Summary
- Corpse disposal prevents diseases, and maintains workforce and hope by keeping bodies from contaminating resources.
- Passing the Soup law early helps ensure the population is fed while waiting for reliable food sources.
- Emergency Shift and Extended Shift laws allow for increased resource production, balancing risk with gain.
With Frostpunk 2 released to tremendous acclaim, there is now more reason than ever for players to take a look back at the 2018 smash hit Frostpunk, and forge a city in a world of relentless cold and bitter decisions.
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While some strategy games focus on a colossal scale, Frostpunk keeps a tight, intimate look at the machinations of a single city persisting against the post-apocalyptic cold of a world destroyed by an unending blizzard. Part of surviving in this world is making new laws to keep things running smoothly and efficiently - but there are some laws that are almost essential when beginning a new game in this bleak world.
4 Corpse Disposal
Diseases From Bodies Can Spell The End To An Early Game
Sometimes, in games, mistakes happen. When mistakes happen in harder games such as Frostpunk, people usually die. In the beginning forays of a playthrough of Frostpunk, improper temperature management, resource misallocation, or even simple RNG events can lead to parts of the population dying and being left to rot in the cold. Corpses breed diseases that will often infect other citizens, hastening their own demise.
Besides killing off workers and engineers, who depending on the type of playthrough are vital cogs to working a machine or valued citizens to be protected, diseases and the death they cause can decrease the essential resource of Hope. Corpse Disposal might decrease Hope slightly, but the benefits of bodies not causing diseases while also keeping the workforce productive far outweigh this.
3 Soup
Making The Starting Rations Last Is Essential
A very talented chef once scorned his patrons by declaring: "No Soup For You!" - if he lived in the last city on earth, he wouldn't have the luxury of turning away his patrons so. Before a reliable supply of food can be gathered for the City, establishing warmth, preliminary structures, and dealing with events in the first few days have to come first. Hunter's Huts and similar early game food structures can only accommodate a population for so long. To make the most out of the meager starting provisions, passing the Soup law as one of the first in the early days will ensure that the people are at least being fed and can work effectively.
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The Soup law does raise discontent, but Frostpunk is a very dark game, and with the options for making food last be sawdust, cannibalism, or a nice warm broth, the people will come to see in time that the right decision has been made. Soup has marginal setbacks for an overall great benefit, as food can be quite difficult to acquire in the early game, and rations made from starting food supplies will often disappear quickly.
2 Emergency Shift
Getting A Stockpile Of Resources In Case Of Emergencies Is Essential
As with many base-building titles set in a post-apocalyptic setting, individual workers often need to come together in order to maximize the amount of resources produced and ensure that everyone can eat and live safely. In Frostpunk specifically, such a concept means workers have to make short-term sacrifices and work for 24 hours. A hard and grueling shift producing raw resources at that rate will not be very good for the City's discontent levels, but it will mean having a large amount of coal, wood, steel, or food to work with in the future, and will actively benefit the collective City as a whole.
A somewhat ominous trend in the gaming industry of late is the uptick in survival games as a genre, seen no more recently than Frostpunk 2 hitting the shelves. Frostpunk is among the many games in this genre that show survival in dire conditions as a matter of hard choices. Players might feel cruel forcing workers to labor over such a long shift, but if it's for the good of the City, then it needs to be done. It's very easy early on for small issues to snowball into larger ones, such as illnesses leading to grave diseases, and so on. This can be avoided if a 24-hour shift was pulled to, say, gather the wood needed for a medical outpost.
1 Extended Shift
A Long-Term Alternative To Emergency Shifts
Games set in colder climates are often quite difficult because the environment itself is usually a major antagonistic force, pushing the player to make harder and harder decisions in order to survive. Frostpunk's city-scaled scope makes this push not through an individual, person-level, a collective population-level approach to laws that shift how the City as a whole operates. Emergency Shift is an example of a dire, last-ditch effort to produce resources in a pinch, but sometimes it's best to prepare for problems before they can even arise.
This is where Extended Shift comes in, allowing the player at any time to turn a worker's shift into a 14-hour slog. It's not pretty, nor will it go down well with the people's discontent, but the discontent gain is marginal when balanced with means of decreasing it, and in the meantime, players will gain a healthy stockpile of resources for the long term. This law acts as a nice middle ground for players who can't or won't risk the discontent gained from an arduous 24-hour emergency shift but need an increase in resources quickly.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 86 /100 Critics Rec: 92%
- Released
- April 24, 2018
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ due to Blood, Mild Sexual Themes, Mild Violence, Strong Language
- Developer(s)
- 11 Bit Studios
- Publisher(s)
- 11 Bit Studios
- Engine
- Liquid Engine
- Franchise
- Frostpunk
WHERE TO PLAY
- Platform(s)
- PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5
- Genre(s)
- City Builder, Survival
