Frostpunk 2 beta impressions: A cold heart will take you far

While knee-deep in a challenging Frostpunk 2 campaign, I found myself distracted by a pop-up notification.

“Steward, some wish for changes to our quarantine policy,” one of my faceless advisors explained. “Forced separation from loved ones is difficult for all when they have to go into quarantine. It’s especially hard for parents whose children are taken from them and put into quarantine. One such mother comes to the quarantine camp every day, asking to be allowed in to take care of her daughter. ‘She’s deathly afraid of being alone — she can’t cope without me!’ she pleads. Should we allow healthy parents into the camp with their sick children?”

I’d enacted the quarantine several in-game weeks earlier as a desperate attempt to eliminate a cold- and hunger-induced sickness that was, for all intents and purposes, a direct result of my poor leadership. The mountains of citizens succumbing to illness had put a strain on my reputation and, perhaps more importantly, deprived me of one of the city-building game’s greatest resources: people who can work. And so into quarantine the infirm went to prevent the dire situation from turning into a full-blown crisis.

Frostpunk 2 recently enjoyed a weeklong early access period, during which Polish developer 11 bit studios invited everyone who pre-ordered the deluxe edition to try out a beta build ahead of the game’s full launch on July 25. Much like its predecessor, the sequel tasks players with managing a community in a world ravaged by the snow-white totality of endless winter, though it’s apparently much less focused on the nitty-gritty than the original.

You and your fellow survivors can withstand these harsh conditions thanks to the city’s generator, a massive, heat-belching feat of engineering treated with a reverence typically reserved for gods. The severity of the situation is not only reflected in the constant pressure of the glacial ice surrounding your city (and, amid particularly brutal blizzards, the edges of your computer screen) but also the main menu itself. Where one might expect to click a simple “start” or “begin” button in other releases, Frostpunk 2 requires you to proclaim “the city must not fall” before embarking on your mission.

The preview was limited to free play in a single region and capped at 300 in-game weeks (about one to two hours of game time), but the content on display proved to be a perfect appetizer to make even me, a relative newcomer to the city-building and survival genre, hungry for more. Although initially overwhelmed by the game’s interwoven mechanics — there’s a whole city council system in which you can secure votes by making promises to the city’s various cliques that reverberate elsewhere, for example — I soon learned how to navigate its spinning-plates approach to crisis management. After half a dozen attempts, I was deftly clearing away ice fields for coal extraction and housing development without a second glance at the tutorial, freeing up my personal mental stack to experiment with research goals and the inevitable politics necessary to get anything done.

Of course, that’s not to say the decisions you make in Frostpunk 2 stick to the macro level. Every move, from general city planning to dealing with the random problems of a single citizen, is treated with equal importance. Big or small, your choices have a weight that sends ripples through time and space.

My advisor provided three potential scenarios in response to the mother’s request. I could amend the law to allow healthy parents into quarantine alongside their sick children, stick to the original word of the edict, or end the separation process altogether. The final choice was out of the question, seeing as the quarantine was the only thing giving my city a fighting chance against disease, which left me to consider the ramifications of the first two. Frostpunk 2 hides very little info from the player, so hovering over my options gave me a brief breakdown of how the immediate future would proceed should I make each decision.

The fallout of both choices concerned my relationship with a semi-progressive faction known as the Technocrats, who organized in opposition to my policies. Allowing healthy parents to stay with their sick children stood to worsen my already strained relationship with the Technocratic bloc of the city council, whereas keeping a strict quarantine in place would stabilize our dealings somewhat, since they respected my initial decision. I’d like to say I struggled between the two options, but with Technocrat-organized protests threatening to shut down a vital food-producing district and colder temperatures on the horizon, I couldn’t risk upsetting them further. Unfortunately for the mother separated from her ailing daughter and the scores of families like them, the strict quarantine remained in effect.

Image: 11 bit studios

Such butterfly effect-style moments are the cornerstone of Frostpunk 2. The freezing society you govern is much like our own, with human cogs and sprockets similarly relying on one another to will the great beast of civilization onward. Small mistakes often spiral out of control if left unattended, resulting in total societal collapse if you lose the trust of the populace. I frequently asked folks to make do with less heat or meager rations to free up workers for patching holes elsewhere. Sometimes, the only thing you can do is heartlessly hack away at the city itself, disabling vital districts in favor of powering others, hoping to find healthy tissue underneath. A scenario like the one I described above could have been avoided with something as simple as searching a region I knew for a fact to be rife with wild game months earlier, but instead my fear of an impending cold snap led me to preoccupy my limited pool of explorers with finding generator fuel. The interplay of resource-gathering and industry, research, and political maneuvering makes for a gameplay loop that’s as compelling as it is maddening.

Oh, and a parting word of advice if you plan on Frostpunking this summer: Make it your top priority to preoccupy the city’s youth with something, whether it be apprenticeships (yay child labor!) or mandatory schooling. Without enacting at least one of these laws, the little shits become roving bands of feral street urchins faster than you can say “Oliver Twist,” sometimes culminating in crime-spiking rumbles between baby-faced gangs that leave several children dead and their parents angrily looking to you for answers. Then again, if you already have harvesting funerals in place, all those mangled little bodies can be used to decrease disease and speed up research, public trust in your leadership be damned. Such is life when the greed and shortsightedness of previous generations doomed the planet to another ice age. The city must not fall.

Frostpunk 2 is set to be released on July 25 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. It’ll also be available for Xbox Game Pass at launch.