Frostpunk is my favourite city builder of all time. I've sunk more hours into games like Cities: Skyline, tentatively brushed with the Anno games (Anno 1800 is top on my 'game to get back into' list) but Frostpunk has stood alone as a particularly engaging experience with strong foundational systems and an awesome aesthetic. If you love stories of staunchly mustached men in the perilous North, with naught but King and country to warm them and human meat to fill their bellies, you will feel right at home. Starting as a mob of middling plebs, you will cling to the heat of the coal-powered Generator, sending half-starved men and women to gather pieces of desiccated wood and haul cold stone to erect the first hovels of New London. Not soon after, you will be confronted with the first of many choices within the Book of Laws, and will be forced to tangle with the twin resources of hope and discontent. The key is to work both in tandem whilst pragmatically considering your dedication to the survival of the city. Child labour is among the first of such decisions, an easy source of labour with an albeit minor blow to hope and rise to discontent. Throughout the game, you will be forced by dozens of these choices, and this isn't Fable, piss off enough people and they'll tear you from your balcony and send you buck-bare into the cold. It's alot of simple systems, but in tandem, they create a tense experience where resource management and the appeasement of your populace take up a near-even amount of your time, or at least 60-40.
That said, the game is not absolutely perfect. The latter half of the lifetime of your city will be plagued by the terrible decision between Order and Faith. Unfortunately, these differences are very small and basically amount to what flavour of mean you want to be, and whether you prefer your Nazis dressed in red or blue. Strict theocracy vs harsh authoritarianism should be an interesting decision, but ends up being mostly aesthetic and not presenting an overwhelmingly different way to play, not until the final parts of their respective tech trees. I also found the other game modes incapable of matching the main story, the seed vaults in particular being a chore and an easy quit after less than 2 hours. But the ability to weave survival elements within a city builder with the existential threat of ice storms reinforces a great player narrative and macro-game. There was certainly space for a sequel to refine and expand these systems, but I don't believe that 11 bit studios completely capitalised on its potential.
It is sad to see that Frostpunk 2 did not perform as well as the first. I can totally respect an artist's insistence in taking a sequel to a new direction and not replicating what had come before. Many of the greatest sequels, whatever the medium, take this big swing on a new idea and hope that the fans will follow with it. Frostpunk 2 was not one of those times. Now I have not played the sequel, which may completely undermine my opinion, but the expanded scope and political focus at the expense of the survival elements turned me off the game. In Frostpunk 1, we can zoom in to see the hobbling masses trudging through the heavy snow, marvel at the first Automatons, and watch the city fall into the icy grip of winter firsthand. Frostpunk 2's literal zoom-out from the people we are supposed to govern alienates us from this close experience with the populace, and for a game which defined itself by the morals of survival to remove us entirely from the proximity of our choices was a mistake. Seeing the announcement for a Frostpunk 1-esque sequel in Frostpunk: 1886 has made me genuinely excited, and as much as I'm looking forward to the unforgiving, closer feeling again, I struggle to not see it as an admission of defeat.
Frostpunk is my favourite type of game, where both art and mechanics intertwine and support one another. It is not just beautiful to look at, but satisfying, overwhelming and hilariously cruel in ways that most games, let alone city builders, struggle to capture.
