Frostpunk is a PBS (pause-based strategy game) in which you build up a city in the far north. You have to gather resources, research technology, pass laws, explore the area and keep your people alive and happy.

The Good

• Unique setting.
• Scouting locations is interesting.
• Resource management works reasonably well.
• The scripted events are entertaining.
• Some of the laws are amusing.
• You can be a total dick to people - even to kids (yay!).

The Bad

• It's a survival game with arbitrary requirements. You need enough steel to build two houses to... research hospital checklists?!
• You can easily miss out on getting an outpost that produces the only resource you can't gather (steam cores). Seriously, wtf.
• Worker management sucks, you can't even specify not to assign sick people (who can't work) to buildings.
• Most of the buildings are just straightforward upgrades.
• Automatons don't always work and sometimes take hours to go to a workplace.
• Even with dozens of unemployed building stuff, even roads, can take far too long.
• Lack of autopause means you constantly have to monitor cooldowns on a bunch of buildings (overtime, foreman, patrol, propaganda, roundup, etc.).
• Basically the only difficulty is storing enough coal for cold snaps.
• You can screw yourself over by following a main quest right away (speeds up The Storm).
• Your people are morons who are so tiny on your screen that you don't care for them at all.
• Why the freaking hell would you move north when the planet gets colder? WHY?!

Conclusion

Like i've said before, survival games suck. There's no flexibility. You need the exact right amount of resources. You can't, say, burn wood instead of coal in your generator. Or use steel instead wood for parts of a house. Or whatever. This rigidity always reminds you that you're just playing a game.

Frostpunk is interesting for a while but after 6,5 hours i've done most main quests, explored all locations, upgraded most of my buildings to the highest level, nearly maxed out hope, removed all discontent and have enough resources for several days. I'm only halfway through the game apparently (day 24) and i've done most of the interesting content. Now i just have to trudge through to the end? Meh.

You have just become the leader of a small community, it is now up to you to make it beautiful and prosperous. Have fun! That's the pitch for most city builders, but Frostpunk isn't most city builders. In this game you are assigned leader of a settlement of refugees around a heat generator. The world has cooled down significantly and now this way of living is the only way to survive.

Over the course of the game you go from building simple shelter for your people to fully scaling up industrial work with coal mining and steel production. You do all this while the temperature keeps dropping.
Death looms everywhere and in order to protect your people from the elements you will have to make some tough decisions. One of the ways, other than erecting buildings, of controlling the outcome of the scenario you are playing, is passing laws. The first legislative decision you are faced with is weather or not you want to institute child labour, and things don't get better from there on. Eventually you get to choose between a legislative path of Faith or Order. If you follow either path to its end, your society will either end up an abusive religious cult, or a totalitarian dictatorship. Undoubtedly, For 11 Bit Studios this is a reflection on the centres of power (historic and contemporary) in their home country, Poland. But it is also so much more than that.

Frostpunk expertly examines the role of authority within the city builder genre. The game shows you the immediate consequences of your actions. It does this firstly by only giving you only a few people to control. At most it is going to be a few hundred, so if any one of them dies, gets sick, or leaves, you will feel that.
Secondly Frostpunk shows the immediate consequences of your actions, by presenting you with tough choices that you have to make. Food is scarce and in a panic over the state of the world some of your people steal food from the cities stockpiles. What do you do? Banish them and send them to almost certain death, or leave it be and take the hit to your popularity, as the thieves go unpunished?
The game puts you in front of a lot of choices that you don't want to make, and yet, you are in the driving seat. It puts you in a moral bind by allowing you actions that will make the game technically easier to beat, but are highly questionable. How far will your legislative actions go when it comes to controlling the populace? A neighbourhood watch? A prison? A propaganda centre? Public executions?
If you play this game with morals in mind, eventually there is a point where you don't want to pass laws any more, which stands in stark contrast with your average city builder where you are always trying to min/max the game's systems to build your dream city. Frostpunk shows you the logical end conclusion that a game like SimCity would take if it happened in the real world.
The game also examines the nature of leadership itself. A lot of things that happen in the game's various scenarios can't be predicted on a blind playthrough. There will always be people that you will have to leave behind. Technically you can be the perfect leader of your society: everyone is cared for, nobody dies, and you don't devolve into some kind of violent autocracy on the way. However, the amount of foresight necessary to do so, pretty much requires that you have either played the scenario before, or have consulted a guide. It feels like cheating either way. This makes the player question their own role in the society they are building, maybe even asking why their position is necessary in the first place. It's a work of genius.

Frostpunk plays surprisingly well on console. It is unfortunate however that I had to seek out the console version, because the PC version kept crashing on me during some scenarios. The game does auto save every in-game day, but a lot can happen during this time. It is also unfortunate that the console release is second class, when it comes to getting additional content. As time of writing, multiple scenarios available as DLC on PC, aren't available on console.

Besides from multiple time-limited scenarios with a tightly designed narrative, Frostpunk also features an endless mode, where you can build a city within the ice to your liking. This is the only part of the game that doesn't work in my opinion. Mechanically this game was clearly built for the time-limited scenarios, and in endless mode all the stakes are removed. Usually I would say, just don't play this part of the game and it would be fine, but I feel like endless mode cheapens the rest of the game's focused messaging simply by association. It feels like there were some tensions going on between the developers, of on the one side wanting to build a clever meta-commentary on a game genre and on the other just wanting a generic city builder with an edgy twist. Or maybe they felt like they owed the players a more generic city builder experience on top? I don't know, but I think it's unfortunate.

As a whole, Frostpunk is a gripping experience that I would recommend to everyone. It will give you lots of things to think about and has a lot of replay value.

In summary: 8/10

First thing I noticed in Frostpunk is that my afternoon disappeared after I installed the game.

Even tough there are sims a lot more complex with more options, this one is quite challenging and immersive at the same time. The game hooks you right at the start and I really liked the general vibe, the consequences of every bad choice etc...

The best thing is that you're still guided a bit and after a first "discovery" run it's really doable to finish the campaign.

I'll definitely give a shot to the additional content real soon

There are very few few city builders out there that give you the same feeling and experience of a "hard to watch movie" and this game exemplifies that perfectly, it is a game that wants you to suffer, to make you feel desperate and see the perspective of what it takes to do very desperate things all for the sake of survival, that is the main theme, it took me like complete resets to finally get a good city going and even then I was very cheap about it, there is an extreme trial and error to the efficiency, and this is not the kind of city builder where you can upgrade everything and max everything out (with the exception of laws, you can basically do all laws by the end of the game if you want), you need to be REALLY picky about what path you want to go towards.

Yeah if you're looking for a city builder which is calm and you feel as if you did everything right, this is not that city builder, Frostpunk is constant engagement, it is always asking the most attention of you, it feels like more of a high level RTS game in that regard than the calm chill city builder where you got a lot of time to wait the resources grind it out. You are timed on 40 days to make a high functioning well heated city, or else the STORM by the end will eliminate you completely. Basically? You have a short time to fully upgrade your heater.

My advice? You pretty much need to play this city builder as if you were speed running it, do everything as soon as possible move fast, don't waste a single second. A part of me honestly hates that, this is a SADISTIC game, it is an extremely well made sadistic game but it is a sadistic game never the less and I ask myself after beating the main campaign (where I basically hoard 5000 coal and try to make the most of it by turning the overheat on and off to live with the most I can) if I wanna suffer again.

I always think about the scouts I send out that during all of these 40 days are just sending people to my city and considering I never send my scouts back to the city I'm just imagining them seeing everything become fascist or a theocracy and be like "Woah... What happened here while I was gone", it really is funny in a matter of perspective, the days feel pretty long as a player but imagine if a city became that under 40 days, not even that, more like 15 days.

I don't fully get the title "Frostpunk" though, I mean I kinda get it, the whole premise is that it's a story of a dystopia you experience first-hand that is made to give you the perspective to be against all of this but make sense of it, thus making you against the establishment or hierarchy which would result in such a thing, that or it was just a nerdy title that saw "steampunk" and thought "oh what if we made it about ICE!", a lot of cyberpunk stories aren't that punk or involve actual punks in nature but are there to showcase a dystopia to make the viewer feel punk. If Frostpunk is a genre then I guess it's just 2 things on the top of my head which are: Frostpunk and Snowpiercer.

Total time played: 28 hours

Difficulty: Medium (Normal)

This is a cool game (literally :p). I had never played a management game this hard though. I found the learning curve really, really steep. Once you master the basics, you get to enjoy the game and stack up resources to feel your city is "thriving", which is kind of a nice feeling. However, after you know how to play it, it becomes pretty repetitive and kind of dull. BE CAREFUL: THIS GAME IS A VERY BIG TIME SINK, YOU CAN EASILY PUT HOURS AND HOURS ON IT WITHOUT REALIZING.

PROS

• Great UI and game mechanics for a management game in consoles
• The story is great, you face hard choices every time and you kind of get attached to your town and people.
• The music is great, I loved it.
• The atmosphere overall is awesome, it keeps this feeling of extreme cold around you every time. There's always this gloomy feeling in the city, people are never happy.
• The decision making and two different paths between "Order" and "Faith" are quite nice and give each different approaches to the game mechanics.

CONS

• Really steep learning curve (I had to do like 5~6 play-throughs to finally beat the first scenario successfully.
• Once you get on top of the learning curve, the game becomes kind of dull and you just feel like you already know what's going to happen (it all comes down to predicting events and preparing for theme a couple of days before they happen)
• Because of the "circumference-like" grid, the city can get messy, real quick.
• Texts are really small and there's no option to make it bigger. It's tiring to play on TV, you definitely rather playing it on a monitor or a screen not more than 1 meter away from you.

I liked it, but not enough to trophy chase. Looking forward to the DLC's if they ever come out, will probably do them :)

COOL SHOTS

An automaton, this little guys will save your life!

--

A big city really fucked up and frozen

-- A big city with 600 people, hard to keep up at this rate!

I found this game awfully addictive but also time-consuming. There is a general satisfaction making really tough decisions: Should I turn on the heat or turn it off to save some coal? Do I want child laborers when I'm short on workers? Should I abandon the sick or try to get them back home?

Unfortunately, about 4 hours in the first scenario, the game puts these arbitrary requirements such as researching a specific technology or stockpiling enough resources. If you didn't strategize that way you're kind of screwed and most likely will need to restart an earlier save. Also I fast-forwarded most of the latter half of the campaign to wait until I could research a technology or build a specific structure.

edit November 2018

You know what? I can't stop thinking about this damn game. As a free-play scenario has recently been released, I'll be returning to Frostpunk, which means rejigging this review.

But first of all, we're cranking this to four stars. I've added a star for the soundtrack alone - one of the best I've ever experienced in game OR movie.

More edits to come once I've delved into some free-play.

original review

Frostpunk is a visually beautiful city-building game. A unique concept carried through quite nicely in terms of design, dialogue, and world-building.

And that's about where my praise of it stops.

See, I racked up hours on this game quite quickly, and for the first time in my life, I feel like I won't get those gaming hours back. Usually I don't mind wiling away three hours on Banished, or mucking about in the Forest for an entire day. But Frostpunk? You can easily sink a couple of hours into a city, only to be told by a pop-up box that the computer has done the maths and your city won't survive the next event it has scheduled. You get a cutesy cut-scene of your character being booted from the thankless city, and then returned to the menu screen.

Rage inducing. Annoying.

At least give me the satisfaction (?) of seeing my city freeze over because I prioritised people keeping limbs over stockpiling coal. Let me realise that I should've built resource depots to stock extra food, instead of reassigning my cooks. This is how people learn - a pop-up box appearing over what appears to be a healthy, functioning city does not deliver the lesson.

The difficulty of the achievements is not just reward for what you have to suffer through to get them, and the game expects you to just get some things; I was alt-tabbing a lot to consult the Steam community.

In conclusion, a pretty way to waste hours you won't get back. My recommendation would be to let Frostpunk hang out on your wishlist until a) it is very much on sale and b) you've just ended up with a bunch of disposable time.

Otherwise, just go do some laundry. It's cheaper and much more rewarding.