If you’re a history and government nerd like me, you’d probably be hard pressed to find a franchise that better appeals to your love of society building and tough moral quandaries than Frostpunk. Thankfully, developer 11 Bit Studios is cooking up another depressing city management simulator with Frostpunk 2, and from the 30-minute demo I saw, they appear to be doubling down on gut-wrenching decisions and brutal difficulty, and it’s got me positively giddy to get my hands on it. The demo I saw was focused solely on the freeplay mode called “Utopia Builder,” so any details of the dedicated story mode remain a mystery, but after seeing the fascinating new direction they’re taking that focuses on politics, faction management, and greatly expanded building, I’m already extremely excited to don my winter jacket and dive back into a fresh new layer of apocalyptic snow.
While the excellent original game focused on surviving a second ice age for mankind that threatened us with extinction, that age has passed with its sequel, which takes place thirty years later. Instead of surviving the apocalypse, Frostpunk 2 focuses on rebuilding society after effectively besting the worst the frozen apocalypse had to offer, with new, more devious threats emerging from within the surviving population. The biggest change that jumped out at me immediately is that we’re no longer confined to a small mass of buildings huddled around an engine for warmth – we’ve now begun to expand outwards and grow the last city on Earth into a proper urban sprawl. Appropriately, time is now measured in months and years as humanity’s numbers are bolstered and new problems emerge, as opposed to the precious few days of time that passed in the first game.
Surviving the unforgiving frosty wastes is still a factor, but it’s very much been moved down to maybe the fourth or fifth most dire thing that’s likely to wipe out humanity. Instead, Frostpunk 2 will have us expanding a city that’s deciding what the future is going to look like and answering extremely difficult political questions, like whether humans should double-down on life-saving technologies, or try to become self-reliant in case that technology eventually fails.
One scenario that the demo explored involved deciding how to best grow food, with different factions within the city offering up their own solutions. One contingent, called the Engineers, put their faith in technology and argued that chemicals were the best way to increase production of food, while another group, the Foragers, insisted that the tried and true method of processing human waste to create fertilizer was the more reliable option. Siding with one group over the other branched out into a whole host of new problems, and in the demo we were shown a path where siding with the Foragers led to health concerns among the population who were required to work at waste processing plants and fell ill.
Picking sides and dealing with the resulting effects will ultimately make certain factions like you or dislike you, creating a precarious political situation as your city expands. That shifting balance of power takes center stage once you’ve constructed the Council building that facilitates legislative proceedings where you can pass laws and apply parliamentary pressure on your allies and detractors to try to get the results you want, which will alter the course of your society. In one scenario presented in the demo, we had to decide whether children should join the workforce at a young age or attend school, the former which would push your society in the direction of valuing Duty, and the latter nudging it in the direction of Reason. The benefits gained from these decisions, and the impact their passing has on the various political caucuses, is something the player will need to manage to beat the odds, as growing unpopular with too many groups will see you removed from your seat of power and the city fall into chaos.
This was on full display as the demo concluded, revealing more extremist factions that emerge later in Frostpunk 2’s run when the Technocrats, a fanatical offshoot of the Engineers, began to organize a revolt, while the Icebloods – hardliner Darwinists that spawned from the Foragers – began to slide farther and farther from mainstream ideals. Clearly, 11 Bit Studios intends to show us just how heavy the crown weighs when Frostpunk 2 debuts next year.
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