As is the case with most city builders, most of the player’s time in Frostpunk 2 is spent looking down upon their city. That is what the game is all about, after all. However, Frostpunk 2 manages to shift that focus from the city of New London to the people within the city themselves. Players hardly even get to see the people that they start to care about. They don’t drive around the city taking care of whatever personal business they have. There is no way to select them and give them orders or commands directly. Looking down at the city, I see that the people are almost entirely absent. Yet they are always present in the player’s mind.
This is chiefly because the city’s people are the only metric for success. In the end, survival is all that matters. The only metric for how well a player’s efforts are working is how many people are dying. Every mechanic in Frostpunk 2 plays into the survival of the city’s citizens to ensure this. It all ties back into staying warm, satiated, and safe. Your citizens are not a means to an end like they are in many other strategy games. They are the end.
This relationship between mechanics and the city’s people puts down the foundation for players caring about them. But then Frostpunk 2 ups the ante by hitting players right in the gut with them as well. As the weeks go by, events take place that reflect the consequences of the player’s actions. For example, if you are running low on fuel for the generator responsible for keeping your entire city warm, you might choose to operate the generator on a lower level. This can allow it to run for longer even if it doesn’t keep people as warm during that time.
This could then cause an event to pop up to highlight and humanize the impacts of your choice. An example could be a diary entry written by a young girl discussing how cold she feels and hoping that she survives until she can feel warm again. Or it could be an old man writing about wishing that his work when he was younger had been enough to give his grandchildren a better life. These messages put faces on the digital number of the literal citizens of your city.
Then, when you get a message at the bottom right of the screen that reads, “55 citizens have died,” your brain connects the dots. Lowering the heating levels increases the rate of sickness in the city, which in turn raises the percent chance of death. But they aren’t just faceless deaths anymore. They’re that old man wishing he was leaving a better world behind or that little girl hoping to see better days. This is how Frostpunk 2 adds emotional weight to a player’s every decision. This is how it maintains a challenging emotional tone that no other city builder can.
What really makes Frostpunk 2 special is how it leverages these emotional beats as rewards and punishments. If you’re successful in leading your city forward, you’ll get peeks at the city’s life that highlight the beauty of enduring in the face of terrible odds. But if you start to struggle or the mechanics get away from you a bit, you are confronted with the tangible consequences of letting down the people you are responsible for. It elevates Frostpunk 2 above what a standard city builder can achieve and matches its impressive mechanical depth with equally impressive emotional moments.
Frostpunk 2 is available now for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S.
