Game Theory: Congratulations, Frostpunk 2 is exactly as miserable as it wants to be

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

I knew my time with Frostpunk 2 was not going well, emotionally, when I started trying to figure out if it was possible to kill one specific child.

Sadly, the game—the sequel to 2018’s BAFTA-nominated Bad Times Simulator—has moved away from dealing with the plights of frozen individuals, to that of larger (if still very chilly) factions and communities, meaning there was no way for me to specifically target Lily May Whateverherlastnamewas for execution. (She was the child who, the game’s relentlessly overwrought writing informed me, had miraculously been born the same moment my unseen character, The Steward, turned New London’s massive furnace back on at the start of its main campaign.) Still, I did end up killing a lot of New Londoners after my first run with the game ended with me shutting the generator right back off in a fit of pique after their relentless nagging, and the game’s obtuse systems and controls drove me into a murderous fury after about an hour of play, so I can keep my fingers crossed. Sure, they managed to vote me out of office and into exile before I could actually kill everybody in the city—at which point, presumably, I would have had to vote myself into exile—but I still like my odds of taking out that particular infant.

I resented Lily May not so much specifically, as for what she represented about Frostpunk 2‘s world, which continues the first game’s tradition of depicting a planet where an ice age has inflicted humanity with a life-threatening paucity of subtlety. “We survived the end of the world…now what?” one of its opening cutscenes has the sheer lack of self-awareness to post up on the screen. Damn, Frostpunk 2! Maybe we really are the walking dead!

It’s not like the first Frostpunk was subtle, either, what with its endless efforts to push you toward fascism or religious fanaticism to survive, so that it could then yell at you for embracing fascism or religious fanaticism to survive. But at least it was unique, with many of the problems and issues facing its ice-afflicted communities feeling like outgrowths of its steampunk-but-there-ain’t-enough-steam setting. Frostpunk 2, meanwhile, feels more generic, at least in part because it features more political factions at play in your city, and more of what feel like “pulled from the headlines” issues: When you’re being asked to weigh in on whether workers need to submit to mandatory infection checks to prevent epidemics—and with both sides presented with a slathering of “Hey, everybody’s an asshole!” equivocation—it’s hard not to get burnt out on the game’s efforts at political satire or commentary.

But exhaustion also just feels like the order of the day generally in Frostpunk 2, mostly by design. In my second, less immediately murderous run at the game, I found brief moments of fun in keeping the various plates the game asks you to take stewardship of spinning; underneath all the ice, the game is 90 percent a resource management simulator, with the player being asked to balance everything from coal and food supplies for their perpetually doomed colonists, to more esoteric ideas like the factional interests of the various political groups that keep popping up in your societies. But the game’s expanded scale, which now regularly tasks you with creating far-off colonies as your need for resources and space blooms, only multiplies the mental bureaucracy at play. Playing on the game’s (recommended) lowest difficulty, the actual numbers never got that threatening, but the sheer middle management I was forced to do, jumping between different communities to make sure all their needs were met, became a bit of Chore Simulator 2024. (And I say this as someone deeply in the groove for the meditative rhythms of actual chore simulators like PowerWash Simulator.) Without the intimacy of the original game, where every drop of lost heat mattered, and which made you feel every death when a decision pushed your people to the knife’s edge of survival, the more abstracted nature of Frostpunk 2‘s larger scale robs it of much of its emotional power.

Or, hell, maybe I’m just tired: It’s worth noting that the first Frostpunk arrived pre-pandemic, when there was a bit more life to the idea of taking on a deliberately stressful post-apocalyptic management job in my spare time. (I also may need to acknowledge that the game may have just fallen prey to the “I’m 40 now” of it all.) It also feels weirder to live with the game’s aggressively centrist politics: This is a game that firmly believes that people, on their own, are basically self-interested, factional, violent pieces of shit, and only the actions of vigilant, highly active government can keep them from turning into highly radicalized icicles. (As with the first game, it’s possible, through careful play, to stop your society from ever sliding into extremism in any direction, suggesting that failing regimes in the real world must be caused by not having sufficiently skilled strategy gamers at their helm.) To its credit, Frostpunk 2 knows it’s playing with heady ideas, even if its man-on-the-street blurbs (which pop up in response to your various laws and decisions) sometimes go as blatantly newspaper-political-cartoon as telling young people to “get a haircut and get a job.” (Some of these put me in mind of some of the writing in the banana republic sim Tropico games, which at least know their approach to representing political power and division is absurdly over the top.) I’ll also note that Frostpunk 2‘s approach to the political process, while simple, is actually some of the coolest gameplay it has on offer: If you want to be sure a law will pass when you dip into your city’s austere City Council, you’ve got to find a faction willing to make a deal to throw their support behind it; figuring out which such deals you can live with, or go back on without getting bit too hard in the ass, is some of the most fun “strategizing” the game actually offers. (The fact that you have to run these shenanigans to gin up political support for things like “Maybe we should put kids in schools” or “We shouldn’t eat the dead” goes back to the game’s basic disdain for the human animal.)

The most damning thing to be said about Frostpunk 2, at the end of the day, is that I just don’t want to play it anymore. I see those things in it that are admirable; in a life less stressful, I can imagine getting deeper into its basic resource management gameplay, which forces you to balance a basic need for slow but steady progress with occasional crisis points. But I don’t find most of the problems it’s asking me to solve—and Christ, but do these people have a lot of problems—all that interesting; combined with its deeply grim view on human nature, it’s enough to get me to shut the furnace down for good, and throw away the key.