Frostpunk - ice age city builder from This War Of Mine devs

[MadMaxHellfire]

criminal? dure, i'm from italy. too much competition.

Become a negro trader. Buy them from africa and sell the to EU. All you need to do is have a big boat. You can also robe them while transporting,some of them are richer than most European.

again, too much competition.
and yes, they're definitely richer than me, i can't afford to pay 2000 euros to cross the mediterranean.

 

[fantadomat]

criminal? dure, i'm from italy. too much competition.

Become a negro trader. Buy them from africa and sell the to EU. All you need to do is have a big boat. You can also robe them while transporting,some of them are richer than most European.

again, too much competition.
and yes, they're definitely richer than me, i can't afford to pay 2000 euros to cross the mediterranean.

Italians are such fair people. Our kebab smugglers take around 10-20 thousands of euro.
Why the fuck are afraid from competition,do your best and make your own way. Buy yourself a few Russian RPG-7 and blow them away in the middle of the Mediterranean.

 

[Shog-goth]

So what's the problem? I heard "they" pay better than the state

"They" are the state.

 

[Shog-goth]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/04/23/frostpunk-review/

Wot I Think: Frostpunk

When I signed the law drafting children into my city’s workforce, I should have felt resistance. Some sense of remorse, or an impulse to explore other options—anything but this. Instead, I was simply surprised at just how many kids lived here.

Then I sent them to the coal mines.

Frostpunk is a ‘society survival’ game. A steampunk city builder where you control the placement of buildings, the distribution of labor, and the laws guiding the evolution of the city of New London, against the backdrop of a world dominated by cold. Menus and direct ethical decisions burst on-screen with the uneven crackle of frost (the miners want to go home and be with their families before a major disaster—will you let them?), and lights caught at the edge of view refract through a pane of glazed ice. While it can be difficult to identify specific buildings you’re looking for amongst the tangle of ramshackle, snow-dusted structures and stacks of smoke, the eerily cozy aesthetic of the game is breathtaking in motion.

In three scenarios with differing complications, environmental layouts, and even stories, you’re given the power of life and death over a populace that alternately loves or despises you. The twin meters of Discontent and Hope represent the general opinions of your populace. Attaining basic resources for survival like food and coal potentially requires sacrifice from the living beings you serve. All the while, the world is getting colder, forcing you to make less than ideal decisions to see another dim sunrise.

You can send the massive generator at the center of your society into overdrive for emergencies, but if the generator overheats, the game ends. If everyone dies, the game ends. If Discontent gets too high, the game ends. If Hope falls to 0, the game ends. You can send scouts and outpost parties into the Frostlands to seek resources from elsewhere, learning more about the state of the world in the process, but that’s just more personnel that won’t be able to contribute to the work in the city itself. This situation seems ripe for a constant, nerve-wracking juggling of priorities, and this is where Frostpunk shines. It never fails to impress just how much panic Frostpunk can pull from you by changing a few numbers, or dramatically plunging a given meter, and leaving you to deal with the consequences. I spent much of the 9 hours it took me to finish the main story desperately clicking across minimal menus in attempts to find some way out of the current hole I was in.

In some ways, Frostpunk plays like an extremely slow real time strategy game, where laws and heat sources are just as engaging to micromanage as colorful units. Pausing and fast-forwarding time as needed to get things just right, before finding out that your plans were so very wrong, is a regular experience. Occasionally, though, you’ll hit a point where you feel like you’re calmly tending a garden. A garden of sniffling survivors in a frozen wasteland built on shattered promises, but a garden nonetheless.

Unfortunately, the moral portion of Frostpunk’s systemic balance, though heavily emphasized, is one of the few areas where it falls flat.

Following the example of 11 bit studios’ previous game, This War of Mine, almost every action you take can be framed as a moral choice. Turning down the range of your generator will save coal, but it also means those citizens caught at the edges of your city will suffer the effects of the irresistible cold. Decisions have practical costs as well as invisible, ethical ones, and well-meaning goals often require sacrifice to achieve on even a basic level. However, because both the considerations and consequences that accompany a decision remain on the scale of the ‘big picture’, Frostpunk quickly becomes a game of easily-quantified numbers.

To survive, you need [X], and in the situation you’re currently in, you can’t get [X] without doing [Y]. Because [Y] is done in the service of the greater good, it’s hard to feel selfish. Not executing political prisoners would mean the absolute failure of the entire colony—and on a personal level, the loss of 5 valuable hours of in-game progress. There’s always the unspoken message that, maybe, you could avoid these circumstances by playing better, but that misses a larger point. Frostpunk, in pursuing the high-level control and intrigue of managing a society, forgets the personal.

In multiple-choice text sequences, people are referred to simply as ‘a citizen’ or ‘a woman’. You don’t get the opportunity to recognize a particular person as a trouble maker, or perhaps as being especially helpful. Except for a basic family tree, the pages of citizen biographies are distressingly blank, even when you supposedly have secret informers seeded among the population.

Engineer Harry Mason doesn’t have a particular aptitude for medicine, making him an ideal pick for placement in a medical facility. John Smith doesn’t become a better sawmill employee after working there for some time, making his getting sick or being transferred undesirable. Aside from being token talking heads at certain set points, it would be reasonable to forget these people have voices or preferences at all.

Every worker is an interchangeable cog in the machine that is your city, so when you’re suddenly asked to consider how one person feels amongst this giant, teeming mass that needs your constant attention, you don’t have a reason to care beyond personal inclination. A personal inclination that, again, has an entire city to think about.

After surviving the main scenario, the physical growth of your city is charted with a gorgeous timelapse, while the game addresses the moral growth of your society via a text epilogue. I had come out the other end of a long winter. Over half of New London’s population was dead. Political prisoners were executed regularly to control discontent, and heavily-armed officers roamed the streets, enforcing order. I would struggle with this course of action in any other game. However, Frostpunk, intentionally or not, creates the ultimate Trolley Problem. 200 died so that 200 would live. Instituting absolute order meant that my Hope meter became Obedience, and I would never again have to worry about that precious resource running out when I considered my next course of action. In fact, I could directly act against it, safe in the knowledge that my citizens supported my reign—or else.

I distinctly remember needing people to die at some point. I flipped the switch that controlled the heating of their homes to ‘off’, and idly noticed the sickness rates skyrocket as I attended to the other lives under my care. I didn’t know the people in that housing development as anything other than numbers, and a few randomized character portraits. They didn’t matter any less than the other people in New London—but that meant they didn’t mean any more, either.

The kids in the mines were, surprisingly, the last to go.

Frostpunk may be one of the most tense, exciting city building survival games on PC, but for a game with such an emphasis on innate justice, and heat, it leaves you surprisingly cold.

Frostpunk is out tomorrow on Steam and GOG

 

[fantadomat]

Here is a mid game video that show some interesting things about the game:

I am pretty hyped about it.
PS:What will you choose guys,order or spirituality?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

criminal? dure, i'm from italy. too much competition.

Become a negro trader. Buy them from africa and sell the to EU. All you need to do is have a big boat. You can also robe them while transporting,some of them are richer than most European.

again, too much competition.
and yes, they're definitely richer than me, i can't afford to pay 2000 euros to cross the mediterranean.

Italians are such fair people. Our kebab smugglers take around 10-20 thousands of euro.
Why the fuck are afraid from competition,do your best and make your own way. Buy yourself a few Russian RPG-7 and blow them away in the middle of the Mediterranean.

10-20k? local tv news always told us 2-3k per person. damn, that's a lot of money.
but it's all not very related to frostpunk, isn't it?

 

[fantadomat]

criminal? dure, i'm from italy. too much competition.

Become a negro trader. Buy them from africa and sell the to EU. All you need to do is have a big boat. You can also robe them while transporting,some of them are richer than most European.

again, too much competition.
and yes, they're definitely richer than me, i can't afford to pay 2000 euros to cross the mediterranean.

Italians are such fair people. Our kebab smugglers take around 10-20 thousands of euro.
Why the fuck are afraid from competition,do your best and make your own way. Buy yourself a few Russian RPG-7 and blow them away in the middle of the Mediterranean.

10-20k? local tv news always told us 2-3k per person. damn, that's a lot of money.
but it's all not very related to frostpunk, isn't it?

Well the game is coming tomorrow,nothing to be said by people for now. I did post a video with some interesting things in the game. Now i don't know about your people but here it is standard price for a smuggle,still there is more risk here. They need to smuggle them a few countries by bus. While in Italia they just need to dump them near the beach and fuck off. It is possible to make a few drop offs a day.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

the news tell us it's a several days, maybe weeks, maybe a month, long travel at sea, from libia to italy. my guess was "they stand still waiting for a hole through patrols" because it shouldn't take longer than a day or two. the stories are about people starved and thirsted to death, with decomposing corpses onboard.
our versions differ wildly.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamer.com/frostpunk-review/

FROSTPUNK REVIEW

"I wish everyone was just like you," I mutter to my steampunk automaton as it stiffly lurches toward my coal mining plant, leaving big, round footprints in the deep snow. I have grown weary of the humans inhabiting my city. They're frail. They're fickle. They get hungry and angry and sad, they fall ill from the cold and skip work, they lose limbs to frostbite and can't work. They suffer and die, and worse than that, they make me suffer because they have thoughts and opinions and most of all, fears. My steambot, though: it just works, only pausing occasionally to refuel. These humans need hope to survive, but my robot doesn't. It's an ideal citizen.

Frostpunk is a city-builder and a society simulator, but most of all a crisis management game where the crisis doesn't end until the game does. A few hours with Frostpunk and the tornadoes and tsunamis of Cities: Skylines seem like minor inconveniences. The traffic jams and noise pollution you used to fret over are now an utter fucking joke. In Frostpunk, if citizens are unhappy enough they'll banish you from your own city to die despised and alone. They might leave town if you fail them, but first they'll spend days trying to convince others to join them in mass exodus. Frostpunk is a tense, gripping, and often stressful survival strategy game filled with difficult, sometimes unthinkable choices. It's tough to play but even tougher to stop.

Steam building
In Frostpunk's version of the 1800s, the entire world has become a sub-zero, arctic wasteland. After fleeing London, the only hope for the survival of your few dozen followers is a massive coal furnace standing in the center of a crater. You'll build small city that huddles around that towering furnace for warmth: a handful of tents, a hunting lodge, a mess hall. Resource gathering is initially limited to sending your citizens pushing through chest-high snow drifts to pick coal from the frost and bust up old crates and scrap piles for wood and steel. Build a lab and staff it with engineers to begin researching new tech: sawmills for cutting down frozen trees, mines to unearth resources from the floor and walls of the crater. Streets will eventually form spokes radiating out from the furnace and you'll line them with buildings and steam towers to keep the ice melted—at least until the temperature plummets even lower.

But that's later. In the early days your city is sparse and the situation is grim, with resources so scarce—and labor power to collect them scarce as well—that simply seeing the sun rise after a night without a casualty feels like major victory. Each new building and item on the tech tree needs to be carefully considered and weighed before spending resources on it. Constructing a pub will lift people's spirits, but that wood is also needed for a medical center to treat the ill. Assigning more hunters to gather food means pulling workers off coal gathering duty, solving one shortage by creating another. Saving up resources to build something important tomorrow when people are homeless or sick today feels cruel and heartless and completely necessary. When asking 'What do my people need most?' the answer is usually: everything.

In the hours before I grew to hate every last one of them, I was constantly torn between short term fixes and long-term solutions for my citizens, feeling guilty for extending work hours to mine a few more chunks of coal to keep the furnace running all night. Wonderfully difficult choices await at every turn in Frostpunk, with precious few being clearly right or wrong.

While my eyes flick restlessly over tiny meters at the top of the screen—how much wood and coal and food is left, and how long will it last—I spend more time staring at the bigger meters at the bottom: discontent and hope, the true gauges of my city's health. Call for a 24 hour work shift and discontent will rise sharply, even as the additional labor saves lives. Sending everyone to bed with full bellies will give them hope, even if they're sleeping in freezing cold tents. If discontent gets too high, or hope too low, you may be notified you only have a few days to reverse the trend by accomplishing a specific goal. Fail to deliver, and those meters will take a hit, creating a tricky balance. That lumber you used to construct a steel mill instead of new homes might make your city ultimately stronger, but you broke a promise to provide shelter for all, so people lose faith in you. It's a masterful expression of the burden of leadership.

You'll be alerted from time to time of some grim events in your city. A child was found nearly frozen sitting next to the grave of his parent. A citizen committed suicide by leaping into the furnace. Someone pulling a double-shift worked himself to death. Sometimes there's nothing to do about it: it's just a little moment the game offers up to make you feel like absolute shit. (To be fair, someone occasionally thanks you for something, but kind words are quickly forgotten when an automaton accidentally crushes someone underfoot.) Sometimes you can make a choice: between forcing an exhausted worker to continue or letting him rest, or choosing to believe (or not) a citizen asking for extra food who may not actually have a hungry child. You're told in advance how your choices may result in a small bump to discontent or hope in either direction, but the reality is that you'll often have to make everyone unhappy to keep them alive. And you'll make more meaningful choices, and more difficult ones, by passing laws.

Human resources
You can pass a new law every 18 hours, and very few of them feel like triumphs of legislation. To make sure everyone has enough to eat, you can cut the food rations with sawdust. To keep production up, you can put children on work detail. Should the deathly ill be treated or just kept comfortable so you focus on the people you know you can save? Nearly every law has a downside: I mean, obviously, children shouldn't have to work, they're children. But try saying that when you've only got enough coal to last an hour and night is about to fall. It's harsh to send a kid out to gather resources from the snow, and even harsher to have him work in dangerous coal mine, but isn't that preferable to letting his parents freeze to death?

Eventually you'll have to choose how to keep your citizens motivated in the face of endless winter. Will it be with order and disciple, or faith and spirituality? Both paths of law can build hope in your population, mainly by exerting control, which can eventually turn you into a despot or false god. A neighborhood watch sounded like a fine idea to me since thieves had been plundering city supplies and rations. Guard towers felt like a natural choice to cut down on troublemakers. Patrols led to arrests, arrests led to prisons, and soon I found myself mulling over building a propaganda center to issue leaflets to reassure everyone I had our problems handled. They needed to believe everything was going to be OK, or at least I needed them to believe it. So I forced them to believe it, I made them be hopeful. It was that or risk losing everything.

The faith path, meanwhile, gives you shrines and temples to comfort citizens, but again, it's a small step from encouraging a little praying to stomping on competing faiths and declaring yourself an infallible leader. You may think you'd never consider rounding up anyone who speaks out against you or publically executing a troublemaker in the middle of town, but in desperate times, when you're on the brink of being cast out of your city or abandoned by the dozens, ruling with an iron fist doesn't feel like the worst option, just one bad option among several. These choices aren't pleasant ones, but Frostpunk is excellent at making you balance being a good leader against being an effective one. At times I felt like a villain for doing the right thing or a hero for doing the wrong one, something few games are bold enough to allow.

Ice fishing
Frostpunk isn't contained to your chilly little city: there's a big frozen world out there, and once you've constructed a lookout station you can rise above the rim of your crater and have a look around, then send scouting parties out to investigate new areas of interest. It's a welcome change to widen your view from the sooty smokestacks and narrow streets and explore. Locate survivors in desperate need of help, find the frozen remains of another city, look for other pockets of life that might be fighting to survive. Like much in Frostpunk, the results of expeditions can be a glorious relief or a terrible burden. Sometimes your scouts will find resources and deliver them back to your city, additional coal or wood you need to complete a project or heat your generator for a few extra, crucial hours. You can even establish outposts to keep wood, food, or other resources arriving in your city on a regular basis.

But while finding new citizens means more workers and engineers, it also means more shelters need to be built and heated, more food hunted and cooked, and more sick filling your already crowded medical buildings. Every pair of hands that can solve a labor problem is attached to one mouth that can cause a food shortage. At one point, several big waves of refugees arrived, most of them terribly ill, which meant either a mad rush of new construction or the brutal choice of turning some or even all of them away. An earlier law I'd passed saying working children get double rations, an act of mercy to make up for an act of cruelty, meant the choice to rescue dozens of abandoned kids in the wild wasn't an automatic yes. Frostpunk is startlingly adept at making your doubt, and even regret, acts of decency.

Your scouts also gather information about what happened to the world, why it happened, and more disturbing: what is going to happen next. None of it is good news.

In cold blood
The first time my scouts delivered some really bad news, my city was humming along, if not perfectly then at least adequately. I was building storehouses for stockpiles of coal and wood. I'd replaced tents with real houses, kept warm by steam towers, which meant no one was getting sick. A supply line for extra lumber was in place. I had a factory in place to build robots that could work around the clock, and was even planning to build a robot that could run my robot factory. Discontent was low and hope was sky-high. The news, which I don't want to spoil, changed all of that in an instant, and my city's hope meter drained almost entirely, taking a lot of my own hope with it. I wanted to continue on with my efficient city planning, but now I had to cast those plans aside and focus only restoring hope or face complete failure.

It felt unfair at first. Deeply unfair. I'd worked hard to make my city safe, habitable, and functional, and my reward was that half my population abruptly deciding they'd be better off leaving. Structurally and strategically I'd done everything right, but people were still miserable, and it took me a while to accept that Frostpunk, as a game, could be allowed to betray me like that. But it's not just about building a city, it's about dealing with society, and real society can work like that sometimes, like when scientists develop life-saving vaccines only to see parents turn to Jenny McCarthy for pediatric advice. When you give society the tools to survive, they might just fling a wrench into the gears. Society sucks. Automatons would never do that.

End of days
Frostpunk isn't an endless city builder: the campaign lasts about 45 days (which took me roughly 12 hours), culminating in an event that will put your fragile city and citizenry to the test in unthinkable conditions. It does feel a bit strange when the game ends. I'm used to open-ended city builders that let me play as long as I want, and I certainly would have enjoyed to opportunity to continue to tinker with my city after the final curtain, so that's a bit disappointing. There's some replayability here: choosing different laws the next time, trying to avoid the mistakes of the last campaign, though the major events and discoveries will be the same each time. One full game is enough to unlock nearly everything in the tech trees, so a replay won't be a wholly different or surprising experience.

There are a couple other scenarios to try, however (with more planned, according to the menu text): in one you're challenged to build a city that can support hundreds of refugees and deal with major social unrest as a result. In the other your task is to keep several seed storage vaults warm enough to protect their contents with very few human workers, relying instead on building an army of automations. I've played a bit of both scenarios and the challenges are significantly different from the main campaign.

Frostpunk also has extraordinary style and and art design. I love the way notifications and menus spread across your screen with the sound of cracking ice, the way steam rises when the sun hits your city after a long cold spell, beads of condensation forming on your screen as you sigh in relief at having survived another day, and the way your tiny citizens wade through waist high snowbanks leaving trails of black tundra behind them, only for those grooves to fill back in as more snow falls. It's beautiful and engrossing in its grim depiction of a world gone cold.

I only wish I could zoom in closer. Frostpunk keeps your view several stories above the frosty misery of the city, so you can never really connect with your citizens. Sometimes instead of looking at labeled meters to tell my how my people feel, I wish I could just peer into their faces and read their expressions, to see their hope or misery for myself. Then again, who has time to take the temperature of the masses? I've got coal to mine. Get to it, my dear automaton. You might break down from time to time, but you'll never lose hope.

THE VERDICT
89

FROSTPUNK
Frostpunk is a stressful, stylish, and addictive survival management game filled with incredibly difficult choices.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/frostpunk/frostpunk-pc-review

Frostpunk PC review

Frostpunk is surprisingly easy as far as management games go. I completed its campaigns on the first attempt. But it’s how I found success that makes Frostpunk special.

To keep my city alive I had to do monstrous things. When the mines froze I sent in teams of workers to clear the ice: 45 people died. When the great storm came I only treated people with light illnesses and left the others: 98 people died as a result. And, when discontent rose, I started executing my own people, strapping them to the underside of my city's great heater: three people murdered.

Frostpunk isn’t about managing a city as much as it is a game about managing your own moral decline.

Frostpunk is set in a Victorian-era world headed for a deep freeze. When the encroaching ice age was discovered, people began building cities in sheltered craters that were to be heated by a giant coal-powered engines. But the cold snap came too soon and so the cities were left unfinished. You play the head of a group of survivors who have marched across the ice to one of those heaters - you need to get it running and build the infrastructure to keep it that way.

The engine sits frozen at the start of every scenario, waiting for you to flick the ignition to set the heart of your city beating. From the moment the engine roars into life you have to keep it fed with coal. It is the constant need of every aspect of your arctic outpost - without heat your people will freeze, your crops will fail, and your factories will stall. Every structure you build is placed on a radial grid that expands from the engine’s centre. By the end of a mission, buildings ring the heater like spokes on a wheel, a tragically symbolic bookend for humanity’s final technological achievement.

11 Bit Studios have done marvellous work on evoking the symbolism of the engine giving life. As soon as the engine starts, it begins belching a heavy plume of black smoke, the ground around the stack is bathed in orange, and the snow melts away. You can tell if a building is heated or not by how much snow and ice covers its walls and roof. In contrast, everything outside of the heated area is locked in ice and smothered in snow.


Getting your city started is easy as there are loose piles of resources to be scavenged nearby. That’s enough to construct tents to shelter your survivors from the worst of the storm, as well as a hunting lodge and cookhouse. which let you start bringing raw food in and turning it into rations for your people. You can even build a workhouse and begin advancing the tech tree, increasing the speed your citizens gather resources or discovering new kinds of structures with which to expand your city. Then the demands start coming in.

Your people are a needy bunch. At any moment you might have a speech bubble appear above your city, denoting a complaint or demand that needs to be answered quickly: “Our houses are too cold,” “There are too many sick,” “We’re hungry.” If you can answer the demand in time your people will become either more hopeful or less discontented. Fail and they will lose hope. If a city’s hope falls too low, or its discontent rises too high, your people will rebel.

Successfully juggling all of these needs is where Frostpunk is at its most challenging. Your people are hungry, so you take some of them off coal mining duty to go out looking for food. The sick are piling up so you turn the heat up on the engine to warm them better, increasing the drain on your coal supplies. It’s times like these where you are going to be most tempted to draft in some unsavoury laws.

Each day or so you can enact a new law. It can be something innocuous like saying you will bury your dead in a cemetery or in a icy pit outside of town, but it can also be more dramatic, like passing child labour laws. When your workforce is low, you can practically double it by allowing children to work in the factories. People will lose hope but your resource gain will increase massively.

That’s basically how my descent into becoming a monstrous dictator began. Whenever I hit up against a shortage or a crisis I’d take the option to make that problem go away, whatever the solution was. The second scenario, which charges you with keeping a set of seed banks warmed through, is a cake walk if you make no attempt to save the nearby city that hasn’t got enough resources to make it through the coming winter. I didn’t risk my mission to help others. Technically, I won, but the hundreds of frozen corpses in the next city over will probably continue to haunt me.

Coaxing players into becoming heartless is familiar territory for 11 Bit Studios, their previous game This War Of Mine has you separate the world into your group of survivors and everyone else. It gets harder to survive without taking from innocent people who just happened to be in the way of your resources. Frostpunk’s target is similar as it challenges the idea of survival at all costs. Like the smoke billowing-heater at the heart of your city, life can be shrouded in dirt.

8/10

 

[thesheeep]

Interesting... a game that becomes easier or harder not primarily based on skill but on one's ability to make necessary decisions unhindered by morals.
At least, that's how the reviews make it sound.

Then again, "professional" game journos are known to be pitiful players, so who knows...
Might as well be possible to be a "good guy" and win.

 

[fantadomat]

Interesting... a game that becomes easier or harder not primarily based on skill but on one's ability to make necessary decisions unhindered by morals.
At least, that's how the reviews make it sound.

Then again, "professional" game journos are known to be pitiful players, so who knows...
Might as well be possible to be a "good guy" and win.

Or they simply suck at playing it. Still it is a nice game.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

 

[oneself]

A fair number of streamers were able to complete the game on the first try, so I am not sure about the difficulty. I'll wait and will purchase iff the reviews are overwhelmingly positive.

 

[trais]

I have a day off and GOG download will be available in 6h, so I'm gonna spend this evening playing Frostpunk. Will post some first impressions after I've clocked few hours in the game.

 

[Turisas]

Out now.

 

[Infinitron]

https://af.gog.com/game/frostpunk?as=1649904300

 

[Dickie]

How did they get that thing down the cliff wall? I was hoping it'd show that.

 

[Lagole Gon]

Fucking timing, I don't have time for vidiya for at least 2 weeks.

 

[cvv]

Been playing for about 2 hours. Game seems almost trivial. I was being intentionally sloppy to find the breakpoint and sure, people die now and then, but so far I'm doing fine. This was NOT the case with This War of Mine where it took 5 or 6 runs to learn the dos and don'ts and another 5 to start reliably winning. I wonder if the devs overthought this one way too much, like "it's not about difficulty but the moral choices you make on your journey" or some such vapid bullshit.

Reserving my judgement for the time being.

 

[Turisas]

^ Yeah doesn't seem too difficult early on at least, but I'd assume there's more challenging scenarios available after you beat the default one (Edit: No need for even that it seems, after you've launched the "A New Home" once you can go back to main menu and restart it with customized difficulty options; there's also a few other scenarios you unlock from playing the main story scenario for x number of days).

The radial base building is a neat change from my usual sprawling builds, and one nice touch is that you can still build roads inbetween existing buildings so you don't need to plan your layout beforehand:

Performance-wise it does alright, everything maxed at 1440p gives me 70-80fps with my 1070; it's just a shame you can't zoom in close enough to see the kids losing fingers to frostbite after picking frozen pieces of coal all day, the above is the closest it gets.

 

[fantadomat]

I am playing the game and this happened.

More than 60 people died in a day because i decided to add more people to my glorious city,that turned out to be sick and dying and the hope tanked. On the bright side,i created my religion and beat the crap out of people that wanted to leave. A few pointers, make gathering huts next to coal pumping thing,make a few stockpiles for coal,later on you will need to end the day at 1000/2000 coal in stock. The UI is not very good and could be a bit annoying at times. Another annoying thing is that the game doesn't auto fill a working spot opened by dead people.

As a whole,the game is fun and pretty good,but it will become boring after one playthrough.

 

[Anthedon]

So it's like Banished then. That was also fun, for one game.

 

[Berekän]

So huh, finished the main scenario in barely 3 hours. I was probably playing very suboptimally but it still felt kind of rushed, I didn't get past tier 3 tech, barely survived by the end and all I could think was "is that it?" Maybe I'm missing something...

 

[trais]

Ok, so I've been playing the game for good couple of hours, so here's some of my promised impressions

- When you first launch the game and start the first scenario it almost give you a sandbox mode learn how the game works. But after you learn what's what, I recommend to restart the game on Hard difficulty, because then it really gets challenging. You're always one fuckup away from going into a death spiral and then the temperature gets even colder... overall, it's pretty brutal.
- Don't expect this game to be a city builder or economy management type. There isn't much variety in basic resources can gather and you don't need to deal with any logistics (people walking on the map are basically eye-candy, everything happens "under the hood") or chain of productions. But even with the few you have, you need to be really good at managing them (on Hard) and sometimes the game forces you to make some tough choices e.g. should I keep heating medical tents to keep them operational and risk running out of coal for the main generator entirely, or do I cut losses early and let the sick freeze to death on the streets.
- I like the artstyle, quite steampunky, but without getting over the top (well, most of the time, giant robot-worker-drone thingy looks pretty ridiculous)
- There is a tech tree in the game, but it's mostly upgrades, or better versions of basic buildings
- I'm pretty sure there isn't any combat in the game whatsoever

Overall, I'm having fun so far, so gonna play some more before I go to sleep.

 

[fantadomat]

I finished two games,one as refugee and another as seed ark. In the first one i hit three time the no hope almost end because of getting 100 sick,but i managed to save the day with my Jesus power in the church. Almost died because i fucked up the coal collecting and had to drop the generator range. The game is pretty easy and it is hard to totally fuck it up.

I played my second game with cheatengine resources because i couldn't be bothered. You start with 45 engineers and have to build automaton industry. By the middle of the game you encounter another city and have to make a choice,between saving the city or saving the seeds And kind of felt meh,because the game just fuck you over even if you have the resources to do both. This game was a lot shorter than the first scenario,couldn't finish half the research even with 6 tech labs and endless resources.

I think that after around 5 hours of gameplay i am done with it and will be happy to delete it.