My ramblings

Frostpunk

I love playing video games. So let me talk about one of my favourites, Frostpunk. To briefly summarize the game, it is a city builder set in and alternative 1886 during a cataclysmic global cooling. The weather suddenly started becoming colder and colder, spreading from the equator. Many countries tries to find ways of surviving this event, mostly through making settlements in the far north, where resources are still harvestable. The British Empire use their massive access to resources to build enormous generators that will heat up the settlements. They then send as many people they can across the frozen oceans towards the generator sites in what they call land dreadnoughts. All in the desperate hope that some will survive. The game then starts with you in charge of one of these sites. You only have a population of 80 people, of which some are children, no houses, only some raw food, a storage house and a cold generator. (I swear, me talking about this is completely unrelated to it suddenly snowing where I live)

If this concept seems interesting to you, then please, buy the game, play it, and then come back here. There are many aspects of the game that I think is best experienced the first time alone. Especially the ending.

Everyone has played the game now or don't care about spoiling it? Good, let me talk about how brilliant this game is. As I said, you start off with hardly anything. So you have to send out your workers, into the snow around the generator and collect the piles of wood, metal and coal that is lying around. You then have to power up the generator so that people don't freeze. Build a workshop so that you can start researching better technologies. Build a cookhouse to make meals. Make a hunters hut to get more raw food. Build a medical post to treat the sick, because people will get sick. Then build houses so that people don't have to sleep outside. All of this is just the first two, maybe three days. It is a very steep learning curve, but I think it emphasizes the severity of the situation. It isn't meant to be easy.

And all of the things you have to worry about in the start is things you always will have to work on. People will get sick, people need food, the generator needs to generate heat, especially as the weather gets colder and colder. The game then adds scouts that you use to explore the frozen land outside your city. You'll find abandoned houses, resources and survivors you can take back to the city. You'll also have to sign laws. Each law has different effects and gives you new possibilities. They also pose moral dilemmas. Is it alright to enact child labour if the city needs it? Is it acceptable to force people to work around the clock to satisfy the resource demands? Make people unsatisfied by having sawdust in their meals, or turning it into thin soup? All of this while also keeping discontent low and hope high among the people, unless you want to be exiled.

All of the elements come together and makes a brilliant mix of city building, resource gathering and management, and micro management. And you always have to carefully balance everything. Where to prioritize your sometimes very limited workforce, which research to choose, what buildings to build so that the city keeps on going. And as you go down the law tree, you'll get more and more power. Be it through a propaganda centre or peace keepers who publicly punish wrongdoers. And if you go too far, you may cross the line. But, the city must survive.

That leads me into the next point, the music. Cause let me tell you, the soundtrack in this game is some of the best I've ever heard. And you bet that I listened to it the entire time while writing this. The music, made by Piotr Musiał, is brilliant and the constant string instrument music perfectly fits the theme. It enhances the constant state of hopelessness the entire setting brings with itself. And my favourite has to be "The City Must Survive" which plays towards the end when impossibly cold storm hits, pushing your city beyond its' limit. I mean, just listen to it!

This single piece just constantly making you tense up. The constant intensity of the storm, always growing, never giving you a moments rest. This music piece is what really made me love the game when I first played it. I never expected the storm to come, and was not at all prepared when my scouts started finding out about it. I massively expanded my research force, so that I could upgrade my reactor enough as well as the houses and insolation. I had to double my food production, since the storm would render me unable to generate more, and I had to nearly triple my coal production to keep up with the rapidly upgrading reactor, severely thinning out my already limited workforce. I increased my production of steel and wood and started churning out automatons to relieve my workforce. I had to upgrade everything faster that I have ever done before or since. I had to employ very morally grey laws to keep this going, making people work overtime and around the clock.

And when the storm hit, I had barely missed the mark on the food required. My capacity for sick people had been severely decreased to help other areas and I had yet to finish upgrading all the houses. The research required was more or less finished on the hour that the storm hit. And then "The city must survive" began playing. And man, I've never been more tense. I was barely having a surplus of coal and I had more or less run out of resources. Halfway through the storm, I started really getting worried about both food and the sick. Over 50 people were sick and without hospital beds, they would become gravely ill any moment. So I had to overcrowd the medical posts and infirmaries. And I knew the food wasn't enough, so I authorized street fights in the hope that some would die, meaning less mouths to feel. I ran out of food, one and half day before the storm ended, I tore down any buildings that weren't essential to survival so that I could build more medical posts. I had just a few hours left of coal for the generator when the storm finally ended. The city had survived, and I got away with very few deaths. Never crossing the line.

Every time I play this game, I learn something that I can do better next time. In the subsequent playthroughs of the main story I survived the storm much more easily with better planning. But I never got tired of it. Not to mention all the other scenarios you can play. And the most recent expansion/DLC "Last autumn" is almost like a different game. It is a scenario that takes place before the cold, with you having to build a generator. I still haven't beaten that scenario, because of my, it is hard. But at the same time, never frustrating. It is always me who prioritized something wrong, or maybe didn't focus good enough on a certain aspect.

I really love this game and I can't wait for what the next DLC will be about. Currently it is called "Project tvadgycgjr" Which allegedly will release this year. Along with KSP 2 and the last of us 2, it is something I can't wait to get my hands on. Anyways, I'm hoping you're all having a wonderful day. Goodbye.