At 11 Bit studios’ office in Warsaw, game director Kuba Stokalski is trying to show me Frostpunk 2. But the citizens of New London, the game’s virtual metropolis, have other priorities. Food and fuel are both running low, meaning large portions of the city are hungry and cold. Stokalski’s recently built extraction district is finally producing coal, but he’s placed it too close to several residential areas, causing a sharp uptick in squalor. Now, the city’s representative Council is about to conduct its first vote—to decide whether to oust Stokalski as its newly appointed Steward. “I’m not doing so well, and they see it.” Stokalski says, sounding flustered. “This isn’t going to be an easy one.”
Inside the Council’s circular hall, Stokalski has a small group of loyalists—known as Stalwarts—on his side. The rest of the Council comprises technophilic New Londoners, and more humanist Frostlanders, neither of whom are happy with Stokalski’s leadership. To get the votes he needs, Stokalski will have to grease some palms. He approaches the New Londoners with a deal, give him their approval, and I’ll put more resources into city development. “Let’s promise this and hopefully it will be enough,” Stokalski says.
The New Londoners agree, and Stokalski scrapes through the vote. If he hadn’t, the game would have been over—15 minutes from when it started. “We could have failed this first vote. It is not scripted,” he says, relieved. “We could have failed basically the third quest in the game.”
THE SOCIETY YOU INHERIT IS VERY DIFFERENT FROM THE ONE THE CAPTAIN RULED OVER
If you wondered whether would be as unforgiving as its predecessor, know that the game’s own director can’t leave it to run for more than five minutes without flirting with disaster. Yet while life in New London is as harsh as ever, it’s also radically different. The crater-city may have has been redesigned from the ground up to explore.
