Never heard of Frostpunk, how’s the game?
It’s a “survival city builder,” so it’s easier to lose than most. It has some serious style and in the first game has some tough decisions between doing what’s humane or doing what benefits you mechanically. As an example, for dealing with the dead you can create a cemetery where the dead can be remembered, reducing the malus to the hope of your people when someone dies. Alternatively you can create a snow pit out in the cold to preserve the bodies for organ harvesting, healing the sick faster and preventing some deaths but reducing hope overall.
I’m biased because I’ve played the first game for over 200 hours, but if it’s on sale definitely give it a try if you think the art looks cool or like city builders. It’s best played in winter when it’s already cold outside. I first played it during the polar vortex a few years back and it was awesome feeling the cold creep into my room as I tried to keep the cold from taking my people.
I’ve also played two playthroughs of Frostpunk 2 the last week and it feels like a larger scale escalation of the first game. If you play the first game enough you learn build orders and what to research first which can become rigid, the sequel feels a lot more fluid in deciding what to build toward next. A law or building has a smaller impact overall but there are enough of them that it feels like building a house of cards that you hope can weather the literal storms that hit you.
What this post doesn’t tell you, dear reader, is how Frostpunk will kick you in the dick repeatedly and you’ll learn to like it. It is a fascinating and difficult game, and not one to take lightly if you struggle separating digital game characters from real life empathy.
It’s relentlessly bleak and cruel but fun and entertaining at the same time (at least the first one).
It’s also really not all that hard once you figure out what’s most important to grow the city.
The new one is more focused on the district level though right? IE you’re not building around the generator, just where to build new generators, mines, etc?
Yes, instead of building individual houses and mines for a few hundred people, you build districts for thousands of people. Instead of heat levels per district, there are five “bad things” that have levels, food, sickness, cold, squalor, and crime. If you don’t produce enough of something like heat from coal/oil the cold level will start to rise to different levels depending on the percentage of the need met (if you make 1/4 the heat demanded, it gets really high). Each level affects other problems, so high levels of cold leads to higher sickness, high levels of sickness reduce the number of available workers, which makes it harder to keep housing districts running, which you need to keep enough shelter or else cold levels rise more.
There are also multiple ways to solve the issues this causes. If you can’t find or exploit a new source of heat yet, you could build hospitals in housing districts to counteract the increase in sickness and keep that level low, preventing sickness, or you could pass a law like family apprenticeship that increases the percentage of your population that can be used as workers (kids helping their parents) so you can afford more people being sick. You could also shut down some material or food production to save heat demand or workers, but then you need to have big enough stockpiles to survive the deficit, or you might be dealing with hunger from food shortages (which increases sickness by the way) or crime from material goods shortages.
And the worse things get, the blacker the edges of the screen get as tensions rise, trust falls, and your own hope outside the game wavers, which get’s really intense. But that only makes it all the sweeter when that one district, building, or law you needed finishes and you see that beautiful word while hovering over the problem killing you; “diminishing.”
I think I went on a bit of a tangent there, but I have really been enjoying my time with the game so far. The one issue I have is the game chugs right now. On an RTX 2080S I have the resolution down to 1080p and framerates still hover around 40. Maybe it’s my CPU, but by the end of my last game building one mega metropolis even the music was skipping repeatedly as the game tried to keep up. I do really hope they make it run better going forward.
It’s currently free on psplus so I wanna try it. I’m always iffy on those games cause just learning the mechanics can take so long and I just wanna play already
For some reason I always thought it was an fps that takes place on trains…I’ll check it out now because I like city builders.
Maybe some mental mixup with Snowpiercer, which does take place on a train surrounded by snow?
Yeah that’s probably it. I haven’t seen Snowpiercer and was mixing the two up.
I’ll admit, I’ve kept no interest in the game or its sequel because the concept just sounds depressing. Similar to Dark Souls’ plot; “Life sucks, you accomplish nothing more than survival, and innocent people die anyway.”
Frostpunk 1 is great. It is stressful and difficult and a well designed survival puzzle.
Haven’t played raft, but I can’t recommend 1 enough.
Even if you just want to chill you can easily use cheat engine to give you infinite resources and it’s still challenging and captivating believe it or not. I played through all the campaigns that way and enjoyed them all. People really need to give a shot to cheating in single player games they’re iffy about, sometimes it can create the experience you’re actually looking for
Completely agree. I played through a few times and lost each time, but wanted to see the ending of the game so I turned on cheats for extra resources and still found it difficult, but overall I was able to beat the game and enjoyed it! Especially when life is busy, I see no issue with the occasional “cheating” in single player games to get the experience you want!
It’s a tedious city builder, if you like that kind of thing.
It is the exact opposite of that. Easily the best paced strategy game in years. This thing moves. It flows. If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.
It’s really, really good.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.
If Anno had somehow managed to channel the narrative of Snowpiercer and the compulsive clicky crunch of Clash of Clans it would be this.
Depending on how you read it, that explains why FP1 did not have the staying power nor depth nor draw of Anno. 😛 Still enjoyed playing through it once, but as far as best-paced goes, I don’t think the granted-much-newer Against The Storm can be beat in that regard, successfully managing to remove the rote nature of most long-tail city building from the genre - even FP1 sadly has that, more on account of how shallow its underlying systems are though, not that the campaign is done too long.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve promised mutually exclusive things to a bunch of council members and I have to somehow navigate a multi-party system without being forced to use the elderly for food.
This is kinda what I mean, actually. FP1 sells its narrative and atmosphere and story super well, even if once you try the waters, it becomes painfully obvious stuff like that is just a story-cover draped over a very rudementary core. These decisions are trivial in their nature and effect even as they sell themselves as being sweeping. The core directional decision sounds gruesome, but never truly amounts to much mechanically, so it peels off pretty quickly, too.
Either way it’s just about maxing your tree depth so you essentially “beat” the game as people no longer become unhappy, and then optimize grid layout a bit (not even much) to survive the ending.Don’t get me wrong though, FP1 was fun to play. In hindsight it’s a mediocre city builder polished to an absolute gleam, which makes it “good”. I would not say it’s more than that, tbh, but then again it kinda doesn’t have to be, either.
Right now I’d say on that continuum it’s probably FP2>Against the Storm>FP1, but I need to play more FP2 to know for sure.
I mean, I will give you that Frostpunk does trade off some procedural complexity for the ability to give you narrative scenarios, but that’s not a bad thing. I am waaaay past needing every game to be an evergreen forever thing these days.
That said, if anybody is just hearing about Against the Storm now, they should go play Against the Storm. Against the Storm is also good.
Oh that’s been my new favorite tactic. I said you’d get research and a vote. I didn’t say it would be enacted or that we would build that…
I need to spend more time with it, but there is an unexpected level of nuance to that, isn’t there? You can drag your feet a LOT, and you can promise a choice on the next law to be enacted or to research a technology without comitting to it actually being deployed. Accurately conveying democracy in a game is pretty much impossible, but I do like how well they let you play the policy delay game.
Yeah, I’m really loving having only semi control.
Tedious: too long, slow, or dull; tiresome or monotonous
I think what you were going for was challenging and/or punishing. The first game explicitly has ends to each city type, and I certainly wouldn’t describe watching the city steam a man alive to get the people to tolerate you putting sawdust in their food “dull”
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Lmao okay so you had a skill issue and got salty, got it.
I finished the game perfectly fine? It wasn’t difficult? My point was that it was too easy, after all? 🤷♀️
Very pretty if i might add
I thought it was one of the most intense city builders I ever played. I love the genre, and I love this style. Pretty difficult as well.
All profit now baby!
FP1 was great
Frostpunk 2 is also available DRM-free on GOG!
https://www.gog.com/en/game/frostpunk_2Looks like the phone app Whiteout Survival ripped these guys off. I’ll have to wishlist this one.
