Frostpunk is the first society survival game, and it earns the label. The world has frozen over, and you rule the last city on Earth: a huddle of tents and workshops around a coal-fed Generator, in a crater the cold has not yet claimed. Keeping New London alive means managing heat, food and labor down to the hour, then signing laws that decide what your people will endure and who they will become. 11 bit studios, the team behind This War of Mine, built a city builder in which every efficient decision is weighed against a conscience.
The City Must Survive
Everything in Frostpunk radiates outward from the Generator. Buildings inside its heat zone stay livable, buildings at the edge freeze, and the temperature outside only trends one way. Coal keeps the Generator burning, wood and steel keep the city growing, and raw food has to be cooked before it feeds anyone. Your workers and engineers can only be in one place during daylight, so every shift assignment is a trade-off between the resource you need today and the one you will need when the next cold front hits.
The cold is not a backdrop. When it drops, workplaces at the fringe shut down, the sick pile up in medical posts, and the amputations and deaths begin if you fall behind. Overdrive the Generator to buy time and you risk it exploding. Frostpunk runs in real time with pause, so you can stop the clock to think, but the calendar never stops advancing toward what is coming.
Make the Law
The Book of Laws is where Frostpunk separates itself from other city builders. Every signature is permanent, every law unlocks the next, and the population remembers what you chose.
- Adaptation
- The early laws are practical and uncomfortable in equal measure. Extended shifts get more out of a day, soup stretches the rations, and putting children to work fills gaps in the labor force. Each one keeps the city running a little longer, and each one costs Hope or raises Discontent.
- Purpose: Order
- Once the city is stable you must choose a path, and there is no turning back. Order builds watchtowers, guard stations and a propaganda center, then escalates toward a prison and a Foreman who keeps the workforce in line. The city gets safer and more productive, and it starts to look like something else.
- Purpose: Faith
- Faith raises a temple, shrines and houses of healing, offering comfort in a world that gives none. Its later laws hand real power to a priesthood and turn dissent into a sin. Both paths end with the same question: how much of your people's freedom is survival worth.
Research and the Frostland
Survival demands progress, and the Workshop is where you buy it. The technology tree runs from better insulation and heaters to steam hubs, hothouses, industrial sawmills and finally automatons: coal-fired walking machines that work through the night and never complain about the cold. The order you research in matters, because a hothouse you finish two days late is a famine you could have prevented.
New London is not the whole world. Beacon-guided scouts leave the crater to explore the Frostland, uncovering wrecked settlements, frozen expeditions and survivors who can be brought home to swell your population. Outposts pull steady resources in from the ice. Every expedition takes days, and what the scouts find out there tells you as much about how the world ended as it does about what is coming next.
Scenarios and Endless Mode
Frostpunk carries several ways to play, each with its own city and its own crisis.
- A New Home is the founding story of New London: refugees, coal, a looming storm and a society that will judge you at the end. It is the campaign most players remember, and it is the reason the phrase "the city must survive" stuck.
- The Arks hands you a colony of engineers guarding the seed vaults that hold the future of plant life, with automatons doing the heavy labor and a very different set of pressures on the city.
- The Refugees opens the gates to wave after wave of desperate newcomers, with a class divide between lords and laborers that you either heal or exploit.
- The Fall of Winterhome puts you in charge of a city that is already failing, with a damaged Generator and a population that has lost faith, and asks you to salvage what you can before the end.
- Endless Mode spans eight maps with distinct terrain and weather. Endurance is the hardest test of your management, Builders starts without a Generator and makes you construct one, and Serenity eases the pressure so you can focus on the art of the city itself.
Photo mode and the ability to name individual citizens and automatons round out the package, and all of it is included with the game.
Who Will You Become?
A single run of Frostpunk takes an evening or two, and the ending will send you straight back in to do it differently. Make your first laws, light the Generator, and find out what kind of ruler New London gets from you.
