I used to be a big fan of city-building games like Pharaoh and Zeus, but I haven't really played any lately. I've bought Frostpunk a couple of days ago and I'm liking it a lot. I went in completely blind and I'm still on my first playthrough, but I wanted to share my first impressions.
Frostpunk is a very unusual city building game. It takes place in a steampunk setting that's thrown into a sudden ice age. You control a small group of refugees from London who are huddled around a giant coal-powered generator in a hole in the snow. You command workers to gather resources, construct buildings, research, etc. as usual. You can also send out scout parties into the frozen wasteland outside of your hole, where they discover additional resources and other refugees. This is the only means of growing your population, so keep your people alive! Scouting also reveals more of the story of the game: What happened to other cities? Where did the ice age come from?
Besides their material needs, the game also tracks your people's discontent and hope. These are affected by living conditions and by Laws. Roughly every day, you can pass a new law in the city. These can unlock new buildings, or new uses for your existing buildings, and often make you choose between a civilized and an efficient alternative. For example, will you build a graveyard and have funeral services that keep your people away from work for hours, or will you dump the dead into a hole outside the heat zone? Will you build a shelter for children, or make them work? No points for guessing which options will be better for your peoples' morale. That's also why the developers call it a society survival game, I guess.
I don't think I've come close to losing the game so far. I feel like the challenge is more in keeping your city somewhat liveable than in winning the game, but who knows, maybe it's going to really ramp up the difficulty. The game also offers a hardcore mode that is more difficult and only lets you save on exit (yay!) and doesn't allow you active pause (boo!). I think I'll try it for my next playthrough.
Still, the game mechanics really reflect the setting. It feels like you never have enough people to get all the resources you need: You need food, of course, you need building materials, and when the generator runs out of coal, your people's homes get cold. At the start of the game, this only causes some discontent and a slightly higher risk of illness. But the temperature varies over time, with a definite downward trend. (Your lonely generator can pump out only so much CO2.) When I ended my last play session, things looked pretty good, actually. I just weathered a short cold (err... even-colder?) period, and had built up a bunch of better insulated houses in anticipation. When it was over, it was actually pretty cozy, given the circumstances. But the forecast started showing an even bigger temperature drop roughly a week away, and I have no idea if this one is going to be permanent. I'll need to research techs to push the generator even further. That will also burn more coal, and I don't know if I can get enough with my current technologies. And during the previous cold period I also had a problem with keeping all the workplaces heated, so that's going to be even worse. I probably can get by with the lower generator setting if necessary. I can handle some discontent and illness.
I'm a little bit sceptical about how the story is integrated with the gameplay. Due to a story event from scouting, hope in my city took a massive drop, and a group of citizens started trying to convince the rest to return to London. Your goal then is to raise hope back up again to stop them from recruiting and convince as many of them to stay. This event also unlocks one of two new sets of laws to help you: You can choose between Discipline and Faith. My situation was decent enough at the time to handle that challenge, but this could have been much worse. There was no warning at all that something big would happen when I scouted that location.
Another thing is that I feel like the story is trying to railroad me into some specific law choices at times...some time after the event I just talked about, there was another one where I could get a hope boost from signing a law that I otherwise wouldn't have considered at the time: The Faith Keepers law creates a sort of religious police force that can be used to quell discontent and doesn't normally do anything for hope. I've got one lone dude staffing their office, because I really don't need them at the moment.
EDIT: Oh, and I completely forgot: The art is gorgeous!
The game can be bought on Steam and GOG.
Has anyone else here played it? What do you think?
Frostpunk is a very unusual city building game. It takes place in a steampunk setting that's thrown into a sudden ice age. You control a small group of refugees from London who are huddled around a giant coal-powered generator in a hole in the snow. You command workers to gather resources, construct buildings, research, etc. as usual. You can also send out scout parties into the frozen wasteland outside of your hole, where they discover additional resources and other refugees. This is the only means of growing your population, so keep your people alive! Scouting also reveals more of the story of the game: What happened to other cities? Where did the ice age come from?
Besides their material needs, the game also tracks your people's discontent and hope. These are affected by living conditions and by Laws. Roughly every day, you can pass a new law in the city. These can unlock new buildings, or new uses for your existing buildings, and often make you choose between a civilized and an efficient alternative. For example, will you build a graveyard and have funeral services that keep your people away from work for hours, or will you dump the dead into a hole outside the heat zone? Will you build a shelter for children, or make them work? No points for guessing which options will be better for your peoples' morale. That's also why the developers call it a society survival game, I guess.
I don't think I've come close to losing the game so far. I feel like the challenge is more in keeping your city somewhat liveable than in winning the game, but who knows, maybe it's going to really ramp up the difficulty. The game also offers a hardcore mode that is more difficult and only lets you save on exit (yay!) and doesn't allow you active pause (boo!). I think I'll try it for my next playthrough.
Still, the game mechanics really reflect the setting. It feels like you never have enough people to get all the resources you need: You need food, of course, you need building materials, and when the generator runs out of coal, your people's homes get cold. At the start of the game, this only causes some discontent and a slightly higher risk of illness. But the temperature varies over time, with a definite downward trend. (Your lonely generator can pump out only so much CO2.) When I ended my last play session, things looked pretty good, actually. I just weathered a short cold (err... even-colder?) period, and had built up a bunch of better insulated houses in anticipation. When it was over, it was actually pretty cozy, given the circumstances. But the forecast started showing an even bigger temperature drop roughly a week away, and I have no idea if this one is going to be permanent. I'll need to research techs to push the generator even further. That will also burn more coal, and I don't know if I can get enough with my current technologies. And during the previous cold period I also had a problem with keeping all the workplaces heated, so that's going to be even worse. I probably can get by with the lower generator setting if necessary. I can handle some discontent and illness.
I'm a little bit sceptical about how the story is integrated with the gameplay. Due to a story event from scouting, hope in my city took a massive drop, and a group of citizens started trying to convince the rest to return to London. Your goal then is to raise hope back up again to stop them from recruiting and convince as many of them to stay. This event also unlocks one of two new sets of laws to help you: You can choose between Discipline and Faith. My situation was decent enough at the time to handle that challenge, but this could have been much worse. There was no warning at all that something big would happen when I scouted that location.
Another thing is that I feel like the story is trying to railroad me into some specific law choices at times...some time after the event I just talked about, there was another one where I could get a hope boost from signing a law that I otherwise wouldn't have considered at the time: The Faith Keepers law creates a sort of religious police force that can be used to quell discontent and doesn't normally do anything for hope. I've got one lone dude staffing their office, because I really don't need them at the moment.
EDIT: Oh, and I completely forgot: The art is gorgeous!
The game can be bought on Steam and GOG.
Has anyone else here played it? What do you think?
