I'm Done Playing: Frostpunk
In which I heat things up
The world is doomed. An eternal winter has covered the globe, and destroyed our old way of life. By dozens, people have left the cities of old to literally huddle together for warmth at the South Pole. Your task is to guide these people through the first hundred days of their new lives; to shape, by your actions, the very structure of society. Do well, and you’ll go down in history a hero. Do poorly, and everyone dies.
I’m done playing Frostpunk.
What is this?
Frostpunk is a scenario based city builder. A bunch of rowdy 1800s working class Londoners have escaped eternal winter by running to the South Pole (?), and your job is to build a city that keeps everybody nice and toasty while various crises unfold around you.
People escaped eternal winter by running to the South Pole?
A little odd, isn’t it? The game doesn’t explain this. I thought for a moment that perhaps the central core that heats and powers your city was a geo-thermal device that had to be located at a pole, but you power it with coal, so that doesn’t actually make sense.
I’m inclined to think that you’re a deranged cult leader who took advantage of a colder than average winter in London to recruit a bunch of simpletons, and the story of Frostpunk is you as Jim Jones trying to desperately keep your grip after the insane decision to isolate your members by moving to the South Pole.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. What do you actually do in Frostpunk?
At its core, its a city builder. In a genius stroke designed to make urban planning undergraduates happy, your settlement is arranged in concentric circles around a central core. You build housing, food huts, medical stations or workshops around this central core, and it’s incredibly satisfying to snap the pieces onto the grid, then build roads to connect your growing city.
You’ve got to manage resources in the usual way: make sure your people have enough food; harvest wood, coal, and iron for buildings, etc. But since you’re at the South Pole, you also have to manage heat. If you don’t keep your buildings warm enough, people freeze to death.
Hence the Frost in the title.
Right. The game does a great job of conveying the sensation of cold via wind effects, frost cracks on the screen, a “thermal view” that shows you how warm each part of your city is, and a general atmosphere of despair. I played the game during the summer, but I had the sense of being indoors in a cozy room in the dead of winter.
What about the punk?
Really, it’s a mystery. I assume punk refers to the player, further alluding to the fact that you’ve thrown off society’s shackles in the creation of your personal cult.
Seems a little flimsy. What other evidence do you have for this theory?
Well, at some point in the game a faction decides you’re doing a bad job and wants to return to London. To deal with these malcontents you choose one of two routes to go down: Order or Faith. If you choose Order, you create a fascist police state; choose Faith, and you create a theocracy.
Now, that’s suspicious on its own. But the culmination of the tech tree for both is the installation of yourself as a perfect, unassailable leader who has absolute power over his members. The game subtly implies this is a bad thing, but by placing this option atop the tech tree it systemically encourages it.
Hm.
Really, it’s surprising this sort of framing hasn’t been mined more thoroughly. City builders are about the fantasy of control: What if you could determine every minor aspect of a community’s life? Frostpunk is the natural evolution of that: your people are stuck in a remote location, dependent on you for heat and shelter. Because of that, you have narrative license to send their children to coal mines, feed them sawdust, or force them to worship you as a god. Your word is law.
Sounds like Frostpunk examined the narrative implications of a city-builder and crafted a story to justify them.
That’s right. And I think that’s why it succeeds as well as it does. There’s a grim desire in most city builders to create an efficient dystopia or destroy your immaculate city with natural disasters. You don’t really have power unless you have the power to destroy.
Frostpunk is satisfying in part because it builds those impulses into the narrative of the game. You must order floggings in the public square; You must turn away refugees. Most desire for power is twinged with sadism, even if its just a desire to punish the “bad” people, and Frostpunk skillfully incorporates that into the narrative of the game.
Does Frostpunk pass the Bechdel test?
It doesn’t assume the player’s gender, so if your cult leader is a woman it certainly does. If you’re a man (or nonbinary) I think it does, technically, since you can assign women to different roles, and different groups of people will have conversations with each other.
That said, the mechanics of Frostpunk are such that it doesn’t really matter what gender someone is. Crushing desperation makes each person little more than a set of hands and a mouth to feed. It’s very egalitarian.
Why’d you stop playing?
I won the game. There’s a bunch of other scenarios one can play, but once I had played through the progression tree once I felt pretty good about setting the game down.
Would you recommend Frostpunk?
Fans of the city builder genre should check it out. It manifests underlying assumptions of the genre in an interesting narrative way, and is pretty fun to play, besides.