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Frostpunk is a city-building survival game developed and published by 11bit studios in 2018. You take on the role of a leader in an alternate late 19th-century history where you must build and maintain a city during a worldwide volcanic winter, by managing resources, making choices on how to survive, and exploring the area outside their city for survivors, resources, or other useful items.

The graphics of FrostPunk are stunning, although a tad bleak, however, I think that is to be expected for a post-apocalyptic game set in such dire circumstances. Watching your workers trudge through the snow cutting paths is really quite eerie, and the light effects when you can afford to power the buildings that create it is stunning. The buildings themselves are quite Steampunk in their design which helps add to the overall setting of the game. The music and sounds are well-executed, the sound of the cutting wind gives me chills every time I launch FrostPunk.

Should you wish to start the campaign, the game provides incredibly wellanimated cut scenes that explain how the game proceeds. There is also what is known as “Endless Mode”, which does allow you to change the difficulty of the scenarios.

The gameplay is not your typical city builder, you have incredibly limited resources of coal, steel and wood. Food is also incredibly sparse forcing you to choose how to allocate your limited number of citizens to which tasks. This is just one of many decisions that you will have to make in this frozen tundra and it is important to remember that your fellow citizens can only work during the slightly milder daylight hours. One of the first things that you need to know about Frostpunk is that it is very difficult to gain new citizens. It is not like most other city-building strategy games whereby they have more babies over the span of a few decades. As each scenario in Frostpunk takes place over the course of just under a couple of months, you will want to try and ensure that as many of your population survive as possible. There are a number of ways to boost your population count by sending out expeditions, however, this can only be done after researching the beacon and that takes more resources.

There are also heart-breaking political decisions to be made using the “Book of Laws”. Will you stretch food to make it last longer, knowing that your workers will not be happy with this decision? All of your decisions in the game affect the discontent and hope metrics, and failing to meet either of these can be cause for you fail.

There are two branches to the Book of Laws, Adaptation and Purpose. Within the “Book of Laws” you have two immediate choices with how to deal with the injured and the ill. One is to “Sustain Life” and the other is to give patients radical treatment. Both have upsides and downsides, but which will weigh less on your conscience, and which is best for the people as a whole. The effects of both of these choices can be seen

in the screenshots above. The answer is never clear cut. There are many such choices like these and the decisions never get any easier. Also, what will you do with the corpses of the dead? Throw them to the wasteland, increasing discontent and decreasing hope, or take up valuable land and resources with a cemetery? The tech tree is large and complex, with four different branches, each of which leads to better technologies and ultimately better use of resources. Each tier must be unlocked before you have access to the technologies contained therein. The decisions you make here will have a huge influence on how your city grows. This tree makes every decision really count, will you prioritise heat for your population or tech to allow you to mine coal and steel from the ground around you? Through the Book of Laws, you also gain the ability to construct different buildings, which in turn may affect

events. Like a complex “Choose Your Own Adventure” story, each adventure has decisions and consequences which can dramatically impact your population. In summary, Frostpunk is a bleak, but compelling game. I enjoyed Endless Mode, much more than the Scenarios, which I found fiendishly difficult. But that could just be that I am more used to the traditional city building game where your population grows alongside you. But I still find myself coming back to Frostpunk time and time again and the story is never the same, as each decision creates a wholly different experience. Submit your games for review and send to simmedup@gmail.com

Frostpunk 2 Release date still TBA