Frostpunk (Video Game Re-Review)

You're probably asking yourself two things upon seeing this.

The first is simply "Wait, didn't you review Frostpunk already?"

And the other will likely be "Where the hell have you been?"

To answer those in turn - I did review it, but several free expansions (including yesterday's one) meant that the game deserved a second look, as it has undergone a few noted improvements. It's not quite a No Man's Sky style turn-around, but it is enough to warrant a second look.

As for where I have been: Life is still chaotic. I'm used to keeping multiple plates spinning at a time, but even I have some trouble when someone throws a kitchen worth of them at me. And then sets the kitchen on fire while they're doing it.

The ironic thing is, that last example can easily describe the experience of playing Frostpunk, only it manages to capture the fun side of things.

The Synopsis

The world is freezing over. The steampunk golden age that the world has enjoyed came to an abrupt end with the onset of an endless winter. No one truly knows the cause of it, nor even how to counteract this catastrophe, but humanity needs to adapt in order to survive. Abandoning their cities, refugee camps flee northward to where gigantic heat generating towers have been constructed. It is now your task to keep your small band of survivors alive, happy, and find a way to make your city thrive amid the wilderness.

The Good

The immediate +1 bonus Frostpunk gets is its thematics. Let's be honest here: Steampunk tends to be treated like a crutch. It's a great visual medium and a very distinctive style when done right, but far too often it boils down to someone sticking a lot of gears onto a top hat and saying it's done. The ones which do this far outnumber the few which try to execute something interesting with it, and even then they typically have trouble with the world-building here. Frostpunk avoids this at every turn thanks to its post-apocalyptic nature. While it could be argued that part of this is sidestepping the problem in question - by destroying the world rather than fully explore it - the game does offer a few substantial hints about the setting. We see indications of the technological level of the world, mentions of nations and even the odd technological marvel. What's more, steam itself is core to the game's very mechanics, and it manages to just about balance advanced technology against age-old aesthetics. Both visual and societal ones, of course.

Many of the problems you end up facing in Frostpunk stem from two societal issues above all others. The first and most obvious among these is the risks and issues of running a city on the verge of annihilation. The local population will make demands of you, have biases colour their influences and even cite your shortcomings as a major problem. Too few medical clinics? Someone's going to complain. Poor shelter? People will become unruly. If you seem to be failing in your duties or favouring one group above all others? People will riot.

The societal system is decided by two meters, one measuring the level of hope within your populace and the other the discontent with your decisions. This might sound like a basic X equals Y system, or something to encourage you to avoid becoming a tyrant, but it ends up being quite the opposite. In fact, how many of your choices tie into this heavily impresses upon the player the grey morality of the game. For one thing, pit fighting actually helps to placate your population, and despite the occasional death duel can do the same. 

The societal additions to your city are made through the Book of Laws, a spider-diagram of a system allowing you to implement new buildings or mechanics. This can only be implemented every few days, but your choices range from establishing a tavern to keep the population's hopes up, to child labour. The easy answers you would expect to see are entirely absent from this experience, as it reinforces the fact that a hopeful and loyal population is not always a good thing. You're perpetually short on resources, supplies and bodies, so while barring the use of child labour might seem like a no-brainer at first, in some scenarios it can become essential to your survival. You simply need more people in order to keep dragging up coal to fuel the furnace. This need to balance survival against morality was what helped This War of Mine stand out, and despite having a fantastical setting and larger scale, it works just as well here.

What further complicates matters is that your population has its own demands, from small-scale familial disputes to broader situational issues. What makes this so effective is that many of these can stem from any number of possible situations, each of which changes depending upon the scenario you play. There are a few basic ones - people will moan if you have everyone living in tents at hell-freezing-over temperatures - but then there are the likes of how you deal with the bodies of traitors, or people taking time off work to pray upon seeing their impending doom. You cannot wholly control this and there is only a rare third answer provided by the game's later choices of Order or Faith (police state or local church) options. However, if you go too far with these, you can easily cross a line from simply having churches to boost morale, to public floggings of those who fail you.

The actual scenario system itself was a point of contention among players on release. Many apparently wanted a free-roaming mode or the likes in order to explore the setting without being bound to a story. However, as time has gone by, it has been increasingly clear that these stories help to offer the game's strongest element. Each explores a different element in a city's life, and throws entirely new challenges your way as your population reacts to them. In New Home you have to establish your new city, and then quell an insurrection of people attempting to break from your city. In The Arks you have to deal with foreign affairs, and the last best hope to preserve your future. In The Refugees there is the issue of class warfare threatening to rip the city apart, while the Fall of Winterhome is about a populace attempting to drag itself back from the edge of annihilation.

While the scenarios themselves cannot be fully delved into without spoiling them, the Fall of Winterhome was the most recent, and highlights just how different these can be. Rather than merely maintaining resources and building up a city from the ground up, you have to rebuild it. You take charge of a failing city which has undergone a revolution, with its people having completely lost hope, and many of its buildings torched beyond use. Your task is to use decrees you would have otherwise ignored and the remaining facilities to make it thrive once more. In addition to this, you need to continually hit targets on the hope meter to ensure that the people trust their new ruler. Even if Winterhome is thriving, if you fail to hit these even once, you face being exiled into the wastes.

So, that's the crux of the good. Surprisingly, there is some bad to be found here as well.

The Bad

This first point is going to sound strange, but for a game based around a new ice age, the heat mechanics are surprisingly lacking. They certainly provide a challenge at first, especially as the temperatures continue to drop and if you only have a fairly low population. However, beyond those first few minutes, it can quickly become a simple nuisance. The furnace which is in the middle of your city is easy to maintain once you get a basic grasp of the mechanics, and there are multiple ways to easily guard your buildings against the cold. Of all the resources on hand, coal is the most plentiful and easy to acquire. Unless you completely botch any attempt to balance mining with a high output, you will never run out of the stuff. Unless the game drops the temperature to ludicrous degrees (I.E. past the freezing point of carbon dioxide) you're never going to feel as if it poses any true threat to you.

The issue of resource management is also somewhat undermined by other additions which undermine the sense of surviving against all odds. The big ones are how the game handles scouting missions and outposts beyond the city itself. Now, this addition is actually a welcome one for several reasons. It shows a broader map of the world, it allows you to gain some extra lore on surrounding locations, and opens up opportunities for new missions. With that being said, the system itself is overly automated. Scouts can march for days without tiring or pausing, and they never consume food. They practically stumble upon stockpiles of resources, and unique parts vital to constructing the more complex machine pieces within your city. As such, you can end up with massive resource booms which allows you to suddenly leap forward in terms of development. Outposts are the same, but they are an even more flagrant problem in many cases. You need to spend little to nothing on them, and they will constantly send massive stockpiles of supplies back to your city on a daily basis. If you play your cards right, these can replace your need for half the buildings in the game, and it makes the survival element obscenely easy.

Even without the issue of coal or supplies, there are distinct bits here which feel extremely superfluous. For example, everyone in this game has a name, from the children to your workers. You might think that this would have some Dwarf Fortress style element, where some people become much more prominent than others, but that isn't the case. They are largely interchangeable and, outside of one surprisingly meaningful difference between graveyards and corpse pits, you will overlook most of them. The stories focus much more on the general population, and the societal events impact the society as a whole rather than an individual group. There's no moment where you think "Oh, that's him!" and can be easy just to think of them as another resource in the end. It doesn't ruin the theme of the game, or even hold it back that much, but it repeatedly highlights how the game missed a trick by lacking a more individual element within the city.

Finally, there's also the technology here, or more specifically the way it develops. The way in which steampunk technology is handled remains one of the game's strengths. It really seems like the creators knew where to draw the line in terms of how far steam power could be taken without pinching things from other gimmick techs (So, no Tesla coils). The use of mini-airships, factories, automated mining rigs and four-legged automata all play a role within the game, and each looks fantastic. The problem comes from actually getting there.

It seems as if 11 bit studios truly wanted the city to develop gradually and to avoid a lot of the science focused min-maxing which could lead to easy victories. In doing so, however, the technological system ended up being time consuming, slow and problematic. You often need to unlock technologies you will never use in order to get to a few later ones you have some interest in. At the same time, the tiered nature of the technology screens requires you to pay out resources to get each on in turn. This adds another timed gate onto progressing forward, and slows any plans you might have. As a result of this, what could have been a very effective and direct system feels very over-engineered and cumbersome. The results are typically great but actually getting there is an arduous uphill battle. Then again, perhaps that was hidden message in all of this.

The Verdict

Frostpunk is still a very flawed game, but a deeply enjoyable one. Much like XCOM, you will walk away with a bucket list of problems, die many times and perhaps curse your luck, but keep playing. The scenarios are varied enough that the same old tactics don't always win out, and even with the resourcing elements mentioned above, the need to placate your city is always a challenge. As a result of the broader variety of stories and a few mechanical tweaks, there have been a number of vast improvements which makes it more than worth your time. If you were holding off on buying this on release due to its criticisms, now is the time to give it a second look.

Verdict: 7.5 out of 10