Frostpunk Is Free On The Epic Games Store

Monday, I honestly thought I’d get a man named 47 to kill me before I’d finish this month‘s Prime Gaming article. Tuesday, EA had suddenly delisted 5 Need for Speed games, House Flipper DLC got a release date, and I am going to ruin a bunch of university students‘ education by being inept. Wednesday, Ubisoft pulled its head out of the sand and admitted games can be political, Life is Strange devs (DONTNOD) are offering their LGBTQ+ positive game for free on pride month, Battlefield 6 is to be revealed this month, and you can get 200+ games in the Queer Games Bundle. Thursday, an E3 awards show was announced, because that’s what we need!

Well, isn’t it great when you can feel a bit smug for several reasons? Most notably, knowing when a “leak” is about as strong and stable as a politician’s handshake? Yes, the proposed “leak” on Reddit from a French version of the Epic Games Store Facebook account did turn out to be much like a politician’s promise, empty. Yet, that didn’t stop some sites reporting: “it is honestly going to happen this week guys!” It turns out, Lara is still trying to figure out where her dad is and how to lock a man in a fridge. However, it was a leak in a non-English speaking part of the internet that divulged this week’s game.

11-bit Studio’s Frostpunk is a dark and twisted take on the city-builder in a way only the studio behind This War of Mine could. I reviewed the console port of the publisher/developer’s city-builder come survival game back when it was released back in 2019; and did so again just yesterday in our latest YouTube video. With both, it was easy to focus on the eye-catching aspect of forced child labor, and driving them into dangerous jobs. Though as dark as that seems, there is a lot more complexity to it.

You play as the benevolent overlord to a group of people who fled the frozen tundra that is London to head north. To Londoners that probably means Milton Keynes and no further. To the rest of us, that means somewhere past Feriquarrie and maybe even a bit further than Gabhsunn Bho Dheas. Your job is to keep over one hundred people fed, heated, and housed. It is simple job really, if it were normal temperatures and not the post-apocalypse. Instead, you have to deal with arctic frost, along with temperatures starting at around a warm -20 degrees (centigrade) on Monday, and drifting to nice mild -150 degrees by Friday morning with an easterly wind.

To say Frostpunk is unforgiving would be an understatement. It actively tries to induce stress if you aren’t careful. Starting off simple, your job is to place down homes and collect resources by hand, all in the vain attempt to start the generator by nightfall. Soon enough, you’ll be placing hospitals 3 miles away from heaters so the sick will die faster, telling kids they can’t have more sawdust soup, and hacking the limbs of the invalid. This is about the time that someone says the morality of it all should dictate your path. Do you create authoritarian police state, or go the “everyone pitches in doing what we can” route. The tyrannical route is the easy one, providing you play your cards right.

Of course, the fail state is prescribed by the hope and discontent of your people, the ungrateful little sods they are. With every action comes a rise in hope or discontent and a possible lowering of the other, with your desire to keep hopes high as you send kids off to prison and tend to uncle Fred’s frostbite with a hacksaw. By the end of any session, if you are feeling happy with your decisions, you haven’t done it right (or your evil/stupid). I should say this, Frostpunk isn’t the deepest game out there, but what it offers with its systems is a fantastic experience.

If I want a happy little town to play with as I listen to a podcast or Big Finish Doctor Who and swear at it (the town), I’ll stick with Cities Skylines. However, if I want a proper “I’m going to grab you by the genitals and swing you about the place” kind of game, I’ll either opt for Dark Souls or Frostpunk. One is a little more relaxing than the other, but that’s what I get for having to deal with children and their parents moaning that I’ve put them in jail.

All this week, you can pick up Frostpunk on the Epic Games Store until the 10th of June. After the 10th, I’ll hopefully (though unlikely) be returning from my cabana boys serving me Sex on the Beach before I return to moan about E3, and possibly die in the middle of writing six billion words in three days. Once again, and I think this is for the penultimate time, Epic are doing the mystery game nonetheless that is going to make next week and the week of E3 so stressful. So expect writers from other sites to not understand basic French, “jusqu’au 3 Juin,” and we’ll get more articles proclaiming Rise of the Tomb Raider is coming this time. Honestly, it’s really happening this time.