Frostpunk - Yes, There's a Story Here

Platform: Windows (also on Mac, PS4, XB1)
Release: 2018 (Windows), 2019 (PS4, XB1), 2021 (Mac)

I originally wasn't going to write anything about Frostpunk since it doesn't contain much of a central narrative and no one would really sell it to a player as a "story-based" game, but one thing I love is when a game emotionally moves me. Frostpunk does that, and also it is an amazing example of showing (or experiencing, since this is a video game) rather than telling, so I figured it was worth discussing.

The basic premise of Frostpunk is that the world is facing a catastrophic winter likely caused by volcanic eruptions around the equator, but there may have been other extenuating factors as suggested by some of the lore nuggets you can uncover over the course of gameplay. All that's really necessary to know is that the game is set in an alternate history steampunk Victorian England and you take on the role of a captain in charge of a small group of survivors try to build a new home around one of the generators built as a last ditch haven for humanity survive a winter with no end in sight.

The game comes with four basic scenarios, each following a different group of people with differing circumstances, so I will mainly talk about "A New Home" since that is considered the main scenario and the one everyone has to start by default before unlocking the others.

"A New Home" starts with a group of survivors arriving at a generator, only to find that no one else is there and the generator isn't even on. Frostpunk is a city builder, so much of the core gameplay revolves around collecting resources and constructing buildings in an ever bigger and more complicated city. Usually I'd add ever more prosperous to the descriptor of a city builder, but Frostpunk is not that type of game, at least on first playthrough.

The problem is that the city's population is finite (though it's possible to find other survivors in scripted events), and you have to manage both hope and discontent. These people have left everything, gambling on finding a sanctuary from the cold, and all you can give them to start with is a few tents. When there's so much work to be done, mouths to feed, or some other problem, the player is confronted with the possibility of signing in a new law.

This is where the player is confronted with how they want to run their new city. Not enough hands to work? Well, the children can work too, if you make it law. At first they'll only do "safe" jobs like working in the cookhouse, but if you get desperate enough due to your adult population falling sick or dying, you can sign another law to make them work in the coal mines.

Laws let you set the tone of your city, to work through rough patches of the game where you wish you could have people work longer hours (since everyone needs to sleep), eat less food, and manage your population's hope and discontent, because if hope drops completely or discontent maxes, the people are going to be done with your leadership and the game ends.

Your people might complain about your law if it's an unpopular decision (like allowing for 24-hour emergency shifts) or they may appreciate it (if it's setting up a care home for the gravely ill and disabled). If they come to you with a problem, and you follow through on your promise to fix it, then their opinion of you will go up. Conversely, if you promise and fail to deliver, the city's hope and discontent will likely go in directions you don't want them to.

For the first third of "A New Home" this feels relatively easy to manage. My first game I put people on a soup diet for a couple weeks to stretch out our supply, and I signed a law allowing for drastic measures (including amputation) to save someone's life. People died, more often than I liked, and usually due to being too sick and cold, but I felt like we were at least making progress in our new home. I set up shelters (basically schools) for children to learn a trade while the adults worked and avoided anything ghoulish like building a snow pit for bodies (for later usage) and instead had everyone buried with dignity.

Since this is the first scenario it makes sense to give the player time to figure out how the mechanics work so there's not much danger.

But then came the discovery of Winterhome.

After the initial group of people get the bones of their settlement up and running, one of the things you want to do is send scouts out to explore the overworld; at first to find the slower members of your convey who were left behind, but also to find signs of other settlements since yours was not supposed to be the only generator in the area.

Instead of finding a city full of survivors who had arrived earlier though, the scouts discover Winterhome, a city so badly mismanaged that the generator exploded and its citizens either starved or froze to death. The news hits your city hard, as your people realize that they might be entirely alone in the world, and this results in two things:

The captain must choose a purpose, and the Londoners form.

Since it's apparent that civilization as they once knew it has collapsed, you need to give people a purpose, a reason to keep fighting for survival when they're in the middle of a snowy wasteland. The game offers a choice between Order or Faith, which opens a new set of potential laws based on your choice.

For my first playthrough I chose Order, because I was leery of controlling people by starting up a cult. Order forms a worker based society where everyone works for the better of all. You set up watchtowers and guard stations to make sure people aren't stealing food or getting up to other mischief and in general people are happy to have their neighbors looking out for each other. This is a city of hundreds, not thousands, so chances are everybody knows everybody else to some degree. Faith manages the population through religion, giving them a place to worship and encouraging acts of charity.

The interesting thing is that while Order and Faith offer different benefits to your new society that will be appreciated by everyone, following either purpose to extremes turns you into a tyrant. Would that be justifiable if it allowed your city to survive?

Since I chose Order and wanted to be a nice captain, I initially just set up the minimum amount of watchtowers required because I didn't want my people calling out their neighbors when we had more important things like… survival. Those watchtowers have to be staffed after all, so people stationed there wouldn't be doing anything else!

But then thieves broke into the food stores, and before I managed to get my first guardhouse set up, there was a second burglary! I had guards ready by the time a third theft happened, but by then I was dealing with worsening morale and when the guards caught the thief I had to decide what to do with them. I didn't have a prison, and I wasn't sure I even wanted one since if I put someone in it I'd have a non-working member of society who would be eating food that could go to someone who wasn't being a selfish ass. So I exiled the thief (which was pretty much a death sentence since who's going to survive out there with no food or supplies).

This second arc of the game is when the player has to deal with the Londoners. They're a group who after the fall of Winterhome, come to believe that leaving London was a mistake. They want to go back, and try rallying other citizens to join them.

The worse the city's hope and the higher the discontent, the more people will join them and the more thefts and vandalism will happen. And this arc is littered with semi-random events. You will probably get at least a couple thefts and an instance of vandalism, one of your guards or faith keepers will probably be killed if you have them, and the Londoners will give speeches to inspire others to join them.

How you choose to deal with them can be straightforward at times, and the game will let you know whether the hope and discontent meters will be hit and roughly how much, but sometimes you wonder: is letting the Londoner spout his mouth off the wisest thing to do when he'll convert more people to his cause, or would it be better to break up the crowd and deny his chance to speak? This is when going down the more disturbing paths in Order and Faith can be helpful, even if morally uncomfortable.

For instance, I had the option of setting up propaganda centers which would increase hope by spreading only the news I wanted my people to hear. My city's hope was not doing too good, but I didn't want to go down the path of authoritarianism, and though I was struggling to keep the Londoners from getting too numerous, I was pretty sure I could keep the city in order until they left. And when they did I saw I had the charitable option of giving them food for their journey, except there was none to spare, so it was grayed out.

The final third of the game begins with the arrival of new refugees who are complete strangers and bringing word that the mother of all storms is coming. Once you have the scientific equipment ready to pinpoint the storm's arrival time, you're given a laundry list of criteria your city should meet in order to survive the storm.

I realized I was nowhere near that and rolled over. (Though admittedly I'm a little tempted to go back to my first save file and see if I can finish it now that I know what I'm doing.)

My second playthrough of "A New Home" went better. Since I knew the preparation criteria, I started aiming to complete them from the very beginning of my settlement. And this time I chose Faith, which I ultimately decided I liked better. While you can go full-on cult leader if you want, I stopped at having public penances, which I felt kind of bad about, but had been pressured into by an event (which would give me a hope boost if I passed the law). When other people came forward and said they didn't like the public penances, I stopped doing them. (Sadly, I will always feel like the faith keeper processions around the generator are cultish, but they function like guards do for Order so you need them to manage the Londoners.)

Less people died this time. Through religious faith I had convinced all the Londoners into rejoining the fold, the city was well supplied, and since I had no idea how long this storm would last, I had a month's worth of coal (based on my current usage) and food set aside. Whenever I could be generous, I would. As we were preparing for the final storm a father wanted to go look for his daughter, who he had suspected had run away. I figured he would probably fail, since this is a game about harsh reality and difficult choices, but I gave him some rations since I figured I had enough to spare.

And then the storm hit.

I thought as long as I made the necessary preparations I could survive the storm, and it would mostly be coasting. After all, I had a fully upgraded generator. But… haha… no.

I could feel the sheer oppression of the weather as the game's UI darkens and frosts over like you're trapped in an eternally frozen night. It's no longer possible to leave the city, but it's possible to keep some of the buildings functioning. (And the music track that plays, "The City Must Survive," is really top notch. You can feel the desperation.) Medics and engineers remained at their posts. The mines were still open at first, but as the temperature dropped the machinery began to freeze and I had to pull people out of the lower level of the mines to avoid accidentally losing anyone to a tunnel collapse.

Hope was constantly falling, more people were refusing to work. My coal usage had shot through the roof and now I was getting less out of the mines. I found myself scrambling to conserve fuel, shutting down non-vital parts of the city, because I had no idea when any of this was going to end. People were constantly getting sick and I hadn't space in the infirmaries for everyone. At the same time I was trying to strategically put my generator in overdrive for short periods of time to alleviate the cold (since leaving it on permanently would cause it to explode and end the game).

Those days in the storm are what made the game for me. There was no objective telling me how to manage my city anymore. The only goal was survival. I was the captain, I had to figure out how to do it, which made it very real. The game was constantly throwing curveballs at me, making things break, having people demand a type of building I had never bothered to research let alone build, and suddenly I needed it in two days because people were afraid.

It was a lot, and yet, in the middle of all of that management, that father, the man who left shelter right before the biggest storm in human history managed to return with his daughter alive! I just didn't expect it given all the constant crap the game throws at these people. It was a badly needed hope spot before the final stretch, because I was constantly worrying whether my city actually had the supplies to survive.

There's a weather forecast in game, and I could finally see a sun peeking out behind the storm, but before it arrived, I saw the biggest drop in temperature the game had ever given me, and I was already running my generator at full blast. I turned off overdrive so I could run it as long as possible when the worst landed, even though this left people in freezing homes and I just had to hope nobody would die from the cold while I saved the heat for an even worse one.

The city shuts down entirely (aside from medical facilities) just before the final stretch, which is a whopping -218 F; so cold I couldn't even conceive of how cold that was. (Fans have pointed out that this is below the freezing point of carbon dioxide and my own comparison searching has placed it well below the coldest part of Antarctica.) Even running the generator on overdrive was barely doing anything… but we held out, and amazingly, no one died during the final storm.

My final tally was 431 survivors with 16 deaths along the way, and in what I think is a nice touch, every time you complete a scenario the game runs through a timelapse showing the growth of your city and a narrative covering the decisions you made. Though my people had their regrets (turning away refugees who we could not feed) and dealt with hardship (subsisting on soup to stretch food supplies), they ultimately looked forward to a hopeful future in the city now christened New London.

I suppose this post has mostly been me writing about my playthrough, but the thing is, I found it memorable. I was trying to keep the city from falling apart, but I had the lines I didn't want to cross (but could see doing on a higher difficulty level), and I spent a good portion of that final storm desperately hoping we'd make it out alive. And most games that aren't RPGs or visual novels don't get that kind of reaction out of me. I wanted to lead these people to safety badly enough that I played each scenario at least twice to make sure I got the best ending (with the exception of "The Refugees" which I got the best ending for on my first try).