Frostpunk 2 goes wider and more political but keeps the gritty, stressful joy

Sequel has yet again made losing your humanity to survive somehow… fun?

I can't remember every interaction I had with the advisers in Civilization games, but I don't believe I ever had to send my guards to put down a protest one of them staged in a new settlement.

Details

Developer/Publisher: 11 Bit Studios
Platform: Windows, macOS (ARM-based); PlayStation and Xbox (Game Pass) to follow
Release Date: Sept. 20, 2024
Rating: M for Mature (17+)
Price: $45 on PC
Links: Steam | GOG | Epic | Official website

Nor could I ask any of them for "Favours" to scrape a few more heat stamps necessary for a new food district, indebting me to them at some future point when they decide they've had enough of some other faction's people and ideas. In Frostpunk 2 (out today), the people who pop up to tell you how they're feeling aren't just helpful indicators, they're a vital part of the strategy. To keep these people going, you've got to make some of them mad, some of them happy, and balance a ledger of all you've gained and demanded from them.

That's the biggest difference you'll notice in Frostpunk 2 if you're coming from the original. The original had you making choices that affected people, but you were the Captain, in full control of your people, at least until you angered them enough to revolt. In Frostpunk 2, you manage factions and communities rather than groups of survivors. You place districts, not hospitals. Time moves in days and weeks, not hours. You play multiple chapters across a landscape in a world that is 30 years removed from its initial peril.

The challenge of Frostpunk 2 is no longer simply getting everyone through this winter. There is now some thought of what kind of people you want to be once you have enough fuel, food, and children. Are you in managed decline, or can you build something better, despite the world trying to kill you?

A beautiful grid with brutal choices

Those are the big-picture changes to Frostpunk 2. At the ground level, the general feeling is quite familiar. It's cold, it sometimes gets colder, and there's a furnace to feed. This time, you need to do "Icebreaking" to unlock tiles for development, but you don't have to worry so much about the exact placement of individual bits. Your colony or city will link itself up and look beautiful in the game's grim Victorian cryo-future style. You have to figure out how to scrimp the resources to put an extraction district on the oil reserves, making enough heat for the residents to stop getting sick so you can then send them out to recover goods from a decimated wagon and then icebreak some more toward a food source, all while planning to build a research center and council building.

The research and political trees you climb are more varied and even harder to choose in this sequel. Early in Frostpunk 2, your explorers find a body in the ice with the insignia of the first game's city on his jacket, and they ask you if it stands for Order or Faith. However you answer, you will have more than just two ideas to choose from. At the base level are two communities, Progress-focused New Londoners and Adaptation-minded Frostlanders. Then you get Order-obsessed Stalwarts, Faithkeepers, and their respective opposition, Pilgrims and Evolvers. Playing the game's "Utopia Builder" mode after the chapter-based story mode brings in a lot more communities and factions. You know, for this fun thing you do in your spare time.

At the Council Hall, you will need to negotiate with these factions to get votes out of the 100 members, divided up by faction influence. Most votes need 51, but votes that change your power require 66. If a faction is on the fence, you can promise them something, like future research projects or other law changes. Break that promise, and they will work against you in the future. Radicals will show up inside each faction, requiring you to either appease them or find support elsewhere. You can look at all the players and "Cornerstones" (ideologies) at play in one of the game's beautifully informative screens. You can ponder this while, all around you, the basic needs like fuel, materials, food, and shelter keep needing to be managed.

Oh, right, and it’s really fun

And it's fun! It's difficult to describe this game and its aesthetic to somebody while remembering to mention that it's beautiful, it's engaging, and it's a wonderful resource-management challenge. Having spent most of my life in Syracuse and Buffalo, New York, I might, might be a sucker for the game's elegiac images and writing about the glacial death coming for us all. I like an oily smoke, an ember's glow, a refugee asking me whether we should club and eat the seals or celebrate them as a sign that life is returning.

Frostpunk 2 builds on its predecessor, expands its scope, fixes some of its annoyances, furthers its story, and retains the core mechanics and original art and storytelling that made it so great. Unlike how your frozen cities will turn out, it is an unqualified success. Some might prefer the more nitty-gritty-grimy tasks of the original, but there's no question why this sequel was made. There are interesting ideas here, crafted into challenging gameplay. It's not for everyone, but it deserves a look if you're even remotely curious about what it would be like to consider your options between packing coal dust into bricks or better insulating houses.

To have the most fun, you'll need to play this on PC with a mouse and keyboard. I played the Mac version on my M2 MacBook Air and, well, it played at a not-so-smooth 28–37 frames per second, with every graphic setting on low. It's also not verified on Steam Deck, graphically, or for controls. Both of these things could improve (and console versions are due later in 2025), but one of the key elements to enjoying your time while beset with impossible choices is seeing how cool your progress looks, and it just looks a lot better on a PC at the moment. Frostpunk 2 is looking for a minimum of 8GB RAM, a Ryzen 5 or Intel Core i5 at 2.5 GHz, an Nvidia GTX 1050Ti or equivalent, and an SSD with 30GB space.

Listing image by 11 Bit Studios