Format PC, PS4, Xbox One

Developer/publisher 11 Bit Studios

Origin Poland

Release 2018

Frostpunk frames the end of the world in simple terms: global cooling. As the Earth begins to freeze and Victorian society collapses, people migrate en masse to the generators –a last-ditch attempt by industrialised nations to survive icy storms and plummeting temperatures. But as for what caused this global cooling? Lead writer Wojciech Setlak is emphatic that the answer doesn’t matter. “It’s not important why it’s cooling – it’s cooling, and it’s killing us!”

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Frostpunk wasn’t the first 11 Bit Studios game to be more interested in effect than cause. “This War Of Mine was not a game about war,” Setlak says of the studio’s acclaimed debut. “It’s about people who’ve had their lives changed by war. The war isn’t incidental, but it’s not important what they are fighting for. In the same way, Frostpunk is not a game about climate change. It’s about consequences.”

These consequences, most often, stem not from the circumstances but from your choices as player. As de facto leader of the last city on Earth, your actions and laws determine the price people pay for survival. What most sets Frostpunk apart from its city-building peers, though, is the way it abandons the genre’s default perspective of distant omniscience, instead forcing you to consider the people with whose lives and liberties you’re bartering. “In many strategy games you are very far away from the people,” lead designer Jakub Stokalski explains. “In Frostpunk, we took that weakness and tried to turn it in our favour.”

Despite your position of power, you are not the hero of Frostpunk. “Our hero is the society, the people,” Setlak says. If you treat them like a resource or push them too far, they can just as easily depose you.

The key to this tension, Stokalski says, was “giving the people agency”, allowing them to go on strike or make demands of the player. “They’re not there just to do your bidding,” he says. “They actually have opinions on how things are going.”

The result is a rare creature: a city builder that feels like walking a tightrope through a blizzard, as you balance hope and discontent, survival and sacrifice. Frostpunk pulls no punches – this is a game that constantly calls you to account, twisting the knife every chance it gets, and all the while the weather is turning, and the temperature is dropping. It’s strange to think, then, that there was a time when there was no frost in Frostpunk.