There are a lot ways for your citizens to die in survival sim Frostpunk: The Last Autumn, the follow-up to one of 2018's best games. They can die of starvation. Sickness. Accidents. Brawls. Exposure to unsafe working conditions. But even if none of those happen I just may murder them all myself. I hate my citizens that much. 

Don't get me wrong: I love my little Frostpunk citizens, too. I want them to survive. Each of their deaths breaks my heart a little. But I hate them. It's a more palpable hate than I've experienced for tiny AI-controlled people in pretty much any other game I've ever played. Here I am, nobly trying to protect them from the incredibly harsh conditions I'm forcing them to endure, and what do they do? Betray me. Again and again. We'll be busy building the massive generator that will warm us against the encroaching, inevitable frost, and then some of them will notice a bunch of owls flying around during the daytime and assume they're harbingers of doom, and everything will grind to a halt.

The game text places the blame on the owls. Not me. I blame my citizens.

And my people aren't entirely wrong: those owls most certainly are an omen, an omen of just how badly human-made climate change will fuck with nature. But half of these idiots don't even believe that climate change is really happening, and they take the daytime owls not as a sign to work faster to build the generator, but as sign that nature is warning them to give up the construction project and go home. That's like deciding rain isn't a reason to patch the hole in your roof but a reason to give up on the idea of a roof altogether.

I hate my citizens so much. I want to save them, but boy do I hate them.

And saving them is not fucking easy. Frostpunk: The Last Autumn seems like it should be easier. Out today, it's a prequel to Frostpunk and takes place before the complete freezing of the world, so there's still green grass at the construction site. The outside world is still functioning: boats deliver material supplies, and after building a telegraph tower you can send for additional workers instead of relying on children for labor or accepting a bunch of refugees who are at death's door, as in Frostpunk's base game.

But while that sounds more pleasant, there really is no hope because I've seen the future of Frostpunk and I know those oceans will freeze solid and those lovely steampunk ships will stop arriving and children will someday be sent crawling around inside machinery by some awful, callous city leader (me). I know the world is doomed. Which is why I'm working these poor people (the ones I hate) so viciously to finish building the generator. It's the only chance we've got to live long enough to see the horrible, hopeless future.

As in the original Frostpunk, in The Last Autumn I pretty quickly slide into fascism. But can you blame me? An erotic photo mailed to a worker leads to chaos as people fight over it, repeatedly, and letters bearing bad news from home threaten to sink the motivation of the workers. I'm trying to protect them from themselves and preserve order, and the best way to do that, in my opinion, is to decide for them what they need to know and what they don't. Go ahead and judge me, but these are people who want to abandon the project because a few birds flew over it. The less they know, the better.

The guilt of censoring mail, of making people work long hours, of knowing that if there were any children available to me I would put them to work on dangerous machinery, it weighs heavily on me. Which is why I'm genuinely pleased when the labor portion of the book of laws opens up. Yes! Labor laws. This is exactly what I need. 

That's not sarcasm, in case you were wondering. I really do need this. I can't be trusted not to use and abuse my citizens until they're corpses, especially with fresh workers arriving at the docks every few days. There needs to be a check in place against my horrifying, heroically brutal leadership.

I pass a law that there must be a labor union and a worker's council. It's risky—now the same idiots who take their cues from owls will now have a say in how the construction of the generator proceeds. I build them a labor hall (well, to be fair, I make them build themselves a labor hall, but unlike their cramped tents, crowded medical facility, and the understaffed pub it might actually be a place they enjoy spending time), and institute collective bargaining, which means they can negotiate in the event of a strike. We've had two strikes already, so it's doesn't take an oracle to divine there will be a third.

Setting up labor laws feels good to me, a feeling I don't often get while playing Frostpunk. And I won't lie, it feels good not just because the union will counter my worst impulses, but also because when things go wrong and we all die I'll be able to spread the blame around a little bit. Turns out, though, we don't even get that far. The first act of the labor union is to fire me.

They stick me in a rowboat and send me out to sea, and I can't say I blame them. I've broken several promises already, being late to build a chapel and bath houses and get everyone fed properly like I said I would. Not to mention all the mail censoring I've done. At least I can die at sea knowing I did what I could to give my workers a voice, even if that voice told me, loudly and in unison, to piss off. 

Frostpunk: The Last Autumn is out today for $17. It requires the base game, which is currently on sale for $12.

Frostpunk is a fantastic city-scale survival game that takes place beyond the world as we know it, in a new ice age that puts a question mark on the prospect of human survival. Surprisingly, rather than deepen the cold in its upcoming expansion, 11 Bit Studios has chosen to melt some of the snow, turning back the clock to just before the globe was consumed by ice in The Last Autumn.

The lengthy, narrated gameplay video above runs through the ways a bit of green grass changes the game. It's still dire—the ice is on the way—but rather than living in hell, you're building a lifeboat to climb in before it arrives. It's still fundamentally the same kind of plate-spinning city building sim, but new laws will change how you manage discontent and productivity as you attempt to construct a giant generator that will power life following the freeze. The resources have also changed, with most arriving by sea, and safety ratings are another thing to worry about. Workers don't love working in death traps.

The Last Autumn releases on January 21. There's no price for just the DLC listed right now, but it can be purchased as part of the Frostpunk Season Pass bundle, which also includes the existing Rifts DLC, one future expansion, a digital art book, and the soundtrack. That's on sale for $24.47 right now, but will be $34.97 or £27.77 normally.

The world of Frostpunk was already frozen over when we first got put in charge of one of humanity's last cities, but the next DLC will take us to an earlier point, before everything was quite as chilly. The Last Autumn is set during the construction of the life-saving generator that heats Frostpunk's city, when you could still see grass and all the water hadn't become ice. 

Instead of looking after a group of starving, desperate survivors, you'll be running a team of engineers building the generator. That doesn't mean it's doing away with its survival themes, however, as the site is far from civilisation and will have to deal with a bunch of new crises. Thankfully there's also a new Book of Laws to let you mould your wee society, along with more steam-powered tech and buildings. 

It's a pretty bleak prospect, given the inevitability of the big freeze and the end of the world, but bleak is Frostpunk's raison d'être. The main scenario starts off initially pretty hopeless, but this time we'll see its actual descent as the planet starts to freeze. Fun!

The Last Autumn is due out on January 21, and you can pick it up as part of the season pass or on its own. The final DLC, Project TVADGYCGJR, will also appear next year. In the meantime, you can grab the base game for 60 percent off on Steam.

Frostpunk, the best sim of 2018, is beckoning survivors back to the frosty wasteland. The unrelentingly gloomy management game's first expansion is out today, along with a season pass that will net players another pair of expansions further down the line. 

The first expansion, The Rifts, introduces a new map for Endless mode that will challenge you to build in a city in a really dumb place. The little land you've got to build on is separated by massive chasms, so you'll need to plonk down bridges and figure out how to keep a scattered city warm. 

I had a hard enough time keeping a decent number of people alive when I had plenty of real estate. By the end everyone was dropping by flies and I was only really saved by the bell, so this might be a challenge too far for me. 

The Rifts is available today for £3.99/$4.99 on Steam, and it's also included in the season pass. Two more expansions are set to appear, starting later this year with The Last Autumn, introducing a new scenario, mechanics and architecture. That'll be followed next year by Project TVADGYCGJR. The title is a code waiting to be cracked, apparently, but we'll also find out more when The Last Autumn launches. 

A free update will throw a trio of maps into Endless mode, based on the Arks, Refugees and Fall of Winterhome scenarios. All Frostpunk players will be able to take them for a spin. It's also received quite a few big updates since launch, so if you've not frozen your arse off for a year, you'll have several new modes and scenarios to play. 

Grim city-building survival game Frostpunk, which we named 2018's best sim, is 50% off on Steam right now. It's $15/£12.50—its lowest ever price, according to deal site IsThereAnyDeal.

In Frostpunk, you slowly build a city in a frozen world that offers very few resources. It's tough, and miserable at times: you'll contemplate horrific decisions just to make it through the day, such as mixing sawdust into meals to bulk them out, or sending children to work in dangerous factories. Your citizens will often freeze, fall ill or starve, and if they're unhappy enough they can even banish you from your own city. 

Chris sung its praises in his 89/100 review, calling it a "stressful, stylish, and addictive survival management game filled with incredibly difficult choices". Once you've started a campaign, its very hard to tear yourself away.

The 50% off deal lasts until Tuesday, and you can grab it here. If you need more convincing, it's also on our list of the best PC games you can play right now.

Frostpunk just saw its one-year anniversary, and in that time it’s sold more than 1.4 million copies, far exceeding developer 11 bit Studio’s expectations. Now, the studio is thinking about what comes next for their game, which they’ve bolstered over the past 12 months with a steady stream of post-release content. While a sequel would certainly make sense, the studio has other ideas in mind, too—including a role-playing game set in the Frostpunk universe.

GamesIndustry.biz spoke with Patryk Grzeszczuk, 11 bit’s director of marketing, about his company’s future plans for Frostpunk. Part of those plans is bringing Frostpunk to consoles, which the studio is working on now.

But further on down the road, Grzeszczuk says 11 bit is looking into exploring new genres, including RPGs. The studio has been gradually adding to Frostpunk’s backstory and lore as they’ve produced more DLC, and that process has resulted in a world rich enough to support a more narrative-leaning game.

“We’ve had that approach since day one,” Grzeszczuk said. “We wanted to create a world, and then fill that world with stories, with places, and then build connections between them.”

“The world of Frostpunk is growing,” he continued. “And we’re thinking that, in the future we should think about, maybe not a sequel, but a spin-off—an RPG set in the same universe.”

Grzeszczuk didn’t elaborate further, but it’s an exciting idea, particularly coming from a studio that, between Frostpunk and This War of Mine, has pushed us into some of the most harrowing decisions we’ve ever had to make in video games. 

Should Frostpunk find continued success in the console market, it’s likely we’ll see a more expanded universe in the near future. 

We gave Frostpunk our Best Sim award for 2018. 

Frostpunk from 11 bit studios claims our next GOTY award. Find the complete set of them throughout December in our GOTY hub.

Chris: At first it appears to be a beautiful steampunk building management game with survival elements. Construct a city around a massive coal-powered generator in a frozen crater, and keep your citizens warm, fed, and healthy. But it's the simulation of a desperate and fickle society, as well as your role as a leader, that makes Frostpunk such a challenging and unforgettable experience. You're periodically called on to pass laws, and each law comes with a compromise, the significance of which isn't entirely apparent until further down the line.

When hungry citizens begin stealing food from your storehouse, it feels perfectly natural to begin a neighborhood watch program to keep an eye on everyone. But with its first few decisions Frostpunk is just grooming you, testing your morals, seeing how far you'll go in the name of saving lives. Later laws can allow you to build guard towers, form a patrolling militia, and eventually you might be spreading propaganda, having people sign loyalty oaths, and even having your band of enforcers perform public executions, all in the name of keeping your city safe and orderly, or at least convincing your citizens that you are in control. The appearance of order gives them hope, and the more tightly you close your iron fist, the more hope they have. By the end of the game you may wind up feeling you've only done what was necessary to save lives, but at the same time you may feel more like a monster than a savior.

Fraser: All of the miserable, freezing people huddled around the city’s few heat sources thought that the perpetual winter was going to be the end of them, but actually it was me. I set aside empathy for a practical attitude, which is a nice way of saying that I made kids work in the mines. Frostpunk’s a strange survival management game in that surviving might not really be worth it, at least not for your poor citizens. Where other survival games use resource scarcity to push players to take risks and venture out further from the base, Frostpunk uses it to force players to make decisions about what kind of society they’re building at the end of the world. And mine was just awful. Survival still ultimately comes down to numbers—population, food stores, temperature—but the methods used to maintain those things are vastly more interesting than ‘build this thing’. 

Jody: Each time you finish one of Frostpunk's campaigns you get to see a time lapse of your settlement's life, pushing back against the ice as it expands. While that happens you're reminded of all the sacrifices that were necessary to make it possible—the scouts who died in the snow, overworked miners who had limbs amputated, the people who suffered under the draconian laws you passed out of necessity—and the cost of survival hits you. After all those hours of howling wind and sheets of ice, that was when Frostpunk finally succeeded at making me feel cold.

Read Chris's Frostpunk review here, and check out his in-depth interview with the team behind the game. 

Despite the perpetual winter, Frostpunk couldn't be described as festive, but thanks to the free update, A Christmas Carol, the gloomy survival management game’s Endless mode is getting a little speck of hope in the form of a new holiday quest and a massive Christmas tree. 

It’s not a surprise that Frostpunk identifies with Dickens. Its frozen industrial city is an analogue for Victorian London, full of factories and poverty, while the themes of crappy working conditions and the poor treatment of the working class crop up in the difficult decisions you have to make when running your struggling haven. 

The update introduces a new quest in Endless mode, where survivors will approach you in the hope that you’ll preserve Christmas for the next generation by hosting a big communal meal and distributing presents. I know that if I was facing a miserable (but probably brief) life in a frozen wasteland at the end of the world, a present would cheer me right up. Unfortunately, given the era, it would probably just be a hoop. The Victorians had rubbish toys. 

It wouldn’t be Frostpunk without something to balance out the cheer, of course, so you’ll have to weigh the costs of having a party and plonking down a lovely Christmas tree with the benefit to morale. A celebration might go down well at first, but everyone will be a lot less chipper when they realise they've scoffed the last of the food. 

A Christmas Carol is free and out now.

Brutal city builder Frostpunk is one of the best games of the year so far, and next week it will add a long-awaited endless mode that lets you grow your city for as long as you can stop your citizens freezing to death.

The team at 11 Bit Studios says the new mode took longer than planned because it's bigger than they first intended—it was initially designed as a grueling challenge, but now it will get both hard and easy variants. It will arrive "within a couple of days", the studio said in the dev diary above.

On Serenity, the easier version, players will get more resources and face less challenging weather conditions, giving them more time to concentrate on building their city the way they like. Endurance, however, promises to be even nastier than the base game, with new randomised events that will turn off parts of your city for a few days, leaving your citizens unprotected against the unending cold. You can tweak the difficulty in each variant, making your citizens more or less demanding, for example.

You'll be able to play both variants on four different maps, and their layout will determine how you can grow your city. The Frostlands—the name for area in the zoomed out map—will still be explorable, and every so often a huge snow storm will cover it, blocking off old locations and opening up new, randomised sites to visit. 

Sometimes, you'll find "mementos" at those sites, and you'll be able to store them in an Archives building, which is one of a few new building types the endless mode adds. 11 Bit says these mementos will answer some of the questions the community has about the lore of the Frostpunk universe.

It sounds like the perfect excuse to jump back into what is a brilliant city builder—you can check out Chris's full review here.

Frostpunk's newest expansion, 'The Fall of Winterhome' is out now.

The new story trailer delivers a rather sombre message, left by a nameless former inhabitant of Winterhome. Named 'The Fall of Winterhome', it shows what happened to the city before the timeline of the main campaign. Developer 11 bit studios promises "hours of brand-new content" and a "unique map with fresh visuals." There will be more lore to uncover too, as well as "new mechanics" and buildings.

Alongside the above, comes the follow developer diary:

With that, a host of balancing and bug fixes have also been introduced. Full details can be perused via this Steam Community post, but highlights include faster scenario unlocks (now set at 20 in-game days), a bunch of AI and graphics optimisations, a host of bug fixes, and a 'Golden Path' achievement update—the later of which now properly describes achievement unlock conditions. 

For more Frostpunk reading, here's Chris' 89-scored review.