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dkirschner's Frostpunk 2 (PC)

[June 14, 2025 01:35:10 PM]

I never really got into this, despite getting most of the way through the campaign (about 4 out of 5 chapters). There is a lot more to manage than in the first game. In Frostpunk 2, you no longer have just one city around a generator, but also outposts to run and a big map to explore. There are more resources to manage. There are more systems to manage. There are multiple factions to manage. It's hard to keep track of everything!

Despite the bigger scope, it's a really similar game. Build your city, keep the people warm, calm, and free of disease and squalor. The temperature goes up and down and you must adapt accordingly, reallocating heat to different districts such that citizens can continue working (ideally uninjured) and not get sick or die of cold. If the cold sets in, things break down fast. Threatening again are the "whiteouts," huge blizzards that last for weeks. You must prepare for them ahead of time, stockpiling food, coal and oil, materials, goods, and so on. There was a major whiteout in chapter 2 or 3 that I had prepared well for in terms of stockpiling, but I hadn't accounted for how unhappy all the factions would get because of the cold. All four factions hated me, my trust went to 0, and they were going to vote to depose me (which is a game over). I couldn't believe it and the only thing I can figure I could have done differently is overheat the generator. But I didn't do that because I was scared it would malfunction. Or perhaps you are supposed to come out of the whiteout hated by everyone and have to rebuild their trust. I funded factions' projects, reallocated heat to their homes, let them pass whatever laws they wanted, and promised them power, and just in the nick of time before the vote, I gained the amount of trust I needed.

I rebuilt all that trust, continued exploring and expanding into chapter 4, where a new outpost required for progression became unmanageable due to mistakes I made. With this particular outpost, you can choose to settle it or salvage cores (valuable and rare resources) to power the generator of your main city to the max level. I chose to salvage, but there are toxic fumes in the outpost. These get worse as you break the ice and extract resources, and I just kept losing so many people from disease. I replenished them over and over, but couldn't keep track of that and funneling other resources to the outpost at the same time, as well as managing my main city and first outpost. The outpost's generator kept losing power, one faction was really pissed off and kept destroying housing districts, which meant my people kept becoming homeless and freezing to death. I finally researched and built a watchtower for security, but then the faction attacked my industrial zone that was automating extraction (so fewer workers died from toxic fumes). Through all this, the generator kept powering down, I think because I didn't have energy extraction set up there and I wasn't funneling efficiently from my main base. Looking back on it, I probably should have built housing in the hills above the toxic fumes so at least my workers wouldn't die at home.

My favorite thing was trying to play all the factions. There's a system again where you pass laws, and each faction can gain and lose representatives in a chamber. They each have different ideologies too, and you might align with one over the other. But of course, doing something aligning with one or two factions might piss off another one, so you're always balancing. The game is transparent about how many votes laws need to pass, and if you need more votes, you can make promises to factions that were hesitant. This serves the dual purpose of getting your law passed and making a hesitant faction happy by fulfilling your promise.

Anyway, managing all these different things was very stressful and felt like pushing a boulder up a hill. I appreciate the complexity of Frostpunk 2, and I still love the environment, story, and tough choices. But like the first game, it's not enough to make me love playing it. I saw, oddly enough, that these developers have another game that just came out on Game Pass, The Alters, which looks unique. I might give that a look in the next few weeks.