Ah, the Refugees. This is the scenario that first got me cautiously optimistic about the Frostpunk devs: remember all that stuff I said about how narratively nonsensical the starting conditions of A New Home are? The Refugees revisits that premise and both better justifies the whole thing and actually leans into how miserable it would actually be for people to be marching through the snow to a safe place they're just kind of hoping exists: you spend the initial portion of the scenario with a continuous stream of refugees arriving every about-a-day, and many of them show up already Ill or hungry, exactly as I said they really ought to be in A New Home.

Furthermore, though you have to Scout to get this answer, there is a proper answer to where all these people came from that marching on foot to the Generator is at all feasible: off 'east' of your Generator is a Land Dreadnought that you'll be told is how your people got this far. It's a ways away, so it makes sense for people to stream in to the Generator site over literally days, but still close enough that such a march is at least vaguely plausible to pull off.

There's also more of a real explanation implied for why the Generator has all these starting resources but no starting buildings or the like, where the resource piles are somewhat organized and the narrative is explicit this Generator was supposed to be a place for the nobles to hole up in, but clearly something went wrong and the supplies are a mess and any other preparations that were supposed to be made didn't get made. This is a big contrast with A New Home, where the resource piles are really clearly there because This Video Game's Design Requires Such Resource Piles Exist, with no real in-universe support for their existence actually making sense.

It's also the first scenario to tune itself so that a Medium difficulty run isn't a total cakewalk. I wouldn't quite call it hard, but it's the first scenario where I wasn't 'checked out' for large stretches of playtime on Medium; the fact that refugees steam into the city on the regular means you're constantly needing to not only deal with current problems but preferably also be building with an awareness that a few dozen more people are going to arrive within the next day, so there's rarely 'time to fast forward until Something Happens' stretches. Its tiny map also manages to be Interestingly Different from A New Home: The Arks is a new map with a unique shape, but if it weren't for the Automaton focus of the scenario, it wouldn't really feel that different from A New Home.

This does unfortunately have the corollary point that it's absurdly brutal on higher difficulties. As of this writing, it's the only scenario I've not cleared on Extreme; I once got decently far, then mismanaged my saves and used Emergency Shift right before Plot-Induced Discontent kicked in and so that run was unwinnable. Most of my attempts don't even make it 5 days in before they become unacceptably compromised. It's not even a Positive Challenge sort of experience: The Refugees is built in a manner where Illness RNG has a concerning level of sway over your potential for success, and the very early game feels like there's basically just a tiny handful of Correct Plays that are opaque due to the game being poor at explaining itself and the fact that when refugees waves arrive exactly is not revealed to you from the beginning but is consistent. I'm also not a fan of some of the 'cheap shots' the game employs, such as one early wave of Workers that arrives just after the work day has ended, and they're already hungry. This contributes to the 'vibe' the game is going for on Medium just fine, but on Extreme it stands out as a very mean thing to do so early in the run when you're heavily struggling with food production and all.

The Refugees is also perhaps the clearest example of something Frostpunk struggles with in general: the game very much wants something like the usual difficulty curve of many video games, where the challenge rises the farther you get and you're expected to bbe able to rise to meet it, but Frostpunk's actual difficulty curve works out to be very consistently hardest in the opening days of a run, where you're scrambling to get all your citizen needs met, get all resource intake started, get the Beacon up, get researches started, etc. Individual scenarios do make some effort to offset this, between the general tendency for temperatures to drop, plus events trying to keeep up the pressure, but technology and Laws offer several big performance jumps that are basically impossible for the design to meaningfully offset. (eg how Infirmaries generally permanently solve healthcare as a concern)

In The Refugee's case, it does try to keep up the pressure through the continuous stream of refugees you'll need to take care of, who increasingly show up in large numbers and are increasingly consistent about showing up in poor shape to boot, but it's basically impossible for the scenario to keep the pressure at a relatively steady skill challenge. Worse is the consideration of the second phase of the scenario: the arrival of the nobility. You can respond to this broadly in two ways: let the lords in, or refuse them entry.

If you consistently refuse them entry, you'll eventually be tasked with building:


Guarded Outpost Depot
Costs 500 Wood and 500 Steel.
Upgrade to regular Outpost Depot. Functions exactly as an Outpost Depot, except you win the instant both of your Outpost Depots have been upgraded into Guarded Outpost Depots.

Two of these. As my description right there say, completing them is instant victory: I was very caught off guard when I did this and the scenario just... ended. It's not very satisfying.

If you instead let them in consistently, you'll be directed to try to keep things under control for 4 days. This requires keeping Hope above 50% and Discontent below 25%, while events constantly try to undermine you: if you do this successfully, you... might get a positive ending. There's a really inane component to this: there's an event involving a lord trying to cut in line at the Cookhouse, and your options are to go 'sure, whatever' and accept a Discontent increase, to just let your people beat him up for cutting in line, or to send in your Faith Keepers or Guards to resolve things peacefully. Inexplicably, if you resolve this event with either of the choices that isn't 'send in the Generator Tyrant's thugs', the ending you get will be one where apparently the masters and servants framework lived and the nobles just got turned into the new underclass, whereas if you sent in your thugs, you get a 'we are all equal' ending that's all happy and stuff.

Um, what?

Like, that's incredibly arbitrary in general and the game makes no effort to communicate that your decision in that particular event is what decides whether the positive ending is Maximum Positive or is just 'well, at least the non-nobles are more or less happy with how things turned out', but it's also very dissonant coming off A New Home where the game was very consistent about viewing the Faith Keepers and Guard Stations not as 'people who keep the peace' but as 'tools of the totalitarian regime, enforcing control through violence'. Why is sending them in now the good choice?

For that matter, why is the narrative treating them as neutral arbitrators? Realistically, these are angry non-nobles themselves, just ones with a social mandate to use violence. I'd fully expect them to just intensify the anti-noble violence, not act as a neutral Voice of Reason.

Overall, while The Refugees was a step forward in some ways, in other ways it was a weird step back in my experience of Frostpunk, and at this point it's actually probably my least favorite scenario: it's mostly Harder A New Home in its overall experience, and on higher difficulties the nature and degree of its difficulty is simply unfun and unfair-feeling. I actually broke down and watched a video guide of somebody getting through The Refugees with zero deaths on Extreme, and it just lowered my enthusiasm further: their process for achieving this involved so much esoteric, incomprehensible abuse of Frostpunk's wonky mechanics that it was impressive but the opposite of appealing.

I also don't have a lot to say because The Refugees is, oddly enough, the most 'vanilla' scenario in the game: you have full access to all Laws and all standard techs, using the properly standard mechanics. Furthermore, the only 'extra' is Guarded Outpost Depots, which themselves don't actually change the game any: they're just a win condition, not new capabilities for the player. As such, most of what I have to say about its gameplay is just the broad statements I've made on prior pages: the only thing relatively specific to The Refugees that I have to say is that its tiny map is particularly hostile to going Child Shelters, as there's a lot of Children and so you'll have to commit a lot of space to Child Shelters, space you really don't have to spare.

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I'm glossing over the gazillion events that make up The Refugees because this seriously isn't that kind of site, but that also leaves me with not a ton to say about The Refugees. You take in waves of refugees for a while, then the nobles show up and that's your new refugee problem, and once you get a resolution to it, the scenario just ends.

I guess I should at least comment on Lord Craven, the last nobleman wave: if you choose to let in all the nobility and ultimately reconcile everybody without him getting lynched, he'll disappear in the night toward the end of the scenario, leaving a note that basically says 'yeah, I'm a monster, but that's what leadership is, so you're either a monster already or you'll be one soon too. kthxbye'.

I'm genuinely not sure what Frostpunk is going for. My first impulse on my first playthrough was to aggressively roll my eyes at this since Frostpunk is heavily trying to be about making hard decisions due to hard circumstances and so I first took it as just Frostpunk talking directly to the audience as This Is The Intended Moral Lesson or some such. I'm a lot less sure nowadays: while I'm not sure the Frostpunk devs are particularly self-aware of their views in this regard, the overall tendency across Frostpunk's scenarios is to show that bad leadership creates bad circumstances, and there's a lot of ruminating on the degree to which people can rationalize basically any decision as Correct and Good and Just no matter how far from those things it might be. So maybe Lord Craven is just meant to be projecting, telling you that it's inevitable you'll become him, as a way to defend his ego, tell himself that he did terrible things Because That Is The Burden Of Leadership and not because he's incompetent and terrible.

But I'm not convinced it's that deep. Frostpunk doesn't really engage with notions of self-deception and similar, not in this kind of sense, and one of the many reasons I tend to be critical of Artsy Games is it's bizarrely common for them to rely solely on surface-level reads of character actions. So I'm left feeling like it's probably unreasonably optimistic to read such in; it feels more likely to be, like other parts of Frostpunk appear, sort of accidentally stumbling into something plausible and compelling via a completely unrelated line of thought.

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Next time, we cover the last non-DLC scenario: The Fall of Winterhome.

See you then.