Frostpunk: How the Cold Changes us

How one city builder makes you a dictator

Frost punk is a game about survival. It's a game about a world that's cold and sterile and challenges the player to make a town thrive in its wastes. And it's a game that does some of  ,the coolest shit I’ve ever seen a game do with its narrative design. Its web of systems spinning together in such a way to lead the player down the path of becoming a brutal leader in the name of survival. 

Its rare enough for a game to make a character arc like this for a more conventionally narrative driven experience, where the story is driven by either dialogue trees in the case of RPGs or cutscenes or a combination of both. But for a game to convey this narrative progression with just its mechanics is worth  a closer look. And with its sequel around the corner, I think now is the perfect time.

So hunker down and seek shelter from the storm as we look at The captain from frostpunk and how the game's mechanics change him from benevolent captain to power hungry leader. 

Or put another way, this video is going to be a look at Frostpunk: How the cold Changes us. 

Before we look at frostpunk specifically, let's start with table stakes. While I will be talking about the character arc of the player character, because it is the Player, I will be talking about the emergent narrative that Frostpunk tends to create a lot. 

Emergent narrative is the story that centres your players. It is the things that happen to your players, as a consequence of the game's mechanics, choices the players make because of those mechanics. We care about emergent narrative in games because this is how the player makes sense of their experience playing your game and how they tell their friends and family about that experience. 

Mechanics in case you haven’t played a video game before, are rules that dictate how players interact with your game, what goals the players are given, the challenges put in front of them and the tools they have to overcome said challenges. 

What sets frostpunk apart from most city builders I have played is how it uses emergent narrative to drive character arcs giving the player a very very good reason why they should slip into depravity. 

But we will get to that. `

The Cold

What makes frostpunk stick for me where so many City builders bounced off me is the element of survival that frostpunk adds to the citybuilder. 

Survival is the end goal of frostpunk. The cold is oppressive, never letting up no matter what time of day or night. If left unchecked it will slowly but surely ground your economy to a halt as people are either amputated due to frostbite or sick. 

 In fact there have been more than one scenarios where I look at my ever dwindling supply of coal, the resource you need to keep your generator on and your town warm, and pray to just make it to the next work day so we can work to fix it. 

You might have heard the term Ludonarrative dissonance. Where the gameplay or the player and the narrative seem to be at odds with each other, well this is a case of Ludo narrative synchronicity. You as the player, and you as the captain of this small group of survivors have the same motive. Make a place for your people to survive. And standing in your way is the Cold, a relentless enemy that can kill without remorse and offers no respite. However things only get worse because in addition to various resources you have to manage like food, coal and warmth there is one resource that keeps the pressure on: time. 

Time: 

The people of your city work from 8 AM to 6 PM everyday, no matter how urgent a crisis breaks out. You didn’t produce enough coal because your workers were sick and getting treated. Most of your residents go, I miss the part where that's my problem. While this does encourage the player to plan ahead and invest in technology to combat inefficiency problems, it adds another layer of pressure as it creates sticky scenarios that force them to slide down the path of depravity. For example, In the beginning of the game when you do not have enough hands, you can sign the child labour law to get more workers or if you would rather not subject children to this, you can sign the emergency shift law where a workplace will work non stop for the next 24 hours at the risk of some people dying. Now if you are like me, you can

USE BOTH AT THE SAME TIME: Come on TIMMY that steel isn’t going to scavenge itself. 

But frostpunk isn’t just about the Cold. 

Its about the people. 

PEOPLE

The last major mechanic we need to set up the player's character arc into depravity is the people of the city. In general your job is to manage two things, the discontent of the citizens vs how hopeful they are. If your discontent gets too high or hope gets two low, you will have one last chance to raise or lower it and if you fail, it's a game over. Whilst this isn’t too bad in itself, at times people will come to you with requests to solve various problems throughout the city that they think you are ignoring. Do you play politics and agree to their solution even though it's not the most effective or risk raising discontent by ignoring them and solving problems your way.  These three when put together give spin together in ways that make the moment to moment city building of Frostpunk fraught with tension as you agonize over not having the resources, the man power or the morale to tackle the cold. But that alone isn’t what facilitates the character arc for Frostpunk's Commander. 

Mechanics alone don't produce emotion, and as a consequence, mechanics alone can’t produce change. Which is why to explain how Frostpunk creates this change, we need to go over all three acts of the New Home scenario. 

If anything I’ve said here excites you to go pick it up, I highly recommend you do so because we will be going over spoilers and peeling the mystery back on some of the games design events. 

Each game ‘s New home scenario begins the same way:

You start with 80 adults and 15 children. A group of people who heard that there were people in the north who developed generators and formed cities that thrived in the wastes. You’ve lost some of your people and supplies on the way here, as you got separated in a blizzard. So you need to get the generator up and running and get some basic shelter for everyone. 

Once you have shelter for everyone and form a hunting party and cookhouse to keep your people fed, you need to construct a workshop and have a beacon set up so that you can set up a party to search for your lost convoy and other su in the frostland. You should find them right? 

Well you do. You find smatterings here and there in caves taking refuge from the unrelenting cold. But you were told that there were teams sent out here long ago. Other were cites out in the frozen wastes and yours was just the latest. Yet where is everyone? The closest city from yours was winterhome. So you send an excavation team, finding useful resources at each point but no people. Odd. 

As days roll on the temperature gets lower. Soon the tents you made for everyone might as well be useless. If you were like me, by now you actually have gotten pretty good at city building parts of the game. You  might have constructed a few medical outposts and kept everyone fairly healthy and hopeful about their new life under your watchful care. Until one day a man staggers out of the snow and collapses. His last words are a match that sets tensions exploding. 

“Winterhome has fallen.” My ears rang. And I could feel my throat go dry. 

Suddenly all of the goodwill I had evaporated in an instant and a chunk of people wanted to abandon my city and return to london. And this kicks off the second act. You need to convince this faction of people who call themselves the Londoners that the city you built has hope yet. And to do that you gain access to two new sets of laws: Faith and order. I chose Faith because it has means to directly raise hope. But both are similar. As they give you ways to directly address discontent or hope. 

And now is a time to address something I haven’t brought up about this game's mechanics. The Book of Laws. The book of laws is this game’s version of an upgrade tree. When you sign a law there usually is a direct modification to hope or discontent as citizens react to a new law. However there’s another thing that happens, you see the consequences of your law unfold through Vigents throughout the city as you are granted little windows into the lives of the city you created. And based on events in the city, you might be forced to sign a law or face the ire of the crowd and sometimes your people might not be willing to see you handle that.

So when a member of the church was beaten and supplies were stolen, I chose to pray for them instead. 

Only it happened, second time. And a third. Until the city reached a boiling point. 

So I created the Faith keepers. And gave them the power to enact public penance. 

With the people kept in line. I was free to help them as much as I wanted. I’d raise hope with evening services. Have food kitchens to raise the warmth of colder work places. I inaugurated a pub. But still as the cold set in, as the sick had begun to mount, the Londoners gained more and more followers. So I proclaimed myself to be the Protector of the Truth. With three days left as the rest of my city to be asleep I realised I couldn’t have enough time left to stop the Londoners from leaving. I pondered my actions, my palms sweaty. Before I signed the New faith. 

The game knows what you are about to do. And it stops you. However it was either to become a despot or let my city, my people die. So I made my decision. 

The night erupted in violence as the Londoners and the old faith were cast into Oblivion their bodies left to fill the snow pits I dug for the dead so that they may keep those of the new faith alive and fertilise our greenhouses. 

And by the end, any hope of the people was gone. They didn’t need it any more as I was left as their Captain. And my word was all they ever needed. 

The final act of Frostpunk 

Was a boss battle against the Cold itself as refugees had begun pouring into the city, fleeing from something massive. In truth it's one of those fights in a city builder that you need to play and as I insisted before, if anything I said interests you about frostpunk you deserve to go play it. But in short, it takes all the nail biting survival and cranks it up to eleven as a massive storm that will kill in minutes is going to hit your city and you need to stock up on food.

To survive the storm in frostpunk is to fulfill what you set out to do when you set out from London. You’ve taken the worst this world can throw at you and you have survived. But as the game is apt to point out, in doing so you crossed a line. 

Frostpunk is a game about survival. It's a game that challenges you to seed a white sterile land with life. At any cost. And it confronts the players with the choices they make. And  that allows for the players to have an interesting character arc within the fiction of the world for a player character. As the player goes from a leader who wants what's best for the city to a leader who wants the city to survive at any cost. But of course this isn’t perfect. As there will always be ways in which players use our systems that we didn’t expect. However there is a take away for game devs here and it is that if you want your player characters to go down a character arc, use your in game economy to make it easy to under go that transformation and it just might be one that has your player justifying it to themselves.      b