The second game i've ever played that makes being a good person an actual dillema instead of mere aestethic

The main contradiction with this conceit is of course the core nature of city builders - you're a half-god, perched roughly 300m above the land, shaping an entire micro civilisation at will. It lends itself easily to megalomanical power trips, less so to empathy.

And indeed, the first time I've played Frostpunk, I approached it with the same detachment I always did with this genre. I choose the order path because frankly, it looked cool and it was more of a choice of aestethic than anything else. And as my utopia-where-we-execute-one-person-each-morning-to-keep-going reached the end and the game dared judge me for my actions...well, I felt preached to despite not choosing the religious path (heh).
"How dare you moralize to me after giving me the tech tree that led me to my orwellian little machine?"

Only on my second playthrough, did I realise that this is not so much a game of choices as a game about restraint.

The political tech tree isn't a tech tree, it is rather a downward spiral of dire emergency measures. I wouldn't say the game communicates this poorly, I think it's more of a problem of how we're conditioned from other games to treat these things. It is also very easy to assume that the moral choice is right there (As it often is with other games): Faith (good) or Order (bad) ?

But no, both faith and order paths start out well with actual morally good additions to your society and indeed the ending judgment is reasonable too and won't scold you for those early decisions like communal gatherings or religious food shelters. "You haven't crossed the line" the closing text informed me the second time around and I felt proud.

Yes, on my second path I picked faith. Albeit not a faithful man, I was quite disilusioned by any definition of "order" watching state crackdowns on various protests in the post-pandemic age. Moreover, while the situation in Frostpunk is much more dire than a low lethality pandemic, I still recalled pretty well the various "emergency measures" the state enacted then and how they all seemed to curtail criticism against the government moreso than help stop a pandemic.

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. " says Marx, and so I ventured into the path of faith.
Temples, churches, food shelters, shrines - they all felt harmless but soon after the people started nagging for religious police. And this time around, I refused to oblige. The perks were obvious, the effects all positive and it was precisely here that the game grabbed my empathy, it was here that I snapped out of my urge to complete tech trees and to adorn my city in badass banners of a perverted cause. It is here that other games fail at making moral choices meaningful. Nor Bethesda nor Bioware can resist the alure of rewarding goodness or of making the choice materially the same albeit with a different aestethic. Paragon and renegade is hardly a choice about morals or selfishness, it's a choice of wether you want to be a prick with red eyes or the hero the game practically begs you to be.

True moral choice is sacrifice, it's knowingly making things harder for yourself, missing out on things or skipping precious content. It's when the game offers little to no mechanical rewards for being a hero. When by accepting new refugees, you stack the odds against yourself, when you restrain yourself from slipping into despotism only for your people to be more miserable and more pissed. When you refuse to enlist children into the workforce and risk the future of your entire city. But you do it anyway. Because it is the right thing to do.


(To answer the opening sentence - the other game is Pathologic 2)

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.

I feel miserable all the damn time in Frostpunk. Everything feels so hopeless right from the beginning of the map. There is so much loss and so much more that will be lost. It's as though all of my little villagers are being marched to their deaths, and I'm fully responsible.

I love city-builder video games, and moreso when there is construction taking place over time and materials needed to create your little towns. It's usually so pleasant to watch workers head to their jobs or go to their homes in a Tropico, Cities: Skylines, or Timberborn.

Except in Frostpunk, where the survivors dredge through snow to a workplace they will surely get ill working inside. Then after their shifts, they will go home because the infirmary is full of other sick survivors.

I'm deciding if I want to potentially sacrifice a survivor on an expedition in order to find some kind of material to finish a building. The small amount of survivors in Frostpunk are an important asset, but I will give up their lives for just some additional coal to get through a cold snap I'm never certain will end.

This was one of my first experiences of a simulator of its kind where I was always full of dread. The only negative aspect of this is that the fail states are decided potentially hours before the player will see them, which elevates this dread. I never know when something I've done made the rest of my session completely futile until I've invested more time; then that dread turns more into frustration in that I've wasted my time.

I've played through the campaign and some DLC. I'll eventually revisit some other campaigns, because it's a really great game. It's just difficult to put those hours in and only hit failures.

Tinha feito uma review antes desse jogo, mas depois de fazer todos os mapas do jogo base e concluí-los, eu volto aqui e falo sem dúvidas. Esse daqui é um dos melhores jogos de gerenciamento de recursos que eu já joguei. Muito viciante e divertido, o jogo é bem difícil e cada vez que você perde um mapa, você descobre uma maneira de tentar passar, o que torna o jogo extremamente satisfatório e bom de jogar.

História
Não tem muita história, mas basicamente o mundo está em frio absoluto e você foi escolhido para liderar a cidade e fazer com que todos sobrevivam. Os mapas têm uma história própria e criativa, deixando-os diferentes do resto.

Gameplay
O brilho desse jogo. Um gerenciamento de recursos extremamente satisfatório e bem difícil, onde você precisa equilibrar muito bem os recursos que gasta e também as leis que você cria para os cidadãos, para não deixá-los muito descontentes ou perderem completamente a esperança em você. Os mapas, além da história principal, têm elementos que os deixam bem diferentes do mapa principal, fazendo com que você precise focar em coisas diferentes dependendo do mapa.

Trilha Sonora
É legal, mas nada muito chamativo.

Conclusão
É um jogaço e caso você goste do estilo de jogo, teste, que eu tenho certeza que você vai gostar e viciar. Com um estilo fenomenal, Frostpunk é extremamente divertido e desafiador. Nota 10/10.

Este juego lo probe pirata y tras jugarlo un dato me di cuenta de tres cosas.

Primero, esta super guay. La vista cenital esta muy bien pensada con la forma de funcionar del juego. El arte es precioso y las decisiones morales y eticas son duras, aunque siempre hay que apoyar la explotacion infantil.

Segundo, que es un juegon con mucha complejidad, mas alla de la que yo me imaginaba, aunque estoy seguro de que con esfuerzo se puede hacer.

Y tercero, si algun dia lo compro, ya que, adivinen, tambien lo perdi, tal vez lo platinee.

As far as city builders go, I believe I have only really ever played Cities: Skylines and this game. I do really enjoy them, but I often feel like it is very easy to end up in a doom spiral. Frostpunk, at least for me, is also a lot more difficult than Cities: Skylines, mainly because the number of different resources makes it a lot easier to fall into said doom spiral. I have not played enough of this game to say why this happens, or enough of the other offerings into this genre to truly assess its quality, but one day I do want to come back to this and at least beat every scenario.

As it stands, I have only beaten the first, "A New Home" and come close to beating "Refugees". I really like the way the scenarios offer slight variations which mean you have to adopt an entirely new strategy. In what I have played, I have found that once you find that winning strategy, it almost swings the other way to you having too many resources and making the game far easier, but again, I cannot say if that will always be the case.

I got addicted to this game for a few days, but I think I really oversaturated myself with it, while also expecting the initial scenario to take a bit longer and not have such a final and sudden conclusion right after the storm. I can see there is a lot more to experience here, and from what I have played, I would certainly recommend the game.