Frostpunk 2 will explore life after the apocalypse

The original Frostpunk was a post-apocalyptic tour de force in which you had to fight to survive. In Frostpunk 2, society has grown after 30 years in the snow, and mere survival is no longer an option. Ambitions and dreams of a better future are in the minds of citizens, and how you deal with those challenges will determine your success as a steward.

Frostpunk 2 will be a more complex city-building survival game than its predecessor. You'll have to replay the game multiple times just to understand what you did wrong. But according to Łukasz Juszczyk, Co-Game Director and Art Director, the idea is not to punish players with incredible difficulty: "If the player is struggling on their sixth time though, after that, we switch the difficulty because it's probably too hard."

Developers want you to learn from your mistakes so you have the satisfaction of getting over the hump: "You can't cheat on the player, okay? If the player fails, then the player needs to know why he failed, or at least have some idea why." That would be easier in a campaign where you can change your decisions from the previous chapter, like making laws and siding with different factions.

Frostpunk 2 will introduce even more layered factions, with people who have ideas of how society should look. Your decisions have more repercussions, as you'll quickly realize you can't make everyone happy. Now, you have a city parliament (counsel meetings) where factions, de facto political parties, have even more influence.

In Frostpunk, I tried to create a fair society where children would learn so they could build a better future. As you can imagine, that backfired big time. Before you can say "sub-zero," the children were back in the mines. So what will it be? Efficient dictatorship, where you risk being killed if you're too strict, or democracy, where you respect everyone and are thus deemed weak?

As you can see, Frostpunk 2 is a challenging game in which you must choose between bad and worse decisions. That said, I'm eager to dive into this advanced society roguelike, as I vividly remember fighting for mere survival (those ice storms didn't help). Frostpunk 2 release date is July 25, 2024.

While you wait for Frostpunk 2, check out the 15 Best single-player survival games on Pro Game Guides.