DEEP FREEZE

Endure a blizzard of tough choices and rough consequences in FROSTPUNK 2

- Christopher Livingston

Citizens of New London: as you prepare to banish me from our city forever, I hope you understand that I always had good intentions. I never meant to run out of food, let hundreds of you perish from cold, or have the streets patrolled by giant fascist robots who stomp entire buildings flat while trying to prevent a single starving child from stealing a chocolate bar. Things just... got outta hand.

But before I step out onto the frozen tundra to die despised and alone, I would like to point out that a lot of what went wrong is, from my perspective, entirely your fault. If you could agree on a school curriculum our city wouldn’t have roving gangs of knife-wielding children. If you’d let me harvest dead citizens for spare parts you might have replacements for those eyes you lost due to working double shifts in my horribly squalid factories. And if you hadn’t kept sabotaging my efforts to bring new technology to our city I wouldn’t have had to use quite so much new technology—like my mechanized police robots—to brutally punish you. Farewell! I hate you all.

Thirty years after the events of the original Frostpunk, the world is still freezing cold and society is still a hot mess. Frostpunk 2 is much bigger than the first game—in Frostpunk you finish the campaign with a city of maybe 800 citizens, whereas now you start out with a population ten times that. This increase in scale isn’t entirely successful: as a city builder, Frostpunk 2 is far more abstract than the original, and I never felt much of a connection to, or interest in, my city as a physical place. As a society management simulation, however, Frostpunk 2 is just as effective as the original. It’s packed wall-to-wall with torturous choices, agonizing consequences and a sliding scale of morality that’s slippery as ice.

CHILLY BUILDER