Frostpunk

Frostpunk is a management strategy game from the creators of This War of Mine. The game tells the story of people surviving in a snowy world and using steam technologies. You will need to build and maintain a city under challenging conditions. You will develop the last bastion of humanity, which is located in the ice. It is necessary not only to gather resources and create new buildings but also to maintain a positive mindset in a society that may suffer from hunger, cold, and pressure from the authorities.

Frostpunk is a real-time city-building strategy with management elements, set in a steampunk environment. Developed by 11bit studio in 2018 for PC, Xbox One, and PS4, it focuses on the survival of a small settlement of people in arctic cold. The player must not only provide shelter and food for their charges but also keep their homes warm while making many difficult decisions.

Circumstances constantly disrupt plans, forcing adaptation, survival, and growth despite the ever-worsening living conditions. Resources must be redistributed, children must be sent to work, and the demands of people dissatisfied with the player's actions must be met. The immersion effect is achieved through excellent graphics with beautiful effects and high-quality textures.

Frostpunk does not have an endless game mode; instead, it offers carefully crafted but still finite scenarios, each telling a story from its own perspective. At the time of release, there were three, and later the developers added several more.

According to the general plot, at the end of the 19th century, a glacial period began in the world. Continental Europe and England were buried under snow, and even large cities were frozen. To survive, people, using steampunk technologies, headed to the Arctic, rich in wood and coal, to use monstrous boilers to heat new settlements.

Then the specifics begin — one scenario simply offers survival, another sets an important goal — to save all plants from extinction, and so on. Each can be completed in different ways, making opposite decisions along the way, which achieves replayability.

In the Arctic, the player has access to a small area for construction, surrounded by a wall of ice, with a steam generator in the center, the heat from which spreads to the nearest homes. Nearby are a few resources available for free; more can be obtained by opening mines and factories.

At the same time, the player is not isolated in their "pit"; they send expeditions in different directions across the game world, find additional quests that shed light on what happened to the planet in the world of Frostpunk and tell how people tried to survive, as well as encounter dangers and accept refugees.

The main priority is the survival of people, so you need to provide them with shelter, food, warmth, work, and entertainment, choosing from three dozen building options, some of which are constructed from rare, non-renewable resources. You will have to choose - build several low-efficiency buildings or one high-efficiency one, but lose a rare resource.

Harsh conditions will require the adoption of new laws, the enforcement of which will not please everyone. It is very important to maintain loyalty and hope among the people, otherwise they will literally throw a bad mayor out into the cold or run away themselves, deceived by their fantasies.

In Frostpunk, you must constantly manage - reallocating human resources, building and upgrading homes, increasing storage capacity, and regulating the supply of heat to the city.

A significant part of the gameplay is dedicated to research: it improves people's lives, increases the productivity of enterprises, and boosts the volume and speed of resource extraction. The game borrows its visual style, building models, and programmable automaton robots from steampunk.