Just beat Frostpunk (well sort of) today, done with the game!
This is a game that had been on my wishlist for awhile and was pleasantly surprised when it was given away free on Epic Games. It's a resource management survival game where you lead a colony through the challenging scenarios.
The game is by the same guys who made This War of Mine, so while the two games play very different, they have a similar feel to them - a focus on trying to survive in harsh, brutal conditions, and making difficult moral choices along the way.
In the case of Frostpunk, the premise is trying to survive in a world beset by climate catastrophe. To sustain, you build civilisation around a single generator, and have to ensure a steady supply of resources, while managing hope and discontent of your populace. You also have to decide what research to priorities, and what policies to enact, and also make decisions that appear from time to time. You also have to give people a purpose to help them through these times, and this can come in the form of 'order' or 'faith'.
I'm not very good at keeping myself away from spoilers, but I'm glad I did. Each scenario in Frostpunk tells a unique story and provides it's own set of challenges. While the base is the same for each game - it's the same buildings you can build, policies you can enact etc, the different scenarios put you in different circumstance and thus demand different approaches to victory.
There are four scenarios in total (without buying the expansions). I played each scenario once on medium to experience it blind, and then once more in hard knowing what to expect and aim to beat it regardless. Spoilers blacked out below:
The first would be the most 'vanilla', where you found the city of New London and seek to build new lives in the frost lands. As you stabilise, you start to seek out other survivors, eventually stumbling upon the devastated city of Winterhome. The death and destruction in that city causes your populace to lose hope and a faction breaks off, wanting to return back to London instead of remaining here and dying. You have to raise hope and convince people to stay, while Londoners sabotage your efforts and try to convince people to leave. In the ideal outcome you manage to convince everyone to stay in the end. In my hard run with order policies, I had no choice but to set up prisons and round up the Londoners as things were getting hand. Prisons aren't all bad, but I would have preferred to have been able to do without them. Then finally an intense finale begins where it is revealed that a huge storm is coming on the horizon, and you have to prepare to face it. I thought this finale was hauntingly beautiful. The storm hits with the lowest temperature you have seen all game, and then it just keeps ramping further for the next 5 days to this dramatic orchestra music. Things fall apart further and there is little you can do. Yet if you were sufficiently well prepared, you would make it through an emerge from the other side. The sound of the weather clearing and temperature rising, which you have heard all game from time to time, is especially beautiful this time. The scenario ends and treats you to a time lapse narrating the decisions you made along the way (link). If you made rough decisions along the way it will be reflected, and if you signed certain extreme policies you would be deemed to have 'crossed the line' (links for faith and order versions). I consider implementing extreme policies a fail so I steered clear of them regardless of how dire things got for all my playthroughs for all scenarios - though I did sign grey ones like prisons, faith keepers, lots of OT and safe child labour. I personally thought this first scenario while the easiest, was also the best one.
The second is focused on a small group of scientists who are charged with protecting four seedling arks containing seeds of all known plants. The key difference in this scenario is that you don't get additional manpower. The engineers you start with are all you have and you have to rely on automatons to keep things working. Later on there is a twist where you discover the city of New Manchester that will not be able to survive the coming storm without your help. Hence you have to decide whether to help New Manchester or not. You can 'win' this game by just focusing on protecting the arks, but you will get a bad ending similar to if you crossed the line in the first scenario. Hence for me, I consider it a 'win' only if I managed to help New Manchester as well. On 'normal', I found this scenario pretty easy but struggled a bit on hard because the temperature drops were brutal. Ending here.
The third tells the story of refugees who have fled from another city and seek to build their new lives. In many ways it's the exact opposite of 'the arks', where you have to deal with waves and waves of people coming in, having to rapidly build facilities for them. I almost lost on 'normal' avoiding child labour as it was too much to handle (the scenario had tons of children). In the second half, the lords (aristocrats which mistreated the original refugees and threatened to have them killed as they fled) also came and you had to manage the two different groups. You have the option of not letting the lords in which would lead to them becoming a troublemaking faction outside the city, or let them come in but struggle to integrate the two groups especially with the huge mistrust between them. I let the lords in for both my playthroughs, and successfully integrated them (link). It seems that whatever happens the refugees will survive, but if you let things get out of control they will kill all the lords whether you let them in or not (links for when you let them in, and when you kept them out).
The fourth puts you in charge of a failed city as you seek to restore things back to normal. This is the prequel to the first scenario, where you are now managing the city of Winterhome which is doomed to fail. Having just taken over the previous leader who has been deposed in a civil war, you first had to rebuild the ruined city. This is very different from the first three scenarios as you start with structures already built and some research done, laws signed. However the city planning is poor and you have to fix it on top of clearing the rubble from the aftermath. Don't spend too much effort rebuilding though, because it turns out there is a critical flaw in the generator due to mismanagement by the previous leader. The scenario then turns into a resource rush as you have to evacuate hundreds of people from Winterhome before the generator explodes. I thought this was really interesting. The first time I played this, I hated it at first because I didn't like the poor planning and it was a pain to have to rebuild. I realised soon on enough though that this scenario was unique in that you don't try to optimise your layout - you are looking to leave Winterhome anyway. What you focus on is getting what you need, and start tearing things down and evacuate. In other scenarios you get more and more people and your city gets increasingly developed, in this scenario you start with almost 600 and the number goes down as you start to evacuate, tearing buildings down for extra materials along the way. You can win this scenario simply by evacuating 100 people which is really easy. However for full completion, you have to evacuate 500 - of which the hardest part is the amount of steel required for the final cabins. This scenario is brutal. I lost on 'normal' the first time because I did not anticipate what a crazy resource rush it would become. Then when I went on 'hard', I lost again despite already having played twice because the window for success is so narrow that suboptimal decisions are punished very heavily - in this case I did not do the right calculations on the necessary food and failed to deliver enough on time leading to starvation. It was close though, and I told myself I was done initially, but I couldn't lay it down and decided to give it another go. I planned meticulously, down to the exact order of laws and research, how many builds of each type and where etc. And I did it! Wuhu. Well. Kind of. Actually I epic failed by forgetting to upgrade my steelworks to the final level despite rushing the research very early. By the time I realised I completely forgot to upgrade my steelworks it was too late and I was far, far behind on the required steel. So strictly speaking if I did not forget, I would have won and would have done it decently comfortably. Since I forgot, this will forever be a black mark. It was very unsatisfactory. Still, I'm not going to spend another 6 hours to try to beat this scenario again especially due to a careless mistake. So I consider myself done. Link where you and I will pretend I was successful. In reality mine says we set out ill prepared and many died on board. Welp.
There is a fifth and sixth scenario, but you have to buy them and I didn't pay for it, so I guess I'm done here unless epic games decides to release those too heh.
All in all, Frostpunk was a really good game. One thing I really liked about it was how you could decide what constitutes victory for you since there are multiple possible endings. How you play likely reflects your views on ethics, whether it be specific moral issues or broader questions like whether the ends justify the means, whether the death of a few is worth it to ensure the survival of the rest. I set pretty hard conditions on myself, and the game is made tougher because of it. You could probably have a much easier time for some of these scenarios if you decided to be a cold hearted dictator.
You know what they should make next. They should make a pandemic management game next. Plenty of real life inspiration they can use to make that game hah. I would play that.
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