izigame.me

Frostpunk is a steampunk post-apocalyptic 'survival city builder' - one where you become hopelessly invested in the wellbeing of a virtually faceless population, and every sentence ends with 'and then things got worse'.
Things are already pretty bad when you begin the main story; the unexplained climate and societal collapse causes refugees to flee, Fallout Vault style, to isolated generators which pump up heat from the earth to shelter small communities from the snow. As you might suspect, it's pretty stressful being one of a handful of people just trying to stay alive in deeply sub-zero temperatures... but then It Gets Worse. As days go by, the temperature will drop more and more precipitously - avoiding spoilers, you (the player-manager of New London) will need to gather resources, research improvements, and sign laws in order to keep your population not only alive, but also contented and hopeful. Naturally, therefore, the challenge comes from balancing all of these as Things Get Worse for the settlers.
There's a lot to say about the game mechanics - which I would usually put here, but will instead leave further down so that potential new players can experience the game as naively as possible. What must be made clear, however, is how incredibly invested you become in your communities, and how (surprisingly) emotionally taxing it can be when they crumble. I have never cried at a movie and generally don't get hit by strong bursts of emotion, but it was hard not to get a little choked up during the final cutscene, after you've experienced first-hand the struggles settlers have gone through and the decisions you feel you had to make which have lead to, perhaps, more pain and suffering that they need've experienced. The same goes for each of the DLC scenarios, which I experienced several years after completing the main storyline - the failure of a healthcare system overwhelmed by refugees, with each death toll a stab in the heart in The Refugees; explosion of the generator before you've managed to evacuate everyone in The Fall of Winterhome; the coming of the first frost, or the industrial accidents in The Last Autumn; the desperate gathering of supplies for a New London on the brink of collapse in On The Edge - each one brought those same emotional highs and lows. I will go into more detail about the DLCs when I review the Season Pass specifically, but can't do that lol. To summarise: each scenario functions like a total conversion mod of the main game - some, like The Last Autumn, are virtually unrecognisable at the beginning - but each is, undeniably, worth your time after the main story.
The next paragraph contains low- to mid-level spoilers about the mechanics of Frostpunk which may influence how you play the game - I strongly recommend going in blind!
I played Frostpunk back when it first came out, and (at the time, on a different website) wrote something about the morality system at play, on which the real, player-imposed 'challenge' is based on. In short: when it came out - and, I believe, to this day - it contained one of the more thoughtful approaches to video game morality i'd seen up to that point, an enormous leap forward from Bioshock-tier 'press x to be a terrible person' mechanics. The game forces you to choose between two ideological systems (based on either 'order' or 'faith') which, on top of the positive effects on hope and discontent, provide production and health/healing bonuses respectively; this starts off pretty innocuously with watchtowers and chapels, but as you enact laws deeper into that tech tree it rapidly escalates into propaganda centres and crucifixions. Crucially, however, the extent to which the player-manager delves into the thinly-veiled communist or theocratic nightmare is, ultimately, up to them; when I watched streamers play it at the time, this caused a certain amount of anger as many of them believed they were 'forced' into extreme measures, and adopted an interesting denialism that it could have gone any different - which can be disproven almost immediately on a second playthrough, since understanding of the game mechanics and the general progression of the game makes it quite easy to keep things cheerful, with no need to resort to public executions, torture, etc. That's not to say it's a loss-condition as such to descend into hell, except for insofar as you feel quite bad about torturing a bunch of people; the game will admonish you during the final cutscene if you have 'gone too far', but will praise you if you don't. 'The line', in case you were wondering, is protector of the truth/righteous denunciation and pledge of loyalty/forceful persuasion - mostly reasonable, I think, although one which has the potential to cause arguments and fuel denialism. It is this self-reflection - on top of the normal 'discontent was too high/hope was too low' - which constitutes the real challenge, and it's one pulled off so well that you, like me, might well be mulling it over for a while after you've uninstalled the game.
Spoilers end.
For a compelling story told almost entirely through textboxes, a harrowing struggle against mounting odds, and a thoughtful, reflective attitude to in-game morality, Frostpunk was my singleplayer game of 2018, if not the decade, and remains one of my 'must-plays'. Buy it, play it, consider how fragile life is and the lies we tell ourselves when we shatter it.