In Frostpunk, a new snowy city-builder by This War of Mine studio 11 Bit that is out today, the player develops a city in a frozen wastelands. You must fuel the churning generator at the heart of your town, feeding it enough coal to keep your people alive. The cold is your first and greatest foe, and itās my favorite part of the game.
I love being cold. Iām obsessed with polar exploration and the frigid nothingness at the ends of the world. Itās a romantic notion, the privilege of someone whoās never really grappled with deadly cold, but I love how low temperatures make the things around me hard and present, let me know the limits of my skin. My love of the cold comes from the years I spent living on a boat and working outdoors, when for a big chunk of the year being cold was something I just had to live with. Iād wake up with my sheets frozen to the wall, spend days bundled up as best I could against sleet and snow. I came to respect and ultimately love the effort it took to move my body through each frozen day, a determination summer doesnāt require.
Iāve been playing Frostpunk for a few days, starting cities, establishing laws and seeing how deep this so-called society survival sim gets. While you canāt zoom into Frostpunk as much as Iād like, your buildings are full of excellent details of people desperate for warmth. Tiny fires burn amid clusters of tents, windows flicker with candlelight, and smoke rises from chimneys and drifts with the wind. Your citizens struggle with the transformation of Earth into a snowy wasteland, and they cling to anything that reminds them of the old times. Fighting arenas and public houses raise their mood, and churches or police forces keep order, but nothing seems to be quite as bolsteringāor as necessaryāas having light and heat close at hand.
More than the gameās details of warmth, I love the details of cold. I love the snow piled on roofs and streets, the paths my citizens tread each day to the sawmills and coal mines so far from the generatorās hum. I love the limits snow creates on the world, how desperately my town glows amid it. This is a city-builder youāre meant to play more than once, crafting a town and a society in the hopes it wonāt fail. But failure does come. The gameās regular cold spells have been run-ending disasters in my Frostpunk attempts, my screen going icy at the edges when Iām the least prepared. I despaired for my virtual city, but I enjoyed the crackling sound effects of ice forming. Cold is your enemy, but itās also the element that makes the whole game exist. Its limits are the space within which your city and all the gameās tense possibilities thrive.
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In one of my Frostpunk games, hope dipped too low and I couldnāt turn things around. I got deposed as leader and sent to die in the snow. Most citizens were impassive or glad to be rid of me, reflecting that at least Iād die quickly in the tundra. After a game spent constantly falling behind, solving one problem only to cause another, a quiet death in the ice didnāt feel entirely like a failure. It seemed peaceful and a lovely, a fitting acknowledgement of my favorite part of the game.
