Build-a-Brrr

Of the myriad subgenres of video games—zombie schlock, cozy agriculture, existential detective sims—few are as chill as city builders. SimCity established the template all the way back in 1989: a player begins with a blank canvas of landscape and, starting with a few farms and ramshackle ramblers, slowly paints a thriving metropolis of skyscrapers and strip malls across the artificial hills. SimCity dominated the genre for nearly twenty years with increasingly complex and visually impressive sequels until a flop in 2013 allowed new titles like Cities: Skylines to flourish. But even these newer titles struggle to break free of the tropes established by the SimCity franchise: bright colors, relaxing vibes, and an uncritical commitment to making lines on a graph ascend into a sky sans horizon. But Frostpunk 2 rejects these elements in pursuit of a grungier, sharper edge. By pitching itself beyond contemporary settings into a post-apocalyptic world of intense scarcity and deathly cold, it goads players into creating cities more brittle and flawed than anything within the genre standard, subjected to pressures designed to shatter them completely.

The main source of satisfaction in any city building game is to witness growth, as a meager population—guided by your hand and your inclinations—flourishes into a powerful metropolis. In a traditional city builder like the SimCity franchise or Cities: Skylines 2, it is taken for granted that covering the land with commercial zones and industrial districts represents progress; that a higher gross domestic product is indistinguishable from a higher good. What makes Frostpunk 2 unique is its willingness to ask, at every step of the process, what this growth will cost.

Frostpunk 2 takes place in an alternate timeline where climate collapse occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Thirty years have passed since the events of the first game, in which players were tasked with building a metropolis called New London in a frozen valley and protecting the fragile city from the apocalyptic ice storm that served as narrative and mechanical climax for the first game. New London is centered around a single massive coal-powered generator; if it ever stops belching black smoke into the freezing air, everyone dies. Accordingly, the city you construct is wrapped around that core, radiating outward like the heat towards the map’s margins. The creation of New London, battened against the colossal storm, is just the first of the first of the game’s discrete scenarios, each presenting new ethical and organizational challenges that improvise on that initial template. In a scenario called “The Refugees,” players manage a much smaller—and poorer—population of working-class families. The settlement is eventually inundated by the disenfranchised upper-class of the pre-apocalypse, now starving and dressed in rags. Accommodating the refugees would strain the city to its breaking point but turning them away is a massacre—at the end of the world, then, does every life count, does forgiveness matter? Given the opportunity, would you shun these people the way they marginalized the workers under your auspice? Can your foresight as a community organizer allow for reconciliation or will the strain of too many mouths and old societal grudges break all you have built?

Frostpunk 2 opens with the death of the Captain, the role you were assigned in the first game. New London, we’re told, stagnated under his rule. He saved the city, but he did not envision a future for his constituents. Now populations and political factions are clamoring to expand beyond the confines of the generator. The entire playspace of the original game is condensed into the new game’s “Central District.” As the Steward, the player’s job is to create a sprawl of new growth for New London into the Frostlands, creating outposts for resources, founding new towns which can be built out as part of the city-sim mechanics with their own local economies, and determining whether to exploit the Frostland’s bounty of resources and independent settlements. The question is no longer whether a city can survive the frost and wind. Rather, what will it cost humanity to live that way? What visions will win out over others and is the city—shifting its gaze from insulated survival to imperial expansion—even the best model for human survival under these circumstances?

Questions of how much to expand—and how hungrily—form the basis of the game’s political factions. The prologue allows you to retrospectively choose between authoritarianism or religion: these priorities determine the opening factions, creating consistency between player choices in the first game and bridging the tonal differences between titles. In Frostpunk, I chose the religious faction, known as the Faithkeepers, with the idea that belief could carry New London through those times where the truth of the world was too bleak to face. Now, thirty years down the timeline, the faction pursues to the letter traditions and values meant only to be a comfort in the worst of times. The Faithkeepers are tied to the New Londoners, whose world still revolves around the great generator’s radiating warmth. The new game’s Frostlander population, those who were born outside New London or survived the storm without the generator, pride themselves on self-reliance and resource conservancy. The Frostlanders organize a visionary faction called the Evolvers, who fancy themselves revolutionary thinkers, architects of a new approach to both technology and society.

As Steward, you have to balance new concerns with the constants of keeping food, heat, health, building materials, and morale balanced—lest a crisis sends your work into catastrophic freefall. From the central district, the player develops a spiderweb of industrial sprawl. You create new districts, research technology, and staff buildings, passing laws that rearrange the allotment of resources and the frame the ambitions of the populace. While the fundamental gameplay is genre standard in its emphasis on balancing income with expense, Frostpunk 2 adds the twist that every ideological faction has a different approach to a given technology—salvaging factories vs. automated factories, high-tech surveillance guard towers or well-staffed patrol guard towers—and a different agenda of laws they want passed.

In most city builder games citizens protest over their basic needs, not whether you’re conforming to their political preferences. In Frostpunk 2, the city actively disagrees with the player’s decisions for much of the play time. Rather than merely balancing the books, you make compromises that allow civic dysfunction and mechanical penalties to pile up—insufficient housing leads to cold, too much industry leads to squalor, not enough goods leads to crime, and everything cumulatively impacts disease. Choices interact and create a push and pull of development that affects both the ranking of dominant factions within the city and the player’s ability to continue pursuing their objectives, their access to resources. For example, building the Frostlanders’ infrastructure (less efficient but produces no squalor) infuriates the New Londoners because sacrificing efficiency means slower growth, fewer goods, and less comfort. On the other hand, listening to the New Londoners about upgrading the generator to its greatest potential upsets the Frostlanders, who view the generator worship as myopic and demand New London instead address the world beyond its heat radius, where people live and die on thinner margins.

There’s more to each faction’s politics than civic growth, however. While the Faithkeepers revere tradition and are resistant to social change, they also maintain a fierce belief in collective: we all rise or fall against the cold together. Warmth and life are equally precious. For the Frostlanders, meanwhile, life and death are a consequence of preparation and choice, and the Evolvers’ extreme individualism amounts to biological and social Darwinism. A new breed of hyper-capitalists, they hold that wealth and privilege are natural consequences of extraordinary performance; the weak and idle deserve nothing.

In the first game, laws operated on a cooldown timer—when enough time passed, you could choose things like child labor policies and edicts on emergency shifts from a list. In Frostpunk 2, you have to put it to a vote, with ethical implications that are inevitable, at an escalating level of extremity the deeper a player gets into the technology tree. Consider the difference in procreation laws: the Faithkeepers believe in Mandatory Marriage, meaning compulsory monogamous heterosexuality, but the Evolvers want Rotational Relationships, the better to maintain genetic diversity within a small population. Both choices infringe on personal liberty and ignore the consent and desire of those involved. But both encourage city growth, adding to the total laborers available for your grand works.

A player can negotiate support against unwanted laws, but if you’re politically overleveraged with too many promises made to too many factions, laws can get passed entirely without your approval. It’s quite a thing to be outmaneuvered by the more extreme voices of your own population—but that’s the heart of Frostpunk 2. They are never your people. A Steward can keep one hand on the wheel, but it is only through jackbooted authoritarianism (its own technology tree and category of law within the game) that your command is guaranteed. All authority within Frostpunk 2 has a price, and often that price is too high to pay by ethical means. Expansion and progress are not inherently good things; growth and efficiency cost lives and liberties. Most choices in the game are followed up on by small, interactive vignettes that describe precisely the ways your policies and choices are hurting people (such as a man describing how badly he coughs and struggles for breath because you passed a Heat Recycling law)—giving the player the option to soften the laws for a boost to trust at the expense of efficiency. Very little in the game exists without some kind of moral or economic reckoning.

Frostpunk 2’s world looks past the dire survivalism of the first game, whose more intimate, limited frame lent itself to the cruel choices demanded by rank pragmatism. Doing shady shit in pursuit of expansion and growth is more appropriately evil in the sequel—and without the imminence of extinction, the satire is more cutting. This is not to say the world of Frostpunk isn’t perfectly deadly. In the campaign, and then more frequently in the “Utopia Builder” free play mode, massive whiteout storms batter the city for months at a time. Food grows meager, hunger rises, and the increased demand for coal and oil sends stockpiles into freefall. As the citizens become exhausted and frightened by the relentless cold, faction approval plummets and your detractors seize their moment. The whiteouts are just as withering and dire as the climactic great storm from the first game’s main scenario, but they are integrated as a game mechanic just as much as a scripted event, a recurring feature of the frozen wasteland.

Surviving the storms is even harder when the player is responsible for an interconnected network of settlements beyond your main city. The populations and their associated visionary factions have fundamentally opposed philosophies of expansion: the Frostlanders (and the Evolvers, because of their interest in adaptation) want to treat the settlements as equal partners and live harmoniously with the cold, whereas New Londoners (and the Faithkeepers, with their emphasis on tradition) see them as vassal states fueling an extraction economy where the best of all things flow to the capitol and its glorious generator. If you extract too much, those on the periphery suffer, while in New London people are warm and fed. Extract too little, and New London is left vulnerable to storms and political violence. The sickly heart of your empire beats irregularly.

The political system behind these relationships, in which the imperial core’s favor is exchanged for resources from the periphery, was originally developed for On The Edge, the first game’s final downloadable installment. There you played as Outpost 11 of New London in an epilogue chapter. Under the city’s escalating demands, Outpost 11 is forced to seek out other settlements, eventually forming alliances against New London. Much of its mechanical innovations inform Frostpunk 2’s gameplay, but this narrative arc, in which you are forced to work so closely and complexly with your neighbors to create alternatives to New London’s empire, is absent in the sequel. While the campaign’s five continuous chapters are much longer and more complex than any individual scenario from the first game, there are no alternate scenarios like The Arks and The Refugees that expand the world thematically. This means, disappointingly, that the player is given no real account of opposing cities or foreign factions. There are independent communities out in the Frostland, but are minimally interactive and have no real oppositional power. Instead, they are themselves resources that you can harvest by force or cooperate with for a greater flow of goods. As a result, the game is oddly lacking in alternative models to the extractive metropolis it strives to critique.

In so many city builders, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, everything is beautiful and no one gets hurt. Industry doesn’t contribute to climate change, people do not ask for things that hurt and imprison their neighbors, you are not called upon to suppress food riots. Whatever makes the line on the graph go up feels good because it is. There is an assumption that, in times of plenty, the modern city is the ideal model for civic organization. The times of hardship which define Frostpunk’s world put narrative pressure on those assumptions. Yet the game still struggles to articulate an alternative to the artifice it’s lampooning. In On The Edge, you could create a mutual support network between a mine operated by orphaned children, a lumber camp of escaped convicts, and a greenhouse community dedicated to sustainable growth. Frostpunk 2 critiques the idea of neoliberal growth thematically but locks players into a flawed and corrupt path as though there’s no other way.

Instead, there’s the Utopia Builder—a particularly ironic name considering what you’ve got to do to win. You choose from among three victory conditions (stockpiling all resources, having over ten thousand people in four separate settlements, or over fifty thousand people in your capital city), select one of seven starting maps for your city, and finally decide between three sets of populations and visionary factions entirely different from those in the main game. The Icebloods believe in self-reliance without being quite so in thrall to the bottom line as the Evolvers, whereas the Technocrats exhibit a fanatical devotion to the city and its technological prowess—but this muddles the balance of political virtues and vices that makes the campaign work. These other factions feel more prescriptive in how they need to be manipulated. After playing several rounds of Utopia Builder, I came to miss the scenarios of the first game. If not as replayable as the Utopia Builder, they were at least meaningfully distinct. Would I find the world as melancholy if I had not played through the final days of its downfall, building New London’s generator from scratch in The Last Autumn DLC?

Frostpunk 2 is betting that players will prefer the less predictable randomization to the diminishing returns of the story-driven scenario. After all, SimCity and other city builders derive their narrative from gameplay as players develop their cities uniquely each time. But those games are meant to be fun, lighthearted and, most of all, uncritical. Just like Call of Duty will rarely say anything explicitly critical of guns, SimCity rarely speaks out against the mindset of infinite growth. Winning means conforming effectively and losing means becoming overwhelmed by crime, fire, or poverty, but never from the things you do to eliminate social ills and prevent disaster. The cynical inversion of Frostpunk 2 is vital. In the Frostpunk series, it should feel bad to make bad choices, it should feel stressful to fail to achieve good outcomes, and it should be harrowing when the whiteout arrives and the oil that pumps through the city’s veins coagulates in the pipes.

All of this runs contrary to the city builder’s traditional aim of beating the odds. So little of what a player does in the game is justified, and so much of it is a series of increasingly craven attempts to cling to power in a world of inexorable hatreds. This is a game where a war on poverty produces a pile of casualties, for which you as Steward are solely responsible. Balancing spreadsheets at the end of the world is nothing to be proud of. The randomization of Utopia Builder is like a flaw in the steam engine: the pressure and heat of the thematic integration leaks out and the machine loses its enviable efficiency amid abstraction.

Despite this, Frostpunk 2 remains a unique in its resonance with the world’s absurdity: choosing between political factions who both have positions I revile; navigating a body politic that will never unite behind long-term good when there are short-term gains to be made; and reckoning with the fact that I will make selfish choices for my own comfort and insulation against the coldness of the world. Life in 2024 is often disgusting and risible, where the leaders who claim to be humanist, who support immigrant rights or the sovereignty of a woman’s right to choose, still support a genocide on the other side of the globe. To get what I want in my own country, I am only given options that take away from others.

In such a dire, unpleasant moment, fiction can model a better world and articulate where we come up short. Take Snowpiercer and the novel on which it is based, whose ice-age steampunk aesthetic inspired much of Frostpunk. In both, our survival depends on an engine that runs on blood; we’re all stuck on this train together and have to keep it on the tracks. Snowpiercer concludes that it is better to let the train crash than swallow the lies of our rulers. Frostpunk 2 is much more skeptical. It posits that once survival is no longer the only consideration, most of us would be right back on our bullshit. Civilizations are built to consume, predicated on the false belief that we will never run out of resources, never have too much, and that infinite growth is not only possible but admirable. And we will cling to that delusion from the first snowflake of the long winter into the sad, bitter cold of apocalypse; devoted slaves of the smoke-belching generator that rules our lives.