Frostpunk developer 11 Bit Studios doesn’t engage with the question of whether video games should tackle ideological questions, so much as it takes that engagement as a given. It’s an axiom baked into the DNA of everything from This War of Mine, which presented the cruelties of war from a civilian perspective, to the original Frostpunk and now Frostpunk 2 – the studio’s philosophical magnum opus, the culmination of years of experimentation with what I like to call its ideological simulators.
It’s an approach that works so well precisely because it relentlessly assails the player with difficult social, political, and economic choices, rather than providing an escape from them. Perhaps Frostpunk 2’s greatest achievement, however, is what it manages to stimulate outside of play. Rarely has a game prompted me to engage in so much consideration of its themes and possible reference texts, or encouraged so much introspection.
That said, my reference texts might not be your reference texts. I spent my childhood in freshly post-Soviet Russia, which was going through a social, political, and economic adjustment so extreme the contours of it are still imprinted on my brain today. I spent my winters in a city flat; I remember minus-20-degree days and the faint haze of smog over city rooftops. The summers were at my grandfather’s dacha – there was one telephone for the entire village; we walked to a well for fresh water; the black and white TV received one channel; the heating came from a brick stove that we gathered wood for from the nearby forest. There are difficult memories and happy memories, but collectively they form a tenor that channels a certain culture and history, and perhaps a time before the one I lived in.
Frostpunk 2 is set in 1916 in what ostensibly feels like alternate history Victorian England, but somehow it manages to speak to me. But its central themes – survival, hope, prosperity, community, progress – are universal enough that I suspect it will speak to you, too, even if that tenor is different. In the meantime, indulge me; like Frostpunk’s disparate factions, we might find some common ground.