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 must build and maintain a city in harsh conditions. You will develop humanity’s last stronghold, buried in the ice. You’ll need not only to gather resources and construct new buildings, but also to keep the people in good spirits as they suffer from hunger, cold, and government pressure.

Frostpunk is a real-time city-building strategy game with management elements, set in a steampunk world. It was developed by 11 bit 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, keep their homes warm, and make many difficult decisions along the way.

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 who are unhappy with your decisions. Excellent graphics, beautiful effects, and high-quality textures help create an immersive experience.

Frostpunk has no endless game 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 main story, an ice age began in the world at the end of the 19th century. Snow covered continental Europe and England, and even major cities froze over. To survive, people used steampunk technology to travel to the Arctic, rich in wood and coal, where they built enormous boilers to heat their new settlements.

The details vary from there: one scenario simply asks you to survive, while another gives you the important goal of saving all plant life from extinction, and so on. You can complete each scenario in different ways, making opposite choices along the way. This makes the game replayable.

In the Arctic, the player has a small area available for construction, surrounded by a wall of ice. A steam generator stands in the center, spreading heat to nearby homes. A few resources are available nearby, and you can get more by opening mines and factories.

The player is not trapped in this “pit,” though. You can send expeditions in different directions across the game world, find additional quests that shed light on what happened to the planet in Frostpunk and how people tried to survive, encounter dangers, and take in refugees.

The main priority is the survival of the people, so you must provide them with shelter, food, warmth, work, and entertainment. You can choose from around thirty types of buildings, some of which require rare, non-renewable resources. You will have to choose whether to build several less efficient buildings or one more efficient building at the cost of a rare resource.

Harsh conditions will require you to pass new laws, and not everyone will approve of them. It is very important to maintain the people’s loyalty and hope. Otherwise, they will literally throw a bad mayor out into the cold, or run away themselves, deceived by their own fantasies.

In Frostpunk, you have to manage things constantly: move workers around, build and upgrade homes, expand your storage capacity, and regulate the heat supply to the city.

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