"The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold
And it's overturned the order of the soul"
Leonard Cohen - The Future
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Damn, what a gorgeous piece of work!
Anyway:
Wrap. Up. Well... The. Frost. Is. Here. (... again)
Welcome to a game where your options are either "hurray we've got gas" or "help we've got gas!"
Welcome to my Stalwart ironfisted rule over a city of reason, progress and merit, in that order. (And a lil' bit of adaptation.)
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| Custodiet ipsos babbages |
The biggest change is a proportional shift in basic theme. Where the original primarily fed off the "man against nature" angle for conflict, this installment refocuses on "man against man" with your main task throughout the campaign being to keep various conflicting factions functional that they in turn may keep the city functioning. This has upsides and downsides, but the various pieces do coalesce into a laudably creative and immersive whole, worth every penny.
(From 11bit's point of view it also keeps the sequel from obsoleting the original, which I'm sure played a much bigger role in their marketing strategy than they'd like to admit.)
The emphasis on interacting masses of humans entails ditching some of the old steampunk appeal, downplaying dirigibles, prostheses or automatons as visual / plot elements. While replacement pathos is included in the package (my reason-first society features serial mating, draconian medical experimentation and triage, communal child rearing and a eugenics program complete with sterilization of criminals) the immersive aspects don't quite follow through on portraying these shifts in mores quite like the original's changes in aural and visual tone. The districts don't look different enough from each other. The music also has lost a bit of its oomph. They do put professional effort in flavor text for many techs and laws, but just a smidge too rarely.
City size increases by two orders of magnitude. Instead of individual constructions on a radial grid you now position entire districts on a hex grid, dwarfing all your original efforts. On the plus side this does cut down on some of the micromanagement. On the minus side it also eliminates some of the poignancy of shifting handfuls of workers to and fro hoping they don't freeze, and the decades-long timescale compared to months in the original also makes one less invested in their eventual fates. ("the death of one man is a tragedy" etc.) * Luckily the designers were well aware of this pitfall and played up the metropolitan heartless rat race through motion conveyed as timelapse light movement along roads. ("Fireflies" the artbook calls them.) I couldn't help but be reminded of the poultry farm scene from Baraka.
In terms of gameplay, the scale-up manifests as less concern with precise numbers of resources than a Supreme Commander style balancing of influx to keep resource flow out of the red as much as you can. Deposits are by default depletable, both within your city and on the overland map. Combined with a heavy emphasis on district adjacency, this yields some captivating juggling of district construction / destruction while maintaining your workforce and coffers. Interestingly, your most basic resource of heat stamps (a.k.a. simoleons) remain difficult to farm all throughout the campaign, scaling poorly with city size and acting instead as your limiting resource (e.g. influence etc. in Paradox' games) and as you make more and more stuff from it advancing through the tech tree, you suffer an almost imperceptible but decisive reliance on petroleum to address every issue instead, black gold surging invisibly beneath your golden resource of manpower through the radial clockwork of city streets. An inspired and highly memorable effect.
I won't go too deep into the interplay between factions. Most of your biggest hurdles entail securing the bickering cliques' votes to pass new laws, whether by building whatever they want or openly bribing them or aiding in their constant backbiting between each other. Since their percentage of council votes scales with populace, you end up spending just as much time subverting your inevitable enemies as currying favor. They do have a decent bit of personality. I actually opened my campaign on the Frostlander / Pilgrim side for the sake of nature, but turned on the Pilgrims in a heartbeat when they started in on the mystical hocus-pocus, a change of heart interestingly even acknowledged in the ending summation. Much as in the original, the deeper you dive down one particular branch, the more controversy you encounter (not that I was particularly uncomfortable with the know-it-all prescriptive bent of Reason.) I hope I'm not giving too much away by confirming they'll eventually be at each others' throats, but if you don't mind a Spoiler \ / , I would like to praise one specific gimmick.
I'd originally intended to maintain a reasonably free society, but by the time the civil war rolled around I'd already backstabbed the Pilgrims and implemented some reviled (yet cool!) techs precluding reconciliation. Plus, when the devs openly warned me trying to seize dictatorial power is the more difficult route... well now, that's just throwing down an obvious gauntlet for me to pick up, isn't it? However, I got stuck for a solid decade unable to raise Frostlander opinion to pass the final laws needed to seize power. I felt like I was doing everything right. I had surpluses in every resource, had eradicated all sniffles and grime, was putting down Pilgrim revolts as soon as they appeared while keeping their faction at 1-4% power, and lowering my Stalwarts' fervor to keep the peace... so what was I doing wrong? Apparently I was doing too much right.
I felt like slapping my forehead when re-reading the fine print that it's in times of high tension that the factions grow more willing to vote you into absolute power. Because yes! Of course! Every would-be dictator needs to drum up mass panic over the threat of some make-work boogeymen so the populace cries out for a strongman to take control!** You need to make life shit for the lower classes in order to divide and conquer them. So let squalor build up a tad, wait until a couple of districts go up in flames, THEN bribe your way to success.
Brilliant!
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* As an aside, Settlers-inspired village simulators (like Banished,
which kicked off the survival city sim trend which Frostpunk built on)
distinguished themselves by scaling down from Sim City's megalopolis to more personal, close-up caretaking. It's funny to see the pendulum now swinging back toward RCI districts and milling swarms of population.
** No, this has absolutely nothing to do with orange hair, game shows and golf courses. Why would you even think that?
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