beautiful and harrowing town builder/survival game. snowpiercer meets pathologic meets banner saga. Every new day is filled with utter disempowerment and dread but the experience somehow manages to feel like a galvanizing struggle, worth persevering through to its end, despite cruelly thwarting you at every turn??? An amazing tonal and mechanical balance to achieve. So much dignity and degredation in this, the atmosphere is a real achievement. I especially love how the game has a Hope/Discontentment sorta metric like so many of these town building games do, but they're separate stats rather than a lone "happy/unhappy" binary slider. It feels really fitting that even in the harshest and most deleterious times, when discomfort and discontentment run rampant, it's still possible for hope to rise through unified struggle and shared purpose. felt such cameraderie and connection to my sickly little british workers! buying them all new parkas and fancy hot chocolate mixes for christmas. sorry 4 compromising my morality and publicly executing a few of u

About once a year I return to Frostpunk to get a handful of playthroughs in, mostly in the main scenario, but this wonderfully weird combination of survival game and city builder always tends to pull me back when I'm lacking in something else to play. It took me a little while to wrap my mind around the intricacies of its systems but it's thankfully a game that's still fun to learn even in failure.

The biggest compliment I can give to Frostpunk is that I originally played this game in the middle of summer, and by the end of my first session, the unyielding oppression of its frozen scenario left me positively freezing in real life. There's a genuine psychological effect to it that makes you absolutely feel like you're cold, even when it's 90 degrees outside. Never experienced anything like that before.

Only finished the first scenario and it took me about ten hours and four attempts to pull through. This game is hard! I don't know the other scenarios yet but the first one was a blast, very bleak in its desolate atmosphere and highly immersive (the first city builder I recommend playing with headphones). You will have to make tough choices and sacrifices; people will die but with clever resource management and planning ahead you'll pull through. It's quite stressful even with active pause mode, so keep that in mind if you expect something like Anno only in a different setting.

It's a bit linear structured and feels at times more like a puzzle or board game than a city builder with highly complex systems underlying. Balancing hope, discontent, injuries, coldness and hunger is far from being a binary system but it lacks depth you typically find in grand strategy games. This does work well for a scenario-based game like this, though, which offers cutscenes and an intense atmosphere. It's not as systemic as the most complex strategy games and city builders. That's part of the reason why I like this game so much so far and its approach.

During the final week of frostpunk's main campaign, a blizzard that plummets temperature to degrees so unprecedentedly cold workers can no longer leave their homes blows through. You - as leader - are told that the coal mines are at danger of collapsing. You are faced with a choice. Either coal production - which creates coal to drive your most vital resource: heat - halts to 30% efficiency or you must send workers to a sure death repairing the mines.

Unless your reservoirs of coal can last a few more days (they probably can't) this isn't an option. You have to sacrifice your workers because you need the coal to last through this final scenario. This is the key issue with frostpunk, a game that presents you with these hard moral decisions that are actually easy to solve because they come down to: make the better moral choice or have a chance of succeeding at the game.

There are some great mechanics at work here. There's a tech tree with equally great options that it's tough to decide where to begin. Every resource is strained enough that you're constantly maneuvering between upping and lowering production. But, this isnt an open ended game. By the end most of your tech tree will be filled out. You will have chosen fascism or flirted with it to see major degree, whether it's a theocracy or dictatorship. It's a narrative, and not the strongest one, but is interesting at it's attempt to tell it through a city building game.

The end asks you "was it worth it?" (this might depend on some of your decisions and this might not always show up I'm not sure?) And, I'm no fatalist, I think half people dead is better than full extinction? Thematically there are ties to climate change, but in frostpunk the ice age is caused by volcanoes erupting and blocking out the sun. Obviously the politics are dicey for a game of this budget, but it would have been more resonant to place this amidst our current politics. An AC generator to tie into global warming? Not sure. What we got feels half assed politically more set dressing than the screed I wanted.

The presentation is lovely. The edges of the screen are icy, music gets more ominous as the situation worsens. This review is mostly negative, but I'm still rating it pretty good because the core mechanics and systemic interplay is really great even when it's a mostly linear affair.

Frostpunk is an interesting spin on the colony builder genre. It definitely has some unique aspects, including the theme and the building style, but is a bit too linearly structured for me.

This game leans very hard into its theme. The building construction is radial, around a furnace, which supplies heat protecting you from the cold. This is a super cool way to blend the theme into the mechanics of the game and it definitely gives the game a unique feel and look. Beyond the cold, you have to deal with hunger, injuries, and discontent. Each of these pressures is dealt with in a similar fashion (linear tech and building upgrades) and the same resources (coal, wood, and steel) which means the actual gameplay becomes a balance between these factors, rather than a freeform interaction with a complex system as in most colony builders.

This results in a game that feels fairly linear and reaching equilibrium (especially in sandbox mode) is pretty straightforward once you understand how the game works. There are some optional tech upgrades to try to break this up (choosing Faith or Order), but the end result is more of a flavor difference than a mechanical one, which makes it unsatisfying.

Frostpunk presents a super unique vision of this genre, but overall just doesn't have much to offer beyond the theme to encourage you to become invested and keep playing.

Simply AMAZING.
This game is difficult, brutal at times, pessimistic, desperate and in the end... hope.

It lacks a better tutorial, you are simple thrown by the game and that is it. The events are few so doesnt have a big replay factor like other city like games. But, the first times you play it (because you will 95% fail in the first time) will be brutal and very tense.

The union of the systems with the setting is striking; your struggles to overcome scarcity in the face of a persistent natural disaster immediately create fear and urgency. That was enough to carry me through one session of the main campaign, but I don't see myself getting much from a harder difficulty or a different scenario. Because the fundamental elements of the simulation are ultimately fairly simple, most of the events meant to heighten entropy (i.e. the flavor) instead have predictable outcomes, and there's little reward in deviating from what works to explore the fairly robust tech trees. A decent introduction to city-building sims, but even as a relative novice to the genre, I needed more.

I played Frostpunk on Xbox One, and this was my second time installing the game. I first tried this game almost a year ago, but it was way too difficult for me. A couple weeks ago, I gave it another chance and I beat the first scenario on Very Easy mode and I loved it.
The music is soo good and I love steampunk architecture. It just sounds so industrial and orchestral it's awesome. Everything looks so gritty and I love it.
The choices the game present to you were so difficult as well. I chose the "Faith" law book because I thought it would allow more freedom than "Order" but I ended up just creating a theocratic fascist state :(. Maybe if my citizens would calm down then I wouldn't have to publicly execute them lol.
Since I played the game on Very Easy, I didn't find the game too difficult, but that was alright by me as I just enjoyed the city building and resource getting aspect. Playing with a controller is probably worse than with a kbm, but I was able to figure it out and it worked well for me.
Overall this is a really great game.

This game has a really cool setting. It's a city builder with a heat management aspect, so you have to make sure your citizens (survivors) don't freeze to death in their homes or at work. It's a really cool idea and aesthetic, the problem is the game is super linear. Expect to chuck your first game up to a learning experience and losing that one, as is usual with city builders in my experience. But the game is too linear and easy so the second one is probably going to be a success, and once you've done it there's nothing else to play for. There are events in the game, sure, but they are either predetermined or I got very unlucky in getting the exact same events in the same order. I hope the sequel can do better in this regard, as this is really fun the first time through, it just doesn't have the usual aspect of replayability I expect from a city builder.

I wanted to love Frostpunk. I love everything about it- the aesthetic, the music, the setting, the choice system are all phenomenal. I like some challenging Sim games. Of course I snapped up Frostpunk.

I've played it several times and failed several times, each time getting a little further before dying due to something I did hours before. Okay, restart, try again. This thing is the dark souls of Sims games. The thing is, each mistake in dark souls doesn't send you back to the beginning, three hours ago.

Maybe I'll revisit and try again, but even my stubborn self couldn't love Frostpunk.

Não é um jogo semelhenate a Sim City ou, sei la, Surviving Mars. Frostpunk é um jogo bem tenso, um misero passo errado ou poucas horas tardio já é suficiente para que, nos próximos dias, sua cidade entre em colapso por causa do frio e você precise reiniciar tudo. Constantemente temos que tomar decisões polemicas como promulgar uma lei que permite o trabalho INFANTIL, desistir da democracia e implementar um regime autoritario ou teocratico.
A trilha sonora reforça muito o tom angustiante, ficando mais pesada a medida que as coisas vão piorando e um pouco mais leve quando melhoram.
É um bom teste de humanidade e até onde vamos pra garantir nossa sobrevivencia.

𝐎𝐁𝐒: 𝐀𝐒 𝐕𝐄𝐙𝐄𝐒 𝐐𝐔𝐀𝐒𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐌𝐏𝐑𝐄, 𝐄𝐔 𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐒𝐎 𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐂𝐀𝐑 𝐔𝐌 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐈𝐋𝐄𝐑 𝐀𝐈 𝐍𝐎 𝐌𝐄𝐈𝐎, 𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐀𝐎 𝐋𝐄𝐈𝐀 𝐏𝐎𝐑 𝐒𝐔𝐀 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐀 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐀 𝐄 𝐑𝐈𝐒𝐂𝐎.

E LÁ VAI EU PERDER MAIS UMA RUN

Enfim partindo pra análise, nunca pensei que gostaria desse estilo de jogo até realmente jogar, tudo nele é friamente calculado, nesse jogo é basicamente você sendo um prefeito tentando construir uma cidade estável o suficiente para a grande nevasca que se aproxima, e bem... nem preciso dizer que falhei inúmeras vezes, e o jogo é assim você precisa perder para aprender e tomar estratégias diferentes desde a fazer alguma fonte de calor ou dar abrigo pras pessoas, lembrando que tu jã esta no meio de uma nevasca intensa, então acaba que a maioria das escolhas pode te ferrar muito se não souber administrar elas com o tempo, sem falar que existe um sistema de reputação, os NPCs realmente podem te odiar, mas não irei falar muito disso pois é bem mais interessante descobrir por conta própria, mas resumindo bem porcamente o jogo é cace, fique quentinho e sobrevive.

E não enche o saco falando que faltou isso ou aquilo, apenas falo oque lembro que no caso é quase nada.

Enfim essa é apenas a opinião de alguem que ama jogar video jogos☝️🤓.

Probably my favorite city builder game. Challenging without being soul-crushing; forces you to make actual hard decisions, often avoiding having options that can be immediately considered the obvious superior choice; makes you feel genuinely really good when you clear a scenario without resorting to fascism.

The game's setting and presentation are top notch as well. It's the sort of steampunk I like, where it remains true to the genre's origins and maintains grounding in its historical context, instead of mining the idea for an aesthetic. The soundtrack is top notch as well; Piotr Musiaɫ's score beautifully captures the game's depiction of the desperation and drive of the human spirit to survive in the face of impossible odds.