In the spirit of management simulators with narrative elements, I have bought and played the Frostpunk game – the first one of two parts. Let me tell you at the very beginning that this game did not live up entirely to my expectations. It was a nice, impactful experience but it became really repetetive really quickly. I have played one run of the game and eneded up killed by my own people for being a horrible person – at the end of my playthrough people have been dying by the minute, so they were quite right to do so.
In Frostpunk, you take on a role of a city Mayor, who handles the growth of a new city – New London, in a wintery, postapocalyptic frostland. Your task is to balance the lives of your people, needs of the community and the workload needed to deliver on those needs. You will be faced with drops in temperature levels, freezing winds, discontent and failing of hope. From time to time you will need to make decisions that will influence the mood of the people. You have also access to a Book of Laws, that can allow for building more buildings and enacting decrees – both with upsides and downsides to people’s wellbeing.
Frostpunk does well for its managemenet part. It keeps you on your toes with flactuating temperature and never-ending run for resources. It certainly balances needs and poeples’ requests nicely and in a way you can feel the stakes, the uncertainty of every day.
The problem with this game, for me, is much more apparent on its narrative side. It wants you to think there is a hidden depth to the city-building, management part, but in a closer look this notion falls short of expectations. The decisions, in case of Book of Laws and daily struggeles of your poeple, are non consequential. They do not carry over from crisis to crisis, nor do they mimic the actual state of your city. The biggest contuinuity there is, is when our twon has been lacking certain thing for longer period of time, citizens will ask for this thing to be taken care of. That is it. There are some storylines you can engage in with your explorers, who wander the frostland, but they are limited to two sentences and take/leave the resources mechanic. Those choices enrich the gameplay, giving you some semblance of control over the happenings in your city – what kind of resources will you gain, will you take on more survivors, but ultimately it is all the same. It always goes back to the numbers – number of resources, number of people or number or special steam cores.
In the game, every citizen has a name and a simple family tree (some of them are alone in the world). They can be Children, Workers or Engineers – this social class will influence their capabilities and roles that they take on in the city itself. There are some game choices that feel intresting and crucial, for example will you make children work or will you make them special, safe places to spend their daytime in. It was something I wanted to make in my own game. Give every person a name, a connection and a role, so the player will feel more attached to them and will be made to make decisions where usability will clash with relationships. It seems like Frostpunk wantedt to go there too, but it fails at it. Firstly, because of the sheer numbers of people in the city. To make sure every building can be manned, your city can grow to have 200, 300 or more poeple. You cannot possibly care about every single one of them. Secondly, the problem is that whenever we are to mke a decision, we are not making the decision about a singluar person. We can have some choices involving a mutineer or a thief, but it will never be attached to a certain individual from the city. Starving Mother, Drunkard or anyone else we make a decision about is just a narrative element and not a functional being from our city. It breaks the immersion sometimes when you make a decision and there are no repercussions. Noone cares about the Drunkard just as much as you do not. Sometimes the only thing that comes out of a decision are comments from the actual people from your city, but again, they just randomly generated, Ashley is not always going to say something against you and Marcel is not a real friend to the establishement. It is just a generated quote that will impact nothing in the game itself. It gives you an illusion of life going on in your city but after some time, when you realise you should not pay attention to people talking but to numbers and levels of discontent you stop really noticing it.
The moment I have realised I can name the citizens myself I was so much more invested in them. Every time someone died I was making sure that it was not one of my three people I have named. From time to time I was just intrested to see what they are up to. It made the game and decisions much more inportant for me. And it was not even part of the normal gameplay. Just an aestethic detail.
In the game people do not learn. No matter how long they work in a coal mine they will never be better suited to work there. They can be equally suited to work in a Cookhouse or as a scout. The only distinction is between Workers and Engineers, where the second social class can work in some more sophisticated jobs like Inventors or Medics.
Overall, I have really appreciated the experience in the Frostpunk. It has pointed out that you can make a very intresting gameplay sing just a couple of resources, provinding you make a compelling ties between them.
To sum up, Frostpunk highlights for me several things:
– the importance of recognisibility of humans in-game for building a connection
– lack of need for a vast resource lineup, a few can do with intresting ties to each other
– importance of context and consequences for decisons
– decisons should be about real game people
– people should be influenced by their occupation
– people’s opinions should be their traits that influence their behaviour after some decisions