by In a few months it will be five whole years since the survival city builder frostpunk is out, challenging players to build a working city in a freezing post-apocalyptic world and carefully manage the society that takes refuge within its borders.
And while we wait to hear when Frostpunk 2 will arrive (fingers crossed for 2023), it’s interesting to look at the city builders that have come out more recently, and how many of them may have been inspired by Frostpunk’s mix of story-based management, game simulation society and survival systems.
We’re in a city building boom these days, which is exciting. Although Fraser pointed out accurately that no one seems to be shooting for Cities: City Skylines City Builder Crownthis leaves plenty of room for all kinds of different types of city builders. We see city-building games taking place at the bottom of the ocean, in space, on the sides of mountains, on the backs of giant creatures, and even on a fantasy ringworld populated by dice.
There’s usually something going on in these games besides building cute towns, managing money and resources, and just making sure there are more happy faces than scowling faces in the civilian population. . There are echoes of Frostpunk’s systems in so many recent city builders.
Expeditions
One of the first buildings you can unlock in Frostpunk is the Beacon, an attached hot air balloon that can soar above the city, allowing a lookout to scout out places of interest far beyond the central generator. Scouts can then travel the world to explore new places (often leading to the discovery of even more remote areas) and return using the beacon as a guide.
Often, these expeditions not only give you extra resources, but also narrative choices, extra decisions to make, and a lot of tension while you wait to see how things unfold. Expeditions also excel at making you feel like your town is just a small part of a much bigger world that’s happening off-screen.
I’ve been happy to see more city builders including systems similar to Frostpunk’s Expeditions, to let us peek beyond our own borders. In The Wandering Village, where you build a colony on the back of a giant, heavy dinosaur-like creature, you can send scavengers out into the world as your mighty beast slowly traverses it. Scavenging isn’t just nice and useful, it can be absolutely crucial – since your city is on the move, it can roam around biomes lacking certain resources, and collecting extra supplies is extremely important for survival.
I haven’t played Ixion myself yet, but it takes place in outer space on a huge traveling space station. In addition to the interior and exterior views of the station, there’s also a star system map, and once you’ve built shuttles, you can send them out to investigate and explore the solar systems the station visits, gather supplies and manage meetings.
It’s a lot like Frostpunk’s Expeditions. Aquatico, the underwater city builder arriving in January, also has expeditions. You’ll be able to build submarines and use them to explore the ocean around your colony, which can include new sources of important materials and potentially even undiscovered types of ocean life.
Real-world policies and policies
Frostpunk isn’t just about building a functional city, it’s about managing society within its borders. Keeping citizens happy isn’t something new in city building games – usually it’s the overriding goal, otherwise people will drift away and the city will fail – but society management and policies and laws you can pass in Frostpunk were deeper and at times confusing. real. He explored systems like child labor, propaganda, censorship and authoritarianism. It’s far to decide what kind of ads you can put on the airships in Cities: Skylines.
We saw more of these real-world politics in survival city builder Floodland, which was released in November. Floodland is set in a world devastated by climate change and contains options for adopting social policies that are shockingly familiar to us after the COVID-19 pandemic. Citizens of Floodland can contract airborne diseases, and to combat their spread, you can adopt policies such as mask-wearing, social distancing, and even confinement.
Urban builder Urbek, which focuses on using natural resources rather than money to build a city that works, has other examples of social policies like reducing the hours of your workforce. (unsurprisingly, it makes people happier, and it would be nice if the real world would take notice) and produce higher quality food. (At the other end of the spectrum, you can use insects as a food source. absolutely doesn’t make people happy, but it’s still a viable solution to food shortages.)
Make you a real person
One of the reasons I tend to shy away from strategy games like Civilization is that I never really feel a connection between myself and what’s going on in the world. That’s why one of the few strategy games I really got sucked into was Crusader Kings 2, because it not only simulates a massive world full of countries, people, and events, but more personal systems. I have a character, which has a personality, attributes, flaws, a family, and all the personal drama that surrounds those things (like when my son falls in love with my aunt and they form an assassination plot against me ).
Although I enjoy city builders like Cities: Skylines, I have a bit of the same issue. I don’t really want to be a god making decisions from above, I also want to feel like part of the city. A resident. Frostpunk did a good job of making me feel like I was really there, mostly because if people got too upset they could just take my power away and kick me in the snow. Ixion takes a similar approach, appointing you the space station’s temporary director until everything goes wrong and you’re forced into a crucial leadership position. As with Frostpunk, if you do a poor enough job, you get fired.
It’s a great way to feel some connection between you and the people you lead.
The next mansion lords, which had a great playable demo (and hopefully will have another soon) came up with a particularly fun way to make you feel more like a real person than a deity sitting behind a keyboard: you could make yourself appear in the village and walk around in third person mode. It’s a small touch – you can’t really interact with anyone – but it’s a great way to feel a connection between you and the people you dominate.
It’s an exciting time to be a city builder fan, with lots of new games coming out now from biggest to biggest very small, and it’s even more exciting to see them evolve into experiences that go beyond just destroying buildings and connecting them to roads. While we wait to see what Frostpunk 2 offers, it’s nice to see that the original Frostpunk still holds influence, nearly half a decade later.
