Kurt Indovina
In Frostpunk 2, I was responsible for a growing population of desperate people, trying to forge a new life in a world that had frozen over. One of the city’s factions pleaded that I, the steward, repeal a law that would require citizens to rotate relationships in order to increase childbirth, and instead enact a law that forced mandatory marriage. By my personal morals, neither law was the right one, but I was at the mercy of my people, the communities they had built, and the radical factions that had formed from extreme ideologies. This is what they wanted. Still, my doubt outweighed their request and I denied. In turn, that faction conducted a protest that would erupt into a civil war. Chaos ran rampant, tension rose, and the trust I had forged with my people diminished. I knew this would happen. After all, it’s the fragile society I built, whether I liked it or not. After 30 hours in Frostpunk 2, to me, it was just another day as a steward attempting to mitigate the downfall of a civilization hanging on a thread wearing thin.
Frostpunk 2 is a compelling, while cynical, view of survival, and a challenging strategy game that sets itself apart from its contemporaries in the city-building genre. Did I feel good watching a city I had developed over the course of nine in-game years start to come apart at the seams, despite having a stockpile of resources to survive for years to come? No. But Frostpunk 2 taught me that I’m not supposed to feel good about it. Instead, it conditioned me to accept that, no matter my best-laid plans, unifying a society with a shared vision of the future was a fool’s errand.
Like the first Frostpunk, this sequel is a survivalist city builder that sees you managing your resources to, hopefully, thrive in a world that’s been frozen over and where fatal storms loom on the horizon, all while navigating the harrowing needs of the planet’s last known survivors. Surviving mother nature’s greatest woes is one thing, but surviving human nature is the true adversary. This means that while you build a city, you’re also building the values of society’s future, creating two distressing challenges to juggle at once. Governing the laws and vision of the future was a defining characteristic of the first Frostpunk, and what separated it from other city builders of the genre at the time–Frostpunk 2 is a natural evolution of that.
It conditioned me to accept that, no matter my best-laid plans, unifying a society with a shared vision of the future was a fool’s errand.
Taking place 30 years after the events of its predecessor, Frostpunk 2 starts with the captain dead, and the city needing to grow and go on without him. You play as a steward, less a leader like the first game’s captain, and more a mediator for the needs of the city and its people. No longer can you simply pass a law to replace food with sawdust–as a steward, passing that law means taking it to a council made up of the city’s communities where its enactment is determined by a vote.
Being made an agent between parties rather than a ruler is what makes Frostpunk 2 a significantly different experience from the first, and in doing so, makes it an excellent entry point for new players. While both games share the same values of building a city and navigating human nature by way of forming laws and societal views, Frostpunk 2 carries over very little in moment-to-moment gameplay from the first, making much of the city-building, law passing, and technological research completely new and its own.
Taking position as a mediator is itself a unique take in a genre that’s repeatedly put players in a god-like position to dictate and create. Frostpunk 2 strips that power from you, and asks you to pick sides, or in most cases, the lesser of several evils, in order to sustain a functioning society. It’s the change in power dynamic that cements Frostpunk 2’s themes best, and makes it more a meditation in accepting that you can not, and will not, please everyone. This is a theme that existed in the first, but the depth of its exploration pales in comparison to how its successor puts it at the forefront.
Trudging through morally despicable areas is familiar territory for returning Frostpunk players, whether that’s instilling child labor or allowing public executions, but Frostpunk 2 makes these choices less black and white, and expands them into grayer tones by way of complex and layered social systems.
In Frostpunk 2, you keep track of how your city is faring through trust and tension, as opposed to the first game’s hope and discontent. Trust is indicated with a bar at the bottom of the screen, while tension is depicted using a Schlenk flask that will bubble and boil as societal unrest rises. If you make too many disagreeable choices then the trust of your citizens diminishes, giving you a short window of time to gain it back before you’re exiled. The same happens if tension boils over from crime, squalor, disease, and hunger. Thing is, the basic necessities of a human’s existence, whether it’s shelter, food, or heat, are only a small facet of the myriad of other factors that determine your success as a steward in Frostpunk 2. This time, you must uphold relations with the city’s communities too.
Several communities can form in your city, each with their own set of morals, beliefs, and ideologies. While some communities will have overlapping values, each one still has a distinct view of what is best for the city. The Machinists beliefs, for example, are founded on technology being the path to a better future. The Lords, on the other hand, reject the advancement of technology and believe in upholding the traditions of life before the world fell to the ice age. The addition of communities paint a clear image of how this world has developed since the first, which gave weight to the world and its ongoing progression. If you build your city on the values of one community more than the other, then members of that community may split off to form a radicalized faction based on those beliefs, becoming an extremist borough all its own. The game features several communities, with each playthrough orienting around three at any given time. In addition, there are numerous factions that can form within each community, many of which I’m still discovering. All of them have their own influence on the choices you make to develop your city, so the level of complexity is high and the balance tricky to strike.
Shelter, food, or heat, are only a small facet of the myriad of other factors that determine your success as a steward in Frostpunk 2.
While many games often put you in a position where you can still succeed by choosing to back a sole faction, it’s not quite as cut-and-dry in Frostpunk 2. Balancing the needs and beliefs of a faction is like tending a flickering flame so you don’t set your house ablaze. Or, in this case, your city. As previously mentioned, if a faction’s views are rejected enough, they’ll protest and that will raise tension. But on the other end, if they’re favored too much, a devout cult-like following will begin to form, halting even your ability to mitigate the city’s next development. As a player, I had no tolerance in supporting a radicalized group that teetered on fascist totalitarian beliefs, but despite rejecting its proposed laws or demands, I was faced with knowing they lived among my city and sat in my council‘s chairs. It created a rigid scenario for me to navigate and, knowing outwardly I couldn’t simply banish them, I was forced to strategically play the long game in building up my own forces and prisons for when the inevitable protests began. This balance and power struggle made for exhilarating and stressful planning that got under my skin. Even when I wasn’t playing Frostpunk 2, I would be scheming on how to tackle the next challenge or planning five steps ahead while going about my daily routine.
Communities and factions are the backbone of the game’s densely interwoven systems, where every decision you make, from the buildings you erect, to the laws you pass and the ideas you research, weaves a web of permutations and possibilities. Each choice you make sets off a chain reaction that paves the way to new laws, ideas, and opportunities, as well as conflicts. Support a community that values economy and tradition, and new ideas to support those agendas emerge. However, equally, you close the door on potentially developing technology to better withstand the next harsh storm. Understanding how it all interlocks together is a steep learning curve that took me the entirety of the game’s 15-hour story, but once understood, the game’s impressive overlapping system of consequences is fully revealed, and opens up a tremendous amount of opportunity for experimentation that kept me coming back for more, no matter how sad this game can at times make me feel about humanity.
Every decision you make is put into context thanks to micro-stories that arise while you overlook your growing metropolis–a returning feature from the first. After a law was passed that proposed that all mothers don’t work to instead raise their children as their sole responsibility, I was prompted with a choice from an angry husband who found out she spent her free time writing a novel. Either I destroyed the novel and increased relations with the communities that supported the law, or let her keep it, slightly raising the trust meter among the population. I let her keep it, and eventually I learned she finished it, and dedicated it to the steward. There’s several of these tiny stories that pop-up, grounding you in the choices you’re making and forcing you to look at the repercussions of your actions, for better or worse. It constantly feeds into the chain of events, and cause-and-effect of how the game is designed, and that shows even in its city building.
Building something as necessary as a research center to develop your city’s ideas requires a series of actions, including breaking the ice to create a suitable foundation, building a housing district, and then expanding that district to enable a building slot in which you can place a research center. And each action requires a workforce and resources to fulfill. Building a hospital, for example, requires the idea to be researched, which can be done by any one community (which in-turn supports their ideologies), and that also requires the housing district to be expanded again before actually building the hospital. This is a small glimpse at the many variables of interconnected hurdles to manage and think ahead about. It can feel head-swelling, but as I came to understand Frostpunk 2’s interconnected systems, it was equally inspiring to approach the cascading set of possibilities and maximize my strategy. It’s that complexity, as head spinning as it can feel, that makes Frostpunk 2 an excellent sandbox for strategy.
Similarly, the staggering amount of laws to explore and the process in passing them requires careful consideration. Taking a law to council will see you navigating each community and faction, the process for which can vary based on the variables of your playthrough. At one point in my playthrough, passing a law meant negotiating between three communities and two factions at any given time. There are dozens upon dozens of laws split up between four categories–survival, city, society, and rule–with three sub-categories and several proposals in each one. It’s a lot. Even with dozens of hours in-game, I’ve yet to explore or see them all. Each law has its own effect, whether it’s requiring the sick to quarantine (which increases shelter demand), or making the sick wear a badge that identifies them as “infectious” (which raises tension). Both laws support a different community’s values, and enacting the one you think is best requires negotiating with undecided parties.
Negotiating, in of itself, carries its own burden, as it requires making a promise to an undecided community. These promises can come by way of proposing a law they want, or even repealing one that currently exists. Or maybe it means simply paying them off.
There is a lot going on in Frostpunk 2, and it involves navigating a lot, and I mean a lot, of menus, as well as blocks of text to digest all of its rules and systems. It took me hours to confidently maneuver through the many menus within menus, which are a necessity to the game’s layered design. It’s hard to view it as a criticism, as I think its menu navigation is a best-case scenario, all things considered, but I can see it being a barrier of entry for some players, even returning ones.
To Frostpunk 2’s credit, it does a good job of including text boxes and expandable tutorials over nearly every significant prompt and decision, which alleviates a lot of going back and forth by arming you with clear information and context. Even still, there are a number of occasions where I was prompted that I couldn’t enact a specific building’s perk, like rolling out guards for a protest, without having passed a specific law, and the game didn’t tell me where that law was located among the many tabs of other laws, or what it specifically did. A link directly to that law would have been a nice quality-of-life feature to alleviate some friction. I did eventually find where that law was, but it came too late after having spent resources on another solution to the problem at hand.
It can be easy to get caught up in the minutia of navigating politics and making sure your city has all it needs to thrive; watching its streets flicker to life as it grows into a steampunk metropolis from a bird’s-eye view. Between all the law-passing and stressful decision-making, expanding your metropolis is a rewarding achievement made tangible through a visual feast. Frostpunk 2 evolves one of the first’s most distinct traits, and that is its unrelentingly dour and gray aesthetic. Frostpunk 2, while still chilling to the bone to look at, adds a much needed dose of color to its buildings, giving each district its own aesthetic, whether it’s the housing district coated in blue paint, or the green brushed onto the industrial food extraction districts. It all gives an extra layer of personality, which is especially welcomed since you’re able to zoom into a district, where you can occasionally spot some of your workers making snow angels. Details like this add the smallest glimpse of needed levity to a world that otherwise feels so depressing.
Exploring the frostland–the frozen land beyond your city limits–has also received some upgrades from the first, as now finding resources requires building connecting trailways back to your city. It also adds opportunities to set up additional colonies, which act like miniature versions of your city from which you can transport goods (just in case managing one city wasn’t difficult enough). It’s a necessary challenge as resources around your city–like coal, food, and materials–only provide enough to get your city started. It’s imperative to explore the frostland to thrive and survive, but unlocking more areas of the overmap can get bogged down by a camera that doesn’t zoom out enough to get the full lay of the land. Navigating the frostland and keeping track of outposts and planning ahead for future expeditions was accompanied by what felt like unnecessary stress due in part to its camera, making an already dense and convoluted game harder to manage.
After the credits rolled, I realized that there was still so much I hadn’t quite understood, and that’s only a side-effect to the nature of the game’s intricate design. It’s in Utopia mode, the game’s endless mode, where its replayability and experimentation take full form. It’s here where you can try your hand at developing a city in different scenarios of varying sizes and resources, whether that’s to expand out into the frostland or create a heavily populated metropolis. The game also has spectacular difficulty customization, allowing you to change the variables of economy, weather, frostland, and society, making it a dream to tailor your experience how you see fit. Though I completed the story in 15 hours, I’ve doubled that in Utopia mode alone, and have several experiments of different difficulties and scenarios happening across several save files.
Frostpunk 2 doesn’t replace the first game. Instead, it elevates its rawest themes of human nature to towering heights. It offers a significantly different challenge in its city-building that allows both games to exist in separate sectors of the genre, and it’s better for it.
Developer 11 Bit Studios continues to follow a theme with each consecutive game, starting with its breakout success This War of Mine. With Frostpunk 2, 11 Bit Studios has built its systems and mechanics around asking you to make inconceivably difficult choices, most of which only lead to the best-case scenario, not the right one. Frostpunk 2 is a great step forward in both studios’ evolution and the survival/city-building genre it helped pioneer.
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