If you didn't see the posts I've been making over the last few weeks, many have been about the attempts to mine to get back into gaming while owning only an overpriced Macbook Pro M2. This isn't the most ideal thing to be attempting to play games on, but hey, it's unfortunately all I have for the time being. I wrote a post on attempting to try out Amazon's Luna cloud service which I knew I wasn't going to stick with, and yesterday wrote a post on Heroic Launcher which helps bridge some Epic Games and GOG titles to the MacOS platform through the handy use of Wine and Crossover. But it hasn't been all that great of an experience due to constant performance issues which either make games run a bit too hot due to the demand, or leaves behind some annoying bugs which make some games essentially pointless to try playing given the inevitable crashes. But one game in particular I really wanted to try out was Frostpunk. I've owned this one for a long time now but never decided to give it a go. Fortunately GOG offers a native MacOS installation and it doesn't run all that bad if you tweak the settings a bit and put things on low. It still looks pretty good, and the performance is totally fine which surprised me. No burning hot laptop, though it does run a little warm.
Frostpunk is a different type of city builder, mixing together the two genres of steampunk and (of course) frostpunk. The world is in ruin after the arrival of a horrific ice age which has devastated much of the world, leaving it uninhabitable due to constant storms and freezing temperatures that constantly dip lower, way below -50 Celsius. I've managed to reach -70C so far and that was just torture as I wasn't all that prepared for it. Anyway, you're destined with starting a new civilisation, starting with a group of people and some natural resources that surround you. Gathering what you can and directing people around as you get the necessary resources to build homes, more industry, and additional resources key to the survival of the town. It sounds relatively straight forward, but it's actually a constant struggle for survival against the cold as you have to manage your resources, manage the people through politics and efficiency, all while ensuring you're one step ahead of research and discoveries. As you're starting off, you're just throwing up little homes here and there, adding a few buildings to keep people sheltered from the cold, but all of this costs. The primary struggle being coal. The one thing that powers the central generator which provides warmth to those around it. And that warmth varies based on distance.
This means you have to build areas of the town which slowly becomes a city within general proximity of other districts, keeping some warmth internal. Buildings don't promise warmth, and you have to allocate people to specific buildings knowing that they'll either get sick or die. This leads to the health aspect, building medical centres and such which don't really help anyone at the early point of the game, if someone gets sick early on, they're pretty much guaranteed death. Especially as you have to farm resources more out of the centre. A constant struggle for me is managing food, which seems near impossible to manage once the cold really kicks in. Where the buildings that manage the food grow too cold to keep operating, and the heaters just aren't enough to keep them going. You can upgrade buildings and make them better in terms of heating and efficiency, but that of course costs. And it takes time to research such upgrades, so you have be certain you're upgrading the right technologies at the right time, otherwise one industry may start to fall behind. This is where much of the difficulty comes in, because it's so frustratingly easy to suddenly slip behind and watch how the pieces begin to fall one after the other: workers not attending work. Resources low. People dying and getting sick. People starve. They revolt. Prisons are made. Guard towers to keep them in check. Next thing you know, you're not just building factories to get more coal to keep the generator going as the demands increase, you're building propaganda centres to keep the people in check as their discontent rises and hope decreases.
Various challenges arise over time as people rise up or resources grow thin, and it's an instead panic to attempt to climb back up and maintain that constantly flow of everything that keeps the city thriving. At first my greatest problem was dealing with the "Londoners" which are a group which claim to be gaining support to replace you if you don't handle things. It's a race to figure out the best way to go about this, and it can be done with just being good and giving the people what they want, but it's so easy to go full totalitarian on them and crush the opposition to deal with it as fast as possible. As I mentioned, time is the hardest thing here. You don't have time for anything, the day/night cycle feels short as you're constantly trying to manage all the industries, and an uprising is the last thing you want to be wasting time and resources on. When things are goign smoothly though, it feels so good to watch as everything expands and flourishes. You can upgrade the homes from tents into bigger tents, then actual homes. Each of these upgrades adds warmth to the people, and warmth is yet another thing you must manage. I haven't quite figured out how to juggle this aspect of things yet, and warmth does tend to be the thing which leads to starvation as the food supply machine stops and the people grow colder.
I am still relatively new to the game and have had a few runs at the first challenge, failing every time but getting a bit more beyond where I did the previous time. I ended up looking up some tips online which led me to realising how to handle certain priorities a bit better, knowing that getting engineers on their research at all times increases the speed massively. It does seem like the kind of game where you have to figure things out over time, and each attempt you make will come with difference decisions, and it's by making the right and wrong decisions and failing and/or sometimes succeeding that you find the right path forward. A little bit linear in this fashion, but still fun. I found it really fun to reach the point in which factories and automation begin, where you can start to utilise robotics to manage certain things, which allows you to farm resources even in the night when the worker's shift would otherwise end. As well as reaching the point where you can create prosthetics, which is incredibly useful when all of your people are frostbitten and losing limbs here and there, leading to them otherwise becoming a burden on the rest of your society as they can't work but do need a home with heating and food.
Chances are, you won't be available to save your people and lead them to greatness, you'll be starting over a lot as something somewhere inevitably crumbles during your run, that side of the game sucks. But it does lead to you trying new things each time, somewhat adding some new variety into the game.