Frostpunk!

Frostpunk is technically a game that has a lot of documentation online, but as has become somewhat usual for Vigaroe projects, the information is scattered widely, wikis and other 'centralized' resources are often deeply incomplete, many aspects of the mechanics don't seem to have been clearly documented anywhere public and online at all, and there's all kinds of incorrect claims and misinformation. Also as has become typical of Vigaroe projects, the game itself is not very good at explaining itself, while being complex and often behaving in counterintuitive manners.

Between all that and having Opinions about its more narrative aspects, here we are at last at a new Vigaroe project after... 7 months of no new content, roughly? Gosh, I was sure it was more like a year. Still, it's been almost two years since I started publishing the last project, so it's certainly been a while in that sense.

For reference, all this is derived from playing the Epic Games release. It is slightly possible that if something I say sounds wrong to you and you're playing on Steam or something that this is why, but frankly unless you've done rigorous testing on the topic the more likely scenario is that you made a reasonable-but-incorrect guess or assumption and never noticed that the game doesn't work the way you believe because this game is opaque, complex, and you'll usually be focused on getting through scenarios, not scrutinizing minutia of mechanics.

Anyway, pages!


Intro. In which I talk about I expected to not like this game, but actually kind of do like this game, even though it's objectively a very messy mess of a game that I wish was put together better.


Adaptation Laws. The starter Laws you have in every scenario except that freak outlier, The Last Autumn. They're... very uneven and some parts are straight-up busted, but they work... okay enough... mostly. Also, I casually spoil a secret thing you probably have no idea exists if you haven't already looked up stuff on a wiki or something. Sorry?


Order Laws. In which I explain the Purpose Law framework, cover the Order options in particular, and end up talking an annoying amount about Faith because Order is inexplicably largely worse than Faith and so I can't really discuss Order's design problems without making those comparisons in some detail.

Faith Laws. The alternate path, which the devs assure you is just as mean as Order is, but don't seem to believe that at all, whoops.


Industry and Exploration techs. In which Scouting and Automatons get a lot of talking, plus also Outposts and a little bit on Prosthetics I guess. I also explain the funkiness of Workshops delivering less and less actual payoff the harder you focus on pushing research, as the game's own explanation is okay but misleading.


Heating techs. In which I explain the highly unintuitive mechanics of temperature in Frostpunk in the process of covering the Heating tech tab. Why is the Generator radius upgrade chain so absurdly bad?.


Health and Shelter. In which I explain that your digital humans don't actually need sleep, they just pretend they do, and cover in detail the janky medical mechanics of Frostpunk. Plus around half the techs of our third research tab.


Food. The other half of our third research tab, covering that stuff your citizens nom on to survive. Like much of Frostpunk, food and hunger is a logical enough system in very broad strokes, but has lots of weird wrinkles when closely scrutinized.


Resources. Our final regular research tab, and overall probably the least jank-focused page so far. Core resources mostly work very well in Frostpunk! I also cover difficulty modifiers as regards to general resource collection, cover the resource gathering rates for direct assignment, and feel very bad for the poor Charcoal Kiln, possibly the most screwed structure in the game.


A New Home. The first scenario of Frostpunk, a bad first impression that had me expecting to dislike the entire game, as Things A New Home Does Well is a very short list, whereas Things A New Home Does Poorly would take several thousand words to properly document. Fortunately, every later scenario is overall better than A New Home. (Albeit unfortunately every later scenario is marred by major flaws regardless)


The Arks. The second scenario, The Arks is all about Automatons, the only scenario where they get to be particularly great. I actually enjoy it a lot, though it's a bit unfortunate how its design doesn't really lend itself to much replayability.


The Refugees. The third scenario, which revisits the basic framework of A New Home, but this time it's taking the narrative premise more seriously. It also has this whole funky 'nobles vs non-nobles' that works poorly. In terms of raw gameplay, it's by far the hardest scenario, particularly when talking from the perspective of higher difficulties -I've literally never beaten it on Extreme. This unfortunately works out to it being A Satisfying Challenge on Medium and then just incredibly frustrating once you're above Medium.