I am a villain. No, really; the first thing I did when I was given the option to enact a new law in the frozen tundra of my new city was child labor. Tropico 6, you might have all that humor business going on; making it a light and happy time of cold war Cuba. Now is the turn of my gritty, depressing, and maniacal plans. Did I say maniacal? I meant the wettest of dreams from the most stereotypical soul-less conservative mind.

The story of Frostpunk, if you can call it that, is about a retrofuturistic world of humans falling into that thing the dinosaurs died of. The people of Londinium, or the people that remain, have collected all three of their possessions that aren’t glued to the floor by ice and headed north. The obvious joke, of course, is that they stopped about Loughborough and said, “That’s north enough; they already have a weird name, we don’t need to hear bath pronounced the wrong way.” Anyway, they find a hole in Nordaustlandet with a stonking big heater in the middle; lucky that, and proceed to live there under my rule. Idiots!

If you read the Tropico 6 review you may have noticed my lack of empathy when I’m supposed to have unwavering power, and how I didn’t get it in my island republic. Frostpunk wouldn’t be grim and depressing if it didn’t give me all the control to kill everyone, and on my first playthrough, I did. I had a theory on this, as I assumed the game would be far too wide for me to become a 100 percent completionist of my darkest fantasies before the deadline on my schedule. The theory goes as thus, there is no end and you are just trying to survive. I lasted fifteen days before I was punted out of the hole.

Given Frostpunk is a city-builder and survival game (sure throw in horror too.) I don’t think I could have been blamed for thinking that as “A New Home” is your main scenario with the others branch off of after reaching 20 days providing new challenges. Though i should mention I have problems: A) keeping sick people alive; and B) keeping children fed, I don’t think I need an extra challenge. Just the recipe for beef jerky, a hacksaw, and grandma. It is the only way the children will get breakfast before going off to another day of hard labor.

The gameplay is your typical city-builder style system ported to a console; however, a lot of it is streamlined. I may have said at one point that strategy games on consoles forget how simple it was to control with a mouse and keyboard. Translating that full 120+ buttons to something with just 24 as standard (more for the Xbox Elite controller) is understandably hard. I’d say, as a way to hold off console obsolescence, including mouse and keyboard support wouldn’t go amiss.

My suggestions aside, I did compliment the controls for a second. You are still navigating several construction menus all working on circles. However, here it makes sense to do circles as everything, including your city, is build in a circle. Between the whole myriad of noise that comes in and menus, I don’t believe I’ve been over-encumbered with this system. I think that’s the first time on a console I can say that about a real-time strategy/city-builder of any kind.

The core premise is, like any other city-builder, to keep your people as happy as possible with their basic needs being yelled at you from menus. Unlike the SimCity needs being a little more 21st-century basics, you are not dealing with that new-fangled indoor plumbing; you are dealing with the very basics. This means: heating, food, housing, and sickness. Everything else is but a distant memory of when you had genitals to procreate, and they weren’t frozen off back in London.

Successfully provide these things and the metrics recounting your successes and failures will rise and fall. One task sounds as simple as: “Provide a livable heat to three homes and sustain it for X number of hours.” Do this and the metric that’s known as “Hope;” (something I’ve never had,) increases. Fail to do these tasks and the metric that’s labeled “Discontent,” increases and makes you as welcome as a dentist in a nightmare.

The issue, as was the case to my first downfall (among others), is sometimes being asked to get something that’s nigh on impossible to get for camp. In particular, with my case, I was asked to get an infirmary for the group to increase their hope. They asked for this at the end of the working day, I had yet to unlock that level of the skill tree, and it would take a minimum of sixteen working hours to unlock. Meanwhile, I was staring down the barrel of my hope already being gravely low, a small group of people wanted to head back to London, and I was running low on supplies. Sometimes your downfall is not one, but all your mistakes.

One of your points to make decisions would be the laws I’ve been referenced several times here. Say you need more of a workforce to complete tasks quicker: child labor! However, these can have knock-on effects beyond your hope and discontent. For example, stating you want “radical treatments” to solve that troublesome frostbite, some of the workforce will be amputees, be less productive, be depressed more often than not, and then kill themselves. I didn’t say this was the happy go lucky Cuban island of nudity, mostly because your tackle would drop off.

Sometimes you’ll want to please the limp-wristed lot that doesn’t want child slave labor while wearing clothes made by children. I know, how rich are they? So as a response, you’ll provide their dead a proper place of rest or give them some blood sport for their downtime. Either way, the maniacal and heartless ones are thinking about productivity and keeping everyone possible alive, while the rest want to live in a fantasy land of hookers and no problems: they both have upsides and downsides. Though only one survives and the other teaches kids how to do some god damn work.

In conclusion: Frostpunk is depressing, gritty, harsh, and I adore it for all those things. It is the horror I like, where humans are just hapless because of their greed in the first place. As a city-builder, it takes a minute to understand; and as a survival game it stands out against the dull, grey, and messy early access zombie games. Taking it back to basic survival. Sure, the control system isn’t perfect, but it is as streamlined as it could get. I’d like to compare Frostpunk to FTL or Dark Souls, as the survival makes replayability a question of your preference to rogue-likes and knowledge learned from failure.

An Xbox One review copy of Frostpunk was provided by 11-bit studios for this review.

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Frostpunk

$29.99 USD

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• The tone that hits the floor crying and stays there.
• Streamlined controls for console players.
• I could be as evil for my people's survival as I liked.

Cons

• Some mistakes and failures can be out of the player's control.