The Age of Coal is Over

Set 30 years after Frostpunk 1, the expansive sequel replaces coal with oil as a more powerful heating resource. Frostpunk 2’s opening hours are spent using coal, but as demonstrated in the beta, this primitive resource fails to keep the generator going for long. As such, one of the beta’s multiple endings involves the discovery of an oil colony. Oil’s role in gameplay terms is getting the city to thrive instead of just surviving the cold, resulting in a city that can expand far beyond its generator. It’s clear that the dev team is saving the finer details of oil’s role for release.

Build and Manage Entire Districts Instead of Just Buildings

With oil comes great responsibility, and that means a bigger city. Frostpunk 1 focused more on the intimate hub surrounding the all-important generator. Things were much smaller in scale in the coal days, with a single building marking a substantial addition. Now, players can expand their city into different districts. Each district in Frostpunk 2 fulfills a unique production role. A housing district will require different resources than a food district, supplying you with distinct advantages. Supply and demand fuel the economics of Frostpunk 2, a change from the brutal ‘scraping to survive’ economics that the first game necessitated.

You’re No Longer the Sole Dictator

Frostpunk 2 has you negotiating with leaders to pass laws through a democratic Council Hall. The Council Hall adds a deep new diplomatic layer to the game, tying together the new faction system with it. Proposing a new law is often met with stern resistance from committee members, forcing the player to negotiate with them and pressure delegates. Your relationships with factions will be strained if you negotiate too forcefully with them. Factions are a complex new wrinkle deserving of their own entry on this list.

Different Competing Factions

Upon starting up a new game, you’re met with the option to choose between different Communities to populate your city. Worker communities prioritize different values and resources than thinker communities, with each eventually developing into full-fledged factions. Factions come into play through the Council Hall negotiations and the research of new buildings and technologies. For example, faction-exclusive research comes at a discount if you are on good terms with that particular faction. Get on bad terms with workers or the technocrat faction and they could work against you in Council Hall sessions and make it harder to research certain buildings.

Time Is Measured in Weeks Instead of Days

Frostpunk 2 moves along at a brisker pace than its predecessor, literally. The in-game clock now includes week, month, and year indicators. Days pass by in literal minutes, and the visuals indicate as much. Roads between the connected districts are lit by the blurred outline of swift-moving citizens, reminiscent of time-lapse car lights. This zoomed-out perspective of in-game time is just one manifestation of Frostpunk 2’s expanded scope.

Frostpunk 2 Uses Unreal Engine 5 While Frostpunk 1 Used Liquid Engine

Frostpunk 1 doesn’t look ugly by any stretch of the imagination, but wow does the sequel outshine it in the graphics department. Lighting in particular really pops due to the high contrast Lumen tech facilitated by UE5. The team does a good job differentiating terrain to make everything look organic and rugged in Frostpunk 2, which is just further helped by the capabilities of Unreal Engine 5.

Hexagonal Grid Tiles

Surprisingly enough, Frostpunk 1 didn’t have grid-based building placement. It didn’t need it due to the micro-scale it was operating on. But now with comprehensive districts connected by long roads, grids are a necessity. Empty land spaces are divvied up by hexagonal tiles, but once you build on the land, a wider grid outline surrounds your property. This is a small, yet vital addition that accommodates Frostpunk 2’s larger scope.

Frostbreaking

Extracting coal and ore deposits in the frozen wastes beyond the city is no simple feat. Unlike the first game, you must send Frostbreaker teams to break the ice before building on the tiles and extracting materials. Frostbreaking may seem like unnecessary busywork, but it allows you to expand the city limits far beyond anything dreamt of in the first game. You can stretch the city out far into the distance … if you can keep up with the resource demand, that is.

Relations, Tension, and Trust Replace Discontent and Hope Social Resources

Frostpunk 2 builds upon the first game’s social resources with Relations, Tension, and Trust. All three of these resources tie into the substantial role that factions and communities play. How other faction groups perceive you replace the brutal survival-oriented problems faced in the first game.

New Crime and Squalor Resource Tabs

Crime increases as goods become more scarce, as you’d expect. You can mitigate increased crime by posting Guard Squads around the districts, but a general population increase leads to a rise in crime. Likewise, Squalor worsens as the population increases, resulting in a dirtier, more disease-addled city. Making sure you balance city expansion with resources to counterbalance the increased population looks to be a fun challenge in Frostpunk 2.

A Population of Thousands Rather Than Hundreds

And of course, the reason we have new Squalor and Crime resources is due to Frostpunk 2’s much larger population. Micromanaging a sub-hundred population in Frostpunk 1 required sophisticated micromanagement skills, while the sequel requires you to multitask across multiple social vectors and resources to satiate the masses.

From Micro to Macro

This shift from micro to macro is a pretty substantial one. I can’t help but think that there’s an element of intimacy and familiarity that is lost when managing a multi-district city. This macro-scale approach will undoubtedly rope in new players averse to the first game’s micromanagement. But the broader scale also makes Frostpunk 2 a little bit less niche and more akin to other city-builder games. While there are still micromanagement elements present in Frostpunk 2, the zoomed-out perspective emphasizes the macro far more.

Far Different Moral Dilemmas

Moral dilemmas in Frostpunk 2 mostly show themselves when deciding which Faction you want to partner with and what suggestions to prioritize. Getting a law passed that bans food additives isn’t as black and white of a moral decision as boosting labor for a couple of weeks to stave off the cold. The moral dilemmas presented in Frostpunk 2 may be less dramatic than in the first game, but they’re more nuanced and politically driven.

Shift From Survival Management to Social Management

Frostpunk 2’s creative director perfectly summed up the game’s premise with the question, “What happens when you survive the un-survivable?” Every system in the game reflects this shift from basic survival to societal evolution. From the laws passed at Council Hall to all the different Factions at play, Frostpunk 2 focuses more on social management than survival management.

You Play as the Steward, Replacing the Deceased Captain

Finally, there’s us, the player. We played the role of the Captain back in the first game. We held the responsibility as a lone dictator, in a sense, with little to no opposition but the deathly cold and riotous populace. Your role in Frostpunk 2 is still a major one, though there’s a lot more teamwork and negotiations with other leaders this time around. The Steward is still a big fish, but the pond is much bigger than the first game, making it a more diplomatic affair overall. We’ll see just how much we, as the Steward, can get away with when Frostpunk 2 releases on September 20th.

"The Invincible is essentially a walking simulator."

There is also another small bit of baggage that warrants discussion when it comes to The Invincible—the book that the game is, in its own strange and interesting way, adapting. The similarly titled book tells the story of the crew of a spaceship, dubbed The Invincible, that is trying to figure out what happened to the crew of The Condor on the planet Regis III. Without going into too much in the way of details for the book’s plot, it’s safe to say that, while reading it might present you with some spoilers, it can also really enhance the core narrative of the game.

Since it’s essentially the least important part of The Invincible, let’s talk about its gameplay first. Tasked with finding your missing crewmates, you have to explore Regis III by making use of maps, landmarks, and other tools at your disposal. Interaction with the world is limited to spotting things, talking about them, and occasionally flipping a switch or hitting a button. In fact, for the vast majority of the game, you’re just going to be walking—and sometimes also driving—around.

That’s not to say that you’re aimlessly wandering around, however. Right from the offset, your goals are always very clear, be it making use of visible landmarks and a sketched-out map to find your camp, to using the wonderfully retro-futuristic gadgets you have to find your crewmates. There’s never really any moment where you’ll be “lost” in terms of not knowing what you should be doing, and since most of the interactions in the game revolve around observations and conversations, this minimalist approach to gameplay lets the game’s story take center stage.

" Rather than making use of a more modern screen, the scanner in The Invincible instead makes use of a circular array of LEDs, each of which can blink, depending on the position of the signal relative to where you’re standing and looking."

Setting everything else aside, the single best thing about The Invincible is its approach to futuristic gadgets. Harkening back to the art-deco aesthetics, just about everything you find in The Invincible feels like it would be right at home in a show set in the 1900s. The design of just about everything is a wonderful mix of the impracticality of classic sci-fi tropes, and the practicality of modern-day technology.

I have to give a shout out to the scanner, which lets you detect any nearby signals. Rather than making use of a more modern screen, the scanner in The Invincible instead makes use of a circular array of LEDs, each of which can blink, depending on the position of the signal relative to where you’re standing and looking. In essence, it’s basically an incredibly low-resolution screen, and by far my personal favorite sci-fi gadget design in a while. Other technology was seemingly designed in a similar way, with robot companions that feel like they belong on the cover of a pulpy sci-fi novel from the 60s, or even the metal detector essentially being a big CRT screen attached to a camera and a pistol grip.

The low-end sci-fi technology used in The Invincible goes quite well with the game’s general look. While Regis III might seem like a rather bland planet from the outset—you start out in a desert, after all—things don’t stay brown and sandy for too long. The hunt for your companions quickly takes you across a series of biomes, each with its own geological landmarks that you’ll often have to make use of in conjunction with your notebook to navigate. Since there aren’t really any big structures on Regis III, you’re going to have to work quite a bit harder to find your way around.

"The low-end sci-fi technology used in The Invincible goes quite well with the game’s general look."

As I’ve mentioned in this review, the story is quite simply the most important thing about The Invincible. The game is trying to tell a rather personal story of crewmates that get separated while out on a scientific journey. Players are put into the shoes of scientist Yasna, who mysteriously wakes up on Regis III with a broken communicator and some severe holes in her memory. Making use of her notes, players will quickly have to start making sense of their surroundings and situation.

Thankfully, the whole game isn’t really about recovering Yasna’s memories; she’s pretty good at recalling important things, after all. Rather, players join Yasna on her quest to find all of her crewmates that landed on Regis III and get off the planet. The premise for the story is simple, and ripe for quite a few twists and turns along the way.

Alongside learning the fate of her crewmates, Yasna also discovers that something about Regis III is incredibly strange. Interestingly, a lot of the intrigue is left to be pondered, and the game isn’t particularly forthcoming with answers, choosing instead to focus on some of the more philosophical aspects of its story. The key mystery, however, revolves almost entirely around the nature of Regis III as a planet, and why the only fauna that seems to have evolved on the planet doesn’t seem keen on leaving its oceans.

"The key mystery, however, revolves almost entirely around the nature of Regis III as a planet"

The quality of the writing in The Invincible is held up to quite an extent by its rather spectacular voice acting and direction, both in terms of visuals as well as audio. Every action you can take in the game feels like it has some real weight to it, and even the simple act of hopping off a ledge can feel like an ordeal on its own, thanks in large part to the fantastic audio. Yasna in particular comes off as a wonderfully believable character, even if her propensity to fall into flashbacks can start feeling somewhat annoying at certain points.

The Invincible is a game held up in large part thanks to just about every single one of its aspects aside from the core gameplay. While there’s quite a bit of exploration, the gameplay isn’t really why you’d want to play the game in the first place. Rather, it’s the story, writing and characters that will pull you through.

The simple story of The Invincible may not be the most bombastic or fantastical one out there—it is based on a sci-fi book to begin with, after all—but rather, the quieter moments of the game, where Yasna is just looking up at the night sky and wondering about things aloud that really make the game what it is. Of course, it also helps that the game has incredibly strong art direction, with one of the best executions of the art-deco-inspired retro futurist aesthetic in a video game.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.

Announced via the game’s official Twitter, This War of Mine: Final Cut will be released for PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S with newly updated 4K visuals and UI adjustments for easier playthroughs using controllers. The port, dye out on May 10, is being handled by Crunching Koalas, who are known for porting various indie projects to consoles. Alongside the above-mentioned platforms, the game will be available to play on Xbox Game Pass at launch.

11-bit studios CEO Prezemek Marszal says: “We believe it’s especially important to educate people on the realities of war right now, while its horrifying reality has become a daily struggle for people that are close to us.

“We’re proud that recent This War of Mine fundraising helped us create a wave of spontaneous help for war victims in Ukraine, and we hope we can further spread our antiwar message with This War of Mine: Final Cut.”

This War of Mine: Final Cut will launch for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on May 10.

This War of Mine: Final Cut crafted by our friends from @CrunchingKoalas with newly updated 4K visuals and UI adjustments is coming to Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 on May 10th. It will also be available on Day One on @XboxGamePass. pic.twitter.com/ifORO5aMri

— This War of Mine (@ThisWarOfMine) April 27, 2022