Frostpunk 2 Preview: Less Frost and More Punks in This Daunting Society Simulator Sequel

ign.com:

If you’re a history and government nerd like me, you’d probably be hard pressed to find a franchise that better appeals to your love of society building and tough moral quandaries than Frostpunk. Thankfully, developer 11 Bit Studios is cooking up another depressing city management simulator with Frostpunk 2, and from the 30-minute demo I saw, they appear to be doubling down on gut-wrenching decisions and brutal difficulty, and it’s got me positively giddy to get my hands on it. The demo I saw was focused solely on the freeplay mode called “Utopia Builder,” so any details of the dedicated story mode remain a mystery, but after seeing the fascinating new direction they’re taking that focuses on politics, faction management, and greatly expanded building, I’m already extremely excited to don my winter jacket and dive back into a fresh new layer of apocalyptic snow.

While the excellent original game focused on surviving a second ice age for mankind that threatened us with extinction, that age has passed with its sequel, which takes place thirty years later. Instead of surviving the apocalypse, Frostpunk 2 focuses on rebuilding society after effectively besting the worst the frozen apocalypse had to offer, with new, more devious threats emerging from within the surviving population. The biggest change that jumped out at me immediately is that we’re no longer confined to a small mass of buildings huddled around an engine for warmth – we’ve now begun to expand outwards and grow the last city on Earth into a proper urban sprawl. Appropriately, time is now measured in months and years as humanity’s numbers are bolstered and new problems emerge, as opposed to the precious few days of time that passed in the first game.

Surviving the