Frostpunk is free to keep this week on the Epic Games Store
A fantastic and miserable management game
Frostpunk's miserabilist management captured the imagination of nearly everyone on RPS back in 2018, and we've since named it on our lists of the best building games, best survival games, and best management games.
If none of that convinced you to part with your shrapnel, here's your chance to grab it for free via the Epic Games Store. Add it to your account before June 10th at 4pm and it's yours to keep.
Frostpunk is a citybuilder, but rather than balancing needs and budgets within an open-ended simulation, it challenges you to survive specific, gloomy story scenarios in a frozen, post-climate collapse world. You'll still need to keep up morale and manage resources, but your decisions lie on a gloomy spectrum between making your population's orphans work in toxic mines, or eating them.
In his Frostpunk review, Xalavier Nelson wrote that game forces a "nerve-wracking juggling of priorities," in which the threat of annihilation always looms. "It never fails to impress just how much panic Frostpunk can pull from you by changing a few numbers, or dramatically plunging a given meter, and leaving you to deal with the consequences. I spent much of the 9 hours it took me to finish the main story desperately clicking across minimal menus in attempts to find some way out of the current hole I was in."
It also prompted Alec to write a five-part diary series.
Since its release, Frostpunk has received three substantial expansions, but those aren't free. Still, the base game offers more than enough icy misery, so get on it.