It's still a very pretty and compelling game, and I've had a lot of fun playing it through to its conclusion across multiple scenarios. So you may think you're hearing an individual's opinion but all you're ever really presented with are the myriad opinions of a mercurial collective identity: the city itself.īoy, this is getting quite deep, isn't it? Let's rewind. And sure, you can click on individuals and see their names, family members, and current concerns but these concerns are always just large-scale issues such as "not enough food", or "not enough shelter". When those notifications appear, it's always just "a man", or "a woman". In fact, the individual doesn't really come into it at all. Because it forces you to place the collective good above the individual good at every turn, which coincides perfectly with the slogan released at the end of the Frostpunk trailer: "the city must survive". You might see these as design flaws - and yeah, you may have a point - but to me it was just fascinating to run through the implications of these systems. But since hope doesn't actually matter that much. You find this out very early when you must choose whether to sign the law forcing children to work. Which kind of undercuts many of the decisions you make over the course of a game, because often the choice can be boiled down to "higher productivity and a better city vs decreased hope and increased discontent". But as long as this doesn't happen, you're fine. The only serious consequences arise when those bars fill or empty completely, which could cost you the game.
It doesn't take long to realise that nothing much actually comes of having low hope, or high discontent. Those twin meters of hope and discontent at the bottom of your screen. But in the end, all these things are just boiled down to facts and figures - the number of sick, the number of homeless, the level of hope and discontent.Īnd that's another thing. The old man dying of frostbite, the young woman complaining loudly about the lack of shelter. It tells you about the mother who hears of this and refuses to let their own child work. Pop-up notifications tell you of the boy who injured himself while working down in the coal mines. See, Frostpunk has this pretense of focusing on the individual lives at stake. I, like many others, spent about 25% of my time giving orders to build and gather and research, and the other 75% of my time zooming in as far as the camera allowed to watch my miniature hooded citizens trudging through the snow, or clustered morosely about the central generator.īut after a while, I began to pay attention to what the game was actually doing, both to the city's populace and to me, the god-player looking down upon it all. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.įrostpunk is a very pretty game about trying to build the last city on Earth after an icy global catastrophe. Icebound Dreadnought: provides your city with 100 steel per day.Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives.Tesla City: provides Steam Cores (useful if you plan on making Automatons to work the buildings instead of sending your human workers).The Fishing Village: provides 100 raw food every two hours (also very useful during the endgame).This is especially useful in the endgame if you also have a Charcoal Kiln (which transforms wood into Coal). Winterhome: provides you with 150 pieces of wood.You can only have two outposts per city, so the other is up to you you could set an outpost in: This will get you 800 Coal every 24 hours. To make sure you'll be able to gather all the Coal you'll need, send your scouts to investigate the coal mine and set an outpost there. However, in the final storm, the temperature drops very, very low, so you'll need way more Coal than ever before. After all, this material powers the generator, buildings' heaters, steam hubs, and any Automaton you have working. If you get to this stage of Frostpunk, you'll know just how important Coal is.
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