FROSTPUNK

Format PC, PS4, Xbox One

Developer/publisher 11 Bit Studios

Origin Poland

Release 2018

Frostpunk frames the end of the world in simple terms: global cooling. As the Earth begins to freeze and Victorian society collapses, people migrate en masse to the generators – a last-ditch attempt by industrialised nations to survive icy storms and plummeting temperatures. But as for what caused this global cooling? Lead writer Wojciech Setlak is emphatic that the answer doesn’t matter. “It’s not important why it’s cooling – it’s cooling, and it’s killing us!”

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Frostpunk wasn’t the first 11 Bit Studios game to be more interested in effect than cause. “This War Of Mine was not a game about war,” Setlak says of the studio’s acclaimed debut. “It’s about people who’ve had their lives changed by war. The war isn’t incidental, but it’s not important what they are fighting for. In the same way, Frostpunk is not a game about climate change. It’s about consequences.”

These consequences, most often, stem not from the circumstances but from your choices as player. As de facto leader of the last city on Earth, your actions apart from its city-building peers, though, is the way it abandons the genre’s default perspective of distant omniscience, instead forcing you to consider the people with whose lives and liberties you’re bartering. “In many strategy games you are very far away from the people,” lead designer explains. “In , we took that weakness and tried to turn it in our favour.”