Frostpunk

Frostpunk

Management games, particularly city builders, are frequently guilty of depicting the breadth of human experience without the depth. SimCity and its successors – both evolutions of the form, such as The Sims, and modernisations such as Cities: Skylines – present some of the challenges of life, but rarely ask you to consider the consequences of either those problems or the solutions brought to bear to fix them. It wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate for them to do so: they are toys and toolkits, sandboxes that task you with engineering solutions to complex problems in a safely abstracted environment. If SimCity took it upon itself to seriously depict the impact of deprivation, it’d be unlikely to remain a game where players happily sink idle weekends in pursuit of their ideal town. To the extent that this genre has a dark side, it chiefly manifests as money-sink mobile and browser games that take the benign ambivalence of the management sim and push it further in pursuit of player retention. Frostpunk challenges these assertions. It is a city builder where survival is not a given; where threats are often existential; where building a civilisation that lasts is hard, but building one that retains its respect for essential freedoms is harder. It is a spiritual successor to 11 Bit’s This War Of Mine, a continuation of the studio’s interest in unlocking the expressive potential of management games.