If you like your games depressing, but informative, then 11 bit studios is your developer of choice. This War of Mine took us to a war-torn city, making us survive amid the rubble by making hard choices. Sometimes, there were no good options, just a “less bad” option or a “pick your flavor of bad” option. It was amazing.
Frostpunk
Developer: 11 bit studios
Price: $29.99
Platforms: PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was provided with a PC code for review.
Frostpunk is their latest and it’s similar. It’s grim and dystopian—thus the “punk”—set in a world where climate change is both real and biting hard. Your chunk of humanity is clustered around a giant furnace that provides power and keeps everyone from freezing to death. That would be the “Frost” bit. Think of it as Snowpiercer minus the train.
The atmosphere is suitably grim and they’ve done an excellent job at combining a number of feelings. It’s a city builder lite in that you don’t have that much control of where things go because everything needs to be clustered around the Generator, so if you build a sprawling base with no roads, everyone will freeze.
Likewise, it’s easy to develop a rhythm of figuring out the day’s tasks and letting everyone work, then knock off when the shift is done. It’s almost like a colony game in that feel, especially when you add in The Book of Laws, which allows you to set a new mandate every 18 hours or so. These can be simple things like declaring shelters for children or sending them to the mines. Or they can completely overturn your gameplay and make the next day difficult.
Resource gathering is familiar. You need coal to keep the Generator going, wood to build things, and so on. But where it gets interesting is actually the worker management, because there are never enough hands to Do All The Things, which is what makes decisions like the child labor one particularly interesting.
Sending the kids into the Sawmill to work may free up some of your adults to hunt for food in the frozen wastes or research better methods of resource extraction. On the other hand, it may absolutely infuriate their parents. The freeze marches relentlessly onward, too, so there’s a need to watch the temperature and chase upgrades beyond just outsmarting the Zerg or beefing up against that incoming orc rush. The cold is always in your base killing your dudes.
The other big management mechanic is “Hope” and “Discontent.” Let people think they’ll live to see the present crisis through and their hope rises. Send too many of their kids to the mines, and Discontent rises. Too much discontent and you’re exiled to a nice farm upstate to run and play and be free. At least that’s, presumably, what they tell the children when they drag them from the mines. Not enough Hope and, well, you send what remains of civilization to a nice farm upstate to run and play and be free.
If Frostpunk has a flaw, it’s that all the numbers can be pretty transparent and it’s easy to fall into a rhythm like with life simulators or other, more static games where you make a few decisions and press Next Turn, then see what happens. The other big issue is that because you’re balanced so precariously on the edge of the knife, there’s also a tendency to play conservative lest you lose everything. Making hard choices usually has a punch in the gut payoff of some kind. Making moonshot/high-risk choices has no incentive whatsoever.
There’s also no apparent randomization to things like the laws you pass and their outcomes, so after you’ve been through it a time or two, you develop an idea of what buttons to push and levers to pull to keep people happy while oppressing them just enough to be productive.
Make it to endgame and you have to live with what you’ve done, and there’s little in the way of happy endings, if you’d consider that a flaw. I’m more considering it a warning, but I like my games as grim and bleak as my cold, black heart. In that aspect, Frostpunk excels. It’s in little atmospheric touches. Ice and snow seems to spatter and run down the lens of your camera. The wind feels suitably bleak. The flimsy sides of colonists’ tent flutter helplessly against the onrushing cold. The furnace can be a beacon of hope to those outside or an ominous warning that the hellish Mordor you’ve built is the only thing worse than the cold.
The Final Word
If you want some amazing, bleak, and depressing world-building, Frostpunk is definitely your jam.
MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
