3.5/5 ★ – squid0812's review of Frostpunk.

Includes light spoilers*** I have some mixed feelings on this one. At first glance, Frostpunk appears to be a fairly straightforward management sim / city builder, albeit one with a unique and intriguing hook (it’s an alternate history scenario featuring a catastrophic climate shift occurring in Victorian era England; the player’s job is to construct a functioning settlement around a massive coal-fueled generator in the frozen north). However, beyond merely constructing a city, the player is also charged with passing laws that will affect how the people living in the city view your leadership. And the game does everything it can to make this element of the play as stressful and tense as possible. You start off short of workers, short of supplies, with your citizens becoming ill and complaining about your failure to heat their homes. The game immediately pushes you to start passing laws that are morally dubious, to say the least. Short on workers? Well, why not just put the kids to work? Need more productivity? No problem, just bump the length of the workday up to 14 hours. This is Frostpunk’s unique twist…it wants to slowly but surely coerce the player into becoming a complete monster by introducing a series of (seemingly) desperate conditions that make the player feel like they have no choice: become a tyrant or die. And for the first time through, this emphasis on desperation degrading morality is really effective. Here’s the problem, though - all of the challenges the game throws at you are really just part of a ruse to make the game appear more challenging than it actually is. After my wonderfully engaging and tense first playthrough (which ended in failure - the city folk justifiably kicked me out as I was desperately trying to hold onto my job by transforming the city into a totalitarian police state), I reflected on my strategy. Going back through for the second time, I focused on making my city as efficient as possible - and noticed in doing so that I could almost completely ignore the lawmaking process and the conditions the game intermittently throws in the player’s way. All of the dangers that had vexed and challenged me the first time through were exposed as mere checks for whether my city was efficient enough. A great example is the Londoners scenario - a few weeks into the main campaign a large group of panicked citizens plan to leave the city. Not only that, but they start stealing food and recruiting other people to leave with them. The first time through, this event produced a lot of angst for me - it was ultimately what pushed me over the edge into becoming a straight-up dictator. The second time through, I simply ignored the Londoners - and because everyone was warm and fed, they all gave up and agreed to stay within just a few days. The first time was a great moment of tension and moral uncertainty. The second time wasn’t even an event - it was just an objective marker that filled corner of the screen as I ensured that coal thumpers and sawmills were functioning at max efficiency. I finished my second playthrough in victory - the city survived, no one died, the game even gave me a stamp of approval to show I hadn’t become a moral abomination. But, in spite of my improved performance, I didn’t have nearly as much fun - all of the surprise and tension was gone, all of the rueful chuckles this game had produced from me with its constant twists and turns were replaced by the furrowed brow of the manager, meticulously checking to ensure all of his tools are working properly. For me, this is the rare game in which mastery does not improve the experience; indeed, for me, it only dampened it. Most of the other base game scenarios ended up with the same issue - because I had figured out the formula for success, they were generally frictionless and lacked suspense (The Fall of Winterhome - a clever and challenging scenario in which the player must deconstruct a poorly run city before rebuilding - is an exception). A great game the first time through that loses a lot of its magic once you start to see the strings. Still, a must-play for those who prefer games that generate tension and stress galore.