(Yeah, that’s the option I picked. What about it?)
A week before Frostpunk 2 came out, I replayed through the main story of Frostpunk 1. Aside from getting thoroughly carried away, I found myself wondering at the end what the studio could do with a Frostpunk 2. I hadn’t looked into what it was at all; I loved the first game and trusted 11 Bit Studios, and that was enough for me. But the game told such a satisfying story. What was there left to do?
Then Frostpunk 2 came out. And, oh. That’s what was left to do.
Politics is Universal
After a prologue following a completely separate group in which you get to decide whether New London followed faith or order during the time of Frostpunk 1 (faith, always faith; I only ran order once to see what it had, and it convinced me never to do it again), you get dropped back into the city you started with, a game and thirty years of game-time ago. You pretty much solved the immediate “we’re all going to freeze to death and/or starve right now” problem back in the first game, so this game skips all that. Your character from the first game, the leader known only as “Captain,” has just died of old age. You now get to play his replacement, the Steward.
Of course, since everyone knows they’re no longer in immediate danger of freezing and/or starving to death, they have a lot of opinions about how you should run things. And they don’t agree on much of anything. This opens up a whole new gameplay loop where you don’t just pass laws and deal with the consequences. Instead, you have categories of things that need dealt with, and it’s up to you to decide how you deal with them. Children need ways to spend time; do you put them in apprenticeships to add them to the workforce, or do you put them into mandatory school to speed up research at the cost of weekly income? Disease needs a way to be controlled; do you isolate the infected in quarantine, or do you make them wear badges warning people to stay away?
There are 100 delegates in the council, representing a number of factions, and each of those factions wants you to do something different and follow different paths. Merchants want privately owned alcohol (go figure). Labourers want to open the borders to everyone. And as you play, more factions emerge who have more specific views. Passing laws means negotiating votes from hesitant or opposed factions, and maintaining good relations means making good on the promises you made in that negotiation.
As you enact laws and pursue research, you’re taking your city down one of two paths for each of three categories: progress vs. adaptation, equality vs. merit, and tradition vs. reason. (Naturally, the different groups also have strong opinions about which path you should follow for each of those.) You end up with two groups who have fundamentally-opposed beliefs on the three categories, and the tension between them is going to become a problem eventually. But you can keep them placated for a long time with actions like granting them the next agenda in the council, bargaining with them for votes (and keeping your promises, of course), choosing research paths they propose, or giving them money on the off chance you happen to have extra (HA!).
Bigger is Better
The factions and council gameplay loop are an indication of the biggest change in Frostpunk 2: The scope.
Gone are the days of building individual tents and houses. No longer do you build hothouses and hunters’ hangars one at a time. No more will you watch the time track by hour by hour. No, this is thirty years later. Survival is no longer the name of the game; it’s actually pretty hard to get people killed the way that seems to happen so easily in Frostpunk 1. (Note: This may also be because the game encourages you to start on the lowest difficulty, so I did, and that difficulty is far more forgiving than normal difficulty in Frostpunk 1.) Instead, on a (mostly) hex-based map, you build “districts,” dedicated spaces that take up six hexes and provide a certain amount of resources of the chosen type. You have housing districts, extraction districts for fuel and materials, food districts, industrial districts that turn materials into goods or prefabs (more on that in a moment), and logistics districts that give you access to the Frostlands the way the Beacon did in Frostpunk 1.
Your resources are also a bit more abstracted compared to the first game. Instead of having wood and steel, and raw food and cooked food being individual resources, you have heatstamps (money); prefabs (building blocks, essentially); food; materials (this includes both wood and metal and they function the same); and goods (daily needed items like clothing). The only thing that’s specifically broken out is the type of fuel you use in your generator, but if you take the upgrade that lets your generator use any fuel, you can basically ignore that distinction for the rest of the game.
But the real change in scope happens at the end of what I would consider Act One of the main story, when, in order to survive and progress the game, you have to find a permanent source of oil. There isn’t one in the starting area, of course, so what this actually says is that you need to find a new place to build a new colony. By the end of my playthrough, I had four colonies in total. Not just the single-resource passive outposts from the first game (although those still exist, and I made it a point to connect almost every one of them); here, I had four places to jump around, check resources for, build districts in, and transfer people between. The Frostlands is a lot bigger now, too, with big regions to explore and multiple side stories you can complete in different ways. (Fuck the Baron, by the way.)
There is No Right Answer
When I told my boyfriend about the plot of this game, he was surprised I liked it so much. He compared it to Game of Thrones, which I call a “misery simulator” and refused to watch past about season 3. I told him it doesn’t remind me at all of Game of Thrones, but I will admit that there is one parallel. There are no heroes in this game. There are no paragons of virtue. You have no endgame solution that will feel totally good, no matter what you do.
The game reinforces it, too. In the end screen of Frostpunk 1, you had a time-lapse video of the creation and construction of your city while the game summarized your choices and the path you took to the end, along with the moral quandaries you were left with. Since you have a lot more space to work with in this game and you almost certainly did a lot of your building far from the city center, Frostpunk 2 has an animation it shows instead of the time-lapse video, which, to be perfectly honest, I’m not totally sure what it’s trying to show. But over that, it still summarizes your choices and the consequences of those choices, including some personal details of the affected NPCs. (Which, ow.)
But well before the endgame decisions that will really punch you in the moral dilemma, the game starts handing you awkward and difficult decisions. In my playthrough (and I’m guessing the majority of this stays the same regardless of decisions), I ended up with a faction that wanted to adapt above basically all else, and who wanted to elbow out the Faithkeepers, who in turn wanted to progress in technology and stick to tradition. I agreed with the adaptation faction in principle, but their fixation on the merit aspect and total disregard for faith and worship made me restrain them multiple times. (For example, no, you cannot set up a field hospital in the temple. I sort of value freedom of religion and separation of church and state, being American and whatever. Let people worship in the damn house of worship, I already built you two real hospitals and eliminated disease, anyway.)
But the real trap is in the gameplay effects of those choices I wasn’t so sold on. I’m always low on workforce and production efficiency, and a lot of those merit-based decisions increase one or both of those. Is it worth going the equality route for a mild bump in trust (which I was already flush with on account of, you know, not being a dick) when the merit option gets me workers or heatstamps I desperately need? The roleplay option and the powergaming option ran face-first into each other on a frequent basis, and even on the lowest difficulty, I was so short on resources so often that roleplay and principles tended to fall by the wayside. Up until (redacted), which suddenly found me roleplaying pretty heavily as–
Whoops. Spoilers.
Embrace the Frost
(I’m not just saying that because it’s the path I picked, okay. It also summarizes my feelings about this game.)
I’m not a veteran of this genre, unless you’re counting it as simulation and grouping it with cafe management sims and other cozy game subgenres; and this game doesn’t make me want to play more in the genre–it just makes me want to play this game over and over until I either rage quit or master everything, whichever comes first. When I finished the campaign, I took about twenty minutes to process, then started up a Utopia Builder run with randomized everything. That run is a few hours in now, and the save file is named “fuckallofthem” because the factions are driving me particularly nuts right now. Actually, the factions are one of the few things I will gripe about in this game. They are (realistically) obdurate and obnoxious and obtuse. But that’s probably accurate to real life, so I can’t complain too much.
What I can and will complain about, however, are some UI problems. The idea tree (research) icon is behind any icon in the building sections, but if you click on an icon in front of it, it takes priority. The number of times I accidentally opened it was… not insignificant. The tooltips on the side also don’t always update properly, which is a problem if you’re, say, trying to find out how much time you have to fulfill a promise, but the tooltip is stuck showing you the time for the other promise you have pending.
It was both too easy and too hard to cancel out of building or expanding. Hitting ESC would open the pause menu as well as canceling, but if you clicked on the wrong icon, it would cancel even if you didn’t mean to and some of those icons were way too easy to hit if you didn’t do a lot of maneuvering with the camera. And I would really have appreciated if the options for passing laws that pop up in negotiations would tell you if they’re in conflict with existing laws (not that I accidentally got myself into a tug-of-war between factions who wanted the opposite law for a category, or anything).
None of the UI problems make the game unplayable, just occasionally mildly frustrating. And I really have no complaints about the rest of the game. Frostpunk 2 is a masterpiece of a sequel that I see myself playing a whole lot more of, and I’m nudging my friends to play as well.
(Note: I originally gave this game an overall score of 9, but after I was finished writing the review I encountered what appears to be a bug which prevents using community actions on, or interacting with, certain factions in Utopia Builder mode. If I learn that this is resolved or there is a workaround, I will update my score. However, this is a notable enough issue in my opinion to downgrade the game from a 9 to an 8.5.)
You can find Seasoned Gaming’s review policy here.