Frostpunk

Frostpunk is a city-building strategy game from the creators of This War of Mine. It tells the story of people surviving in a snow-covered world and using steam-powered technology. You’ll have to build and maintain a city in harsh conditions. You’ll develop humanity’s last stronghold, surrounded by ice. You’ll need to do more than gather resources and construct new buildings—you’ll also have to keep up the morale of a society that may suffer from hunger, cold, and pressure from the authorities.

Frostpunk is a real-time city-building strategy game with management elements, set in a steampunk world. It was developed by 11bit Studios in 2018 for PC, Xbox One, and PS4. The game is about a small settlement of people trying to survive in the Arctic cold. You must provide your people with shelter and food, as well as heat their homes, all while making many difficult decisions.

Circumstances constantly disrupt your plans, forcing you to adapt, survive, and grow despite living conditions that keep getting worse. You’ll have to redistribute resources, put children to work, and meet the demands of people unhappy with your actions. The game’s excellent graphics, beautiful effects, and high-quality textures create an immersive experience.

Frostpunk has no endless mode. Instead, it offers carefully crafted but finite scenarios, each telling the story from a different perspective. There were three at launch, and the developers added several more later.

According to the overall story, an ice age began in the late 19th century. Continental Europe and England were buried in snow, and even major cities froze over. To survive, people used steampunk technology to travel to the Arctic, rich in wood and coal, where they used enormous boilers to heat new settlements.

After that, the stories become more specific: one scenario asks you simply to survive, while another gives you the important goal of saving all plant life from extinction, and so on. Each scenario can be completed in different ways by making opposing decisions along the way, which makes the game replayable.

In the Arctic, the player has a small area available for building. It is surrounded by a wall of ice, with a steam generator at its center that sends heat to nearby homes. A few resources are readily available nearby; more can be obtained by opening mines and factories.

The player is not isolated in their “pit,” however. They send expeditions in different directions across the game world, discover additional quests that shed light on what happened to the planet in the world of Frostpunk and tell the stories of how people tried to survive, encounter dangers, and take in refugees.

The top priority is keeping people alive, so you need to provide them with shelter, food, warmth, work, and entertainment, choosing from about thirty types of buildings. Some of them require rare, non-renewable resources. You’ll have to choose between building several less efficient structures or one more efficient one, but using up a rare resource.

Harsh conditions will require you to pass new laws, whose enforcement won’t please everyone. It’s vital to maintain people’s loyalty and hope; otherwise, they’ll literally throw a bad mayor out into the cold, or run away themselves, fooled by their own fantasies.

In Frostpunk, you’ll need to manage things constantly: reassign workers, build and upgrade homes, expand storage capacity, and regulate the heat supply to the city.

Research is an important part of the gameplay: it improves people’s lives, boosts productivity, and increases the amount and speed of resource extraction. The game borrows its visual style, building designs, and programmable robot automatons from steampunk.