It could be argued that city builders are a dime-a-dozen concept, but 11 bit studios’Frostpunkreally pushed that concept to the extreme. Attempting to build a city during a volcanic winter that had all but spelled the end for mankind,Frostpunksaw players struggle to acquire resources, make key decisions for the city’s growth, and explore the frozen apocalyptic wasteland to survive the end of the world. Its story is great, the gameplay is fun, and the various scenarios ensure there was some variety in every run. Now,Frostpunk 2asks a very important question: what happens when you survive the end of the world?
Frostpunk 2picks up 30 years after this volcanic winter officially comes to an end, and while the outside world is still cruel and harsh, it’s not what it used to be. It’s more survivable than ever, but 11 bit studios has dialedFrostpunk 2well beyond eleven by turning the core enemy from nature into human nature. As the city expands and becomes a metropolis on a much wider scale, people have differing ideas for the future, and that future is one the player must shape. Game Rant recently saw about 30 minutes ofFrostpunk 2gameplay, and while it was brief, it was incredibly informative and exciting.
The game mode we saw was notFrostpunk 2’s core story mode, however, but its Utopia Builder game mode. This is essentially its endless sandbox box, and it seems likely there will be multiple scenarios to accompany this game mode. The one we saw was simply dubbed The City Must Not Fall. One of the first things players are going to notice is the much larger scale; whereas the first game was very much about generating key buildings and slowly growing the city, players are given a central hub and a huge metropolis in this one. They build entire districts inFrostpunk 2instead of buildings, which were divided into things (that we saw) such as Housing, Food, Extraction, Industrial District, and Logistics. The latter allows the city to explore and chart beyond its current confines, while icebreakers would break up entire areas of ice for more expansion. These districts serve as base layers and the basic economy for the game, which is then complicated (in a good way) by modifiers and upgrades made to them. The example shown was the Research Institute, and even in the Central Hub, players will be able to build a Council Hall.
This increase in scope impacts everything about the upcomingstrategy game. Not just the size of the city and its need for space, but how time passes; instead of days, it’s moving in weeks, months, and years. Players have to manage cold, hunger, disease, and so forth, all while the city is looking to establish what kind of society it is. Over time, factions and communities will develop within the city, and players must manage them as they would real-world politics. Our viewing started off with two distinct communities, Engineers and Foragers, with the former believing that the city’s future lies in technology and the latter believing the city should act as if another apocalypse could happen at any time and be more adaptable. Later on, those would see spin-offs: a more extremist wing of the Engineers called the Technocrats and another wing of the Foragers called Icebloods.
When asked how many factions and communities players can expect inFrostpunk 2, game co-directors Jakub Stokalski and Lukasz Juszczyk explained that they looked at schools of idea and thought dating back to the Renaissance, saw what tons of people coalesced around, and boiled them down to a playable system. Each one was adopted tothe world ofFrostpunk 2, of course, but it’s not a mash-up of random social ideas either. It comes down to heavily researched life and social systems dating centuries. The devs understandably didn’t put a number on it, but acknowledged there would be plenty for fans, as it likely matches the scope of social systems during this time and the scope of the game itself. After all, a core part of this game’s social system is the conflict that people have when it comes to ideas for the future. “One man’s utopia is another’s dystopia,” they said.
One way this manifests isFrostpunk 2’s Idea Tree, where various communities and factions offer different solutions for the city’s ongoing development and expansions. While we could not see every possible challenge, the Idea Tree listed actionable items such as efficiency, iron, goods, resources, coal, oil, geothermal, food, and transport. The core conceit of this feature is that if someone were to ask two completely different factions (or more) how to accomplish X, they would get different answers. The example given to us was abouthow to deal with fertilizer for crops: the engineers believed a chemical process would be the best solution, while the foragers (again, afraid of the next apocalypse) suggested the city use human feces as fertilizer. The devs opted for the latter, which led to a constructible building for one of the districts: the BioWaste Drum Hothouse.
This quickly spiraled out of control. While the foragers were happy, Engineers were not. The Engineers asked for this to be appealed, and if it wasn’t, then they asked us to at least treat the sewage produced by the Hothouse. Although we chose to treat the septic, it still led to our workers getting sick down the line, and the worst part is that the city was using child labor at this point. This led to us having to choose laws in regard to how children are treated within the city. To make matters worse, there are pop-ups that give insight into workers and citizens throughout the city, and one child reflecting on working around shoveling feces was not happy because he had friends who got to play. City insights know how to twist the knife, which will no doubt influence how someFrostpunk 2players build their city and their society.
This, in turn, led to the Council Hall voting on child labor in the future. Each faction had its ideals, while players could risk it all but putting it up for a vote, put pressure on these factions to swing the vote, negotiate and compromise with these factions, and so forth. For child labor inFrostpunk 2, some options we saw were to abolish it outright, to leave it up to the parents, to enroll children in schools, and other minor options that would influence factions, the city’s workforce, faction growth, and so forth. Sometimes negotiations would require the player to make certain promises to a faction, and it was made clear how difficult it could be to not overpromise things, to deliver on promises, and do the impossible of keeping everyone in the city happy. If that wasn’t complicated enough, negotiation could also lead into sublaws, change or impact other laws, or modify existing laws. Three examples we saw were how work shifts worked, how each action would modify a faction and their trust in a player, or lead to outright rolling back other decisions. Other broad categories of law options we saw came down to Economy, Society, Rule, and Survival, with what type of people this city becomes being the most important aspect of this building. And as anyone knows, somecomplexity is required for any good city builder game.
The devs would also explain that, in many ways, city-builder games likeFrostpunklead to power fantasiesbecause, regardless, players get to make and live their choices.Frostpunk 2, meanwhile, aims to force players to live with the consequences of their actions by focusing more heavily on the social elements of a city-builder; in fact, it’s perhaps better to describeFrostpunk 2as a society-builder game than a city-builder. Part of this manifests in another mechanic, briefly described as the Spirit of the Times for the city. The city, as a whole, can be pushed into a direction where technology is the answer to everything or the city could evolve into a very dutiful society, with a plethora of other options on top of that. This can also influence the other factions we mentioned earlier, but also represent which communities are minorities or majorities.
Some groups will not negotiate on certain factors because they are completely against that group’s principles, and this can lead to gnarly actions, groups gathering power, and so forth. For example, we saw Technocrats get angry and attempt to spread their influence across the city when a law was passed that they didn’t like. Players could react to that action, and how they react could determine the Technocrats' role in the city. All in all, part of this ties into thethermal meterinFrostpunk 2. The thermal meter of the first game represented the heat that was keeping the city alive and how the city was faring against the apocalyptic winter, but the “thermal meter” ofFrostpunk 2represents the fire of the human spirit.
After all, it was easy to justifyhard decisions in the firstFrostpunkbecause it was either submit or freeze. It’s not that simple inFrostpunk 2where players must navigate the social landscape of various developments, factions, thoughts, laws, and ideals. Every faction wants a bright future, but that future is different for every school of thought.Frostpunk2 forces players to face the idea that the greatest threat to humanity is humanity. It’s not just about the wasteland surrounding the city, but the wasteland within it socially.
“I will you show you fear in a handful of dust,” T.S. Eliot wrote in his poemThe Wasteland, which focuses on the imagery of humans being created from dust in Genesis. In other words, Eliot writes that he intends to show readers the fear that resides within themselves and follows this up with the various fates and shortcomings of several figures, as well as the general attitude of citizens in the crestfallen city of London. He describes London as this “Unreal City/Under the brown fog of a winter dawn” which is its most obvious connection toFrostpunk 2, but in many ways,Frostpunk 2seems like a gamification of Eliot’s sentiments of society, the individual, and the duality of mankind and its future. That may sound lofty, but there’s perhaps not a better way to describeFrostpunk 2’s ambition more so than capturing that fear and hope within society.
