Frostpunk made a name for itself in 2018 when the designers took a simple icey base builder and gave it higher stakes, aesthetics and intent than other games. It was a short game but brought an immense amount of depth. Frostpunk 2 aims to expand and get players back to that concept through a system that presents players with more significant stakes and risks than ever before.
But is it as noteworthy as the first game?
For those who didn’t play the original game, Frostpunk centers on the concept that the world has ended in an icey doomed blizzard in the early 20th century, forcing people to abandon their ways and seek safety. You, New London's leader, must help its residents survive a lack of food, heat and hope. The first game placed you as “Captain”, the leader who was forced to make hard decisions to keep this community alive in the first few months and years of the icey oblivion consuming the Earth. The second game is in the wake of the Captain’s reign, where you (the “Steward”) now oversee New London and must guide it toward finding a future where it can withstand the dangerous weather that has consumed the entirety of the world.
The game relies on mechanics similar to those of the original game. The steward must manage food, fuel, housing, and building components to match the community's needs. These are managed by “districts,” and each district performs a different purpose. For example, the food district produces food. There are also the new factors of “Crime” and “refuse,” aka trash.
However, you won’t have complete freedom to do what you want. You must manage the people and their views of you and your community, or you risk being voted out.
Higher Stakes, More To Consider
One of the most notable changes is the addition of the “Council” and the various factions representing varying views of the city. When you return to New London, you’ll find that the city is divided into several new factions. The New Londoners, the Frostlanders, the “Evolvers,” and a fourth faction that reflects either your commitment to Faith or Order in the original game. Each faction represents a certain percentage of city residents and thus holds a certain number of votes. If the Steward wants to pass a law, it must now be approved by at least 51% of the Council.
This is where you, as a player, must get creative. Only some laws are quickly approved. That means that you can either roll your dice to see if you’ll get the votes or negotiate with the factions. Each faction has principles that they’ll emphasize, and those principles influence what laws or research they want to be completed. For example, the Frostlanders (Who believe in living off the land rather than advancing technologically) may want you to use moss as a filter to minimize refuse, while the New Londoners think that it is a necessary risk since the technology is key to survival.
You, as the Steward, have to do all you can to keep all of the factions happy. If you don’t, their fervor may increase and that can lead to violent actions against you and the city. If it gets bad and trust declines to an all-time low, you could face being voted out.
Add in complicating factors like shifting populations, a diminishing fuel supply, whiteouts, a growing need to innovate and you have a game that is complicated and stressful.
Mostly solid gameplay, but graphically demanding
I only recently got a chance to play Frostpunk, a decision that I regret, considering the amazing aesthetics and storytelling mechanics of the game. So getting to return to Frostpunk 2 was a delight. The mechanics feel familiar to any Frostpunk veteran, and the aesthetics maintain the dour yet determinative musical entourage that the original game included.
The game’s graphics were occasionally laggy on my gaming laptop, gameplay was clear. Placing districts was a simple task, as was managing resources. The gameplay was addictive, with the mixture of music, tasks and time demands constantly pulling me back in to play a bit more and a bit more. I did occasionally have some camera issues on the Research Tab, where my view was immediately dragged upward at launch and hiding the images at hand. The game’s graphics were also quite demanding on my PC, slowing down gameplay on the regular.
The game has toggleable difficulty settings, which can affect which parts are harder for the player. For example, a player may want to focus more on managing political interests over the economy.
The story is divided into five chapters, and I only reached chapter three by the time of my review. While the game undoubtedly operates on a macro level, it goes out of its way to help make our decisions feel meaningful on a micro level through small dialogues from NPCs in the city and via little animations.
The moral qualms feel far more complicated as well. For example, one set of research technologies allows you to replace workers with machines. That may, over time, kill a lot of your people due to injuries (Ah, the OSHA-less early 20th century.) There are even options to encourage forced breeding, have your economy driven mainly by workers or even attach badges to the sickly that may isolate them. Many of these ideas carry this social stigma with them, but that’s what the game is trying to do; to make us as players think through what we’re willing to sacrifice and risk to survive. What principles will we adhere to, and what ideas will we abandon? While I strove to balance the interests of the four factions in my singular run, I inevitably ran into a barrier where I had to embrace one faction over the other completely.
Conclusion:
The original Frostpunk presented players with a simple puzzle: what are you willing to do as a society to survive the apocalypse? Its mechanics explored this magnificently, presenting us with challenges and ideas that made us second-guess what we’d do at the end of the world. Frostpunk 2 furthers that struggle by asking, “What are we willing to do to thrive?” Will we rely wholly on technology to save us, or adapt to the brutal cold and make nature our guide? Will we be the same leader we started as at the launch of the campaign? Every player will be faced with that moral conundrum, and will have to decide what it is they value most to reach the end of that journey.
