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Frostpunk 2
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ack in 2018, Frostpunk showed us how easy it would be to slip into tyranny, asking us to make desperate choices in an alternate history where the world had been plunged into ice. Yet for some, its bitterly difficult survival scenario raised more questions still. You didn’t have to be a tyrant, but you were always an autocrat. Would it have been possible to build something truly good or just in that world? What if the system itself were fundamentally fairer? In Frostpunk 2, the monkey’s paw curls. Here, 11 Bit puts us back in the biting cold, 30 years after the first game’s climate disaster. New London has grown vastly, no longer a huddle of tents around the leaky warmth of a generator but a city able to support thousands. The captain that led the settlement has passed, and your first move as his steward is to establish a council to give all the communities a representative vote. It’s a new world, with new challenges. Among the alterations are the types of resources at your disposal and your building methods. You’re no longer responsible for setting down every building, but instead establishing districts over a hex-based map. Extraction districts, for example, are zoned on top of resource tiles for coal, oil, prefabs and materials, while specific buildings specialise each district for output bonuses that turn the tide from desperation to surplus. Not all tiles are available to start with, though, and you have to spend resources to break through the frost a handful at a time. Combined with adjacency bonuses (and penalties) between districts, there’s a satisfying synergy game in how and when you place your tiles. One of the most important resources, however, is trust, and it’s possible to get an early Game Over if you lose a vote of confidence from the communities you govern. The first problem you must solve is a shortage of fuel by finding a coal vein, then deciding what kind of factory to build to exploit it. Here, instead of a tech tree, 11 Bit leads with an ‘idea tree’, which means communities can propose solutions to any problem, comprising new buildings and new laws. Your choice of coal mine, then, isn’t only a compromise between which is more labourintensive or which raises the risk of disease, but which idea is more popular (and whose opinion you care about).
This framework of compromise underlies everything. Outlawing child labour (or ‘childhood apprenticeships’, as it’s diplomatically phrased) is no longer an unambiguous nice thing that you weigh up against material costs of labour and shelter. No, sending children to school is actively disliked by some, and will cause arguments about what children should be taught. Broadly, there are three ideological spectrums here: whether to adapt to the cold or trust in technological progress; whether to respect tradition or be guided by reason; and whether to pursue equality or reward merit.
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Developer/publisher 11 Bit Studios Format PC (tested), PS5, Xbox Series Release Out now
Where Frostpunk was intimate, the sequel takes a bird’s-eye view, but this distance serves it just as well
BIG PICTURE
Frostpunk 2 is immediately a more zoomed-out game that demands a more macroeconomic approach. Roads and infrastructure build themselves, with heat automatically piped into whatever districts you construct, and you no longer need to match each patient to a doctor, as disease now ebbs and flows with the wellness of the city. The death bell may toll for a hundred deaths by hunger while you build housing districts to home an incoming population influx of a thousand. As you look over the city and the surrounding frost lands, and the colonies and outposts connected by golden threads, you get to see all the branches and nodes of a complex ecosystem – while any sense of the individual person has long since washed out into the snow.
However, decisions aren’t strictly either/or, and we find ourselves investing in ‘adapt’ and ‘evolve’, for example, by picking laws and buildings that align with both. Each community holds one of these ideals, and factions (smaller, potentially more radical groups) will span all three, meaning they have strong opinions about everything that can become a stonewall. This is where compromise comes in. If there’s a law you want to pass, and opposition against it, do you negotiate with more moderate naysayers and promise them something else? Or do you strengthen the faction on your ‘side’ with bribes? Or take the dangling offer of renewed despotism and centralise authority around yourself? Smartly, these ideologies lack easy real-world analogues, which makes it more interesting to engage with questions without reacting by reflex, even as divisions become extreme. The religiously aligned Faithkeepers, for instance, value both Tradition and Equality, which means holding that everyone should be unionised and paid equal wages in the workplace – except mothers, who should be at home. Whether it’s compromising your vision or your own ideals, then, there’s no uncomplicated route through New London. Nor is there even a linear one, as laws that have been passed can be revoked, and you can backtrack to alternate research choices at any time. It all makes Frostpunk 2 feel like a deeply reactive game. Likewise with resources, it’s easy to tell from the UI whether you have ‘enough’, ‘not enough’, or ‘enough for now’, but the hard numbers are so large as to be unintuitive. Tens of thousands of coal or oil units will last weeks, but that can mean minutes in realtime, and may change as soon as the temperature goes down or the population booms. And where the first game saw your situation become increasingly dire, Frostpunk 2 has your resources competing against your need for growth. You’re not simply putting out fires, but anticipating the next season, and continuous expansion. Stability lasts moments, and that uncertainty creates the need to keep looking for the next thing. The coal vein that provides power in your first year will be woefully inadequate by year two, so you have to push into the surrounding wilds to find more coal or oil, or to build outposts that supply food and materials when your resources run dry. Where Frostpunk was painfully intimate, the sequel takes a bird’s-eye view, but this distance serves it just as well. When you’re the only person who can see the overlapping factors leading to disease, squalor and cold, and the complex steps to unravel them, you’ll know when someone is offering you half a solution, and when those patchworked halves are causing tensions to boil. Over the length of its five-part campaign, Frostpunk 2 demonstrates that it doesn’t only have new mechanical tricks for the survival city builder, but explores uncomfortable questions about whether you can 9 ever build a fair world. Fair, it asks, for whom?