A cold heart will take you far in Frostpunk 2

polygon.com:

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