Much like The Alters, there’s a driving question at the heart of Frostpunk 2. It’s just a single word apart, but that makes all the difference. “The big question,” says design director Jakub Stokalski, “is: what now?” It’s something the developers are asking of the first game’s Frostlands setting, and the people who inhabit it – who, as Stokalski points out, have by the end of the original Frostpunk essentially survived the end of the world – but also of themselves, as they attempt to follow up the first game’s enormous success with a pair of new directors at the helm.
This is a moment the studio has been preparing for, however. Przemysław Marszał, who was that game’s co-lead and art director before becoming CEO, explains that it was specifically conceived as “a game that we could more easily make a sequel to”, a decision made even before development on This War Of Mine was completed. “We already knew we wouldn’t make This War Of Mine 2. Or maybe not that we won’t, but we’re not planning to. Because we didn’t have anything more to tell.”
For a sequel to get the greenlight, the team needed to prove that there more to tell. Not only establishing that there was design space left in the concept, but figuring out what would be communicated via these new mechanics. “When we were setting out to develop a sequel – or even ask ourselves to – there was this question of,agrees: “Silence can be golden, right? It can be smarter not to say anything.”
