Okay, which of you asked for this? Survival-management game Frostpunk was already bad enough, turning innocent and mild-mannered RPS writers into tyrannical despots desperate to eke out just one more day in the frozen apocalyptic wastes. Today’s update threatens to push them over the edge with a new difficulty level – Survivor Mode – for those who figured even Hard was too forgiving. The new mode removes active pause mode, and limits you to a single rolling save slot. In short, it’s Ironman mode, and they’ve not solved the icing problem.

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Ever since delightful Japanese hack n’ slash/storekeeping sim hybrid Recettear proved that such a thing was even possible, I’ve loved the idea of playing as an RPG shopkeeper. Clearly they’re the most powerful class around – how else do you get multiple god-slaying swords in stock? Today yet another game in this small yet charming sub-genre was released. In Moonlighter, you run your family’s equipment store by day, plunder the dungeons for loot and additional stock by night – It almost makes working two jobs sound bearable.

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Frostpunk has quite a fandom here at RPS. Even if the game hadn’t been good, we would still have given it coverage because we enjoy going Full Mr. Freeze with headlines like “Frostpunk ventures out into the cold” and my personal favorite “There’s snow hope in this new Frostpunk trailer” which I’m borderline mad about. Look, I’d never do anything like that in my headlines. Luckily, we don’t have to keep talking about wordplay, because Frostpunk’s tremendous sales out of the gate mean post-release content isn’t stuck in a freeze.

Please don’t go.

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Despite society/city builder Frostpunk being on my radar for months, I somehow only just clocked that the name’s a play on steampunk. The revelations continue: steam is something that can conceivably turn into frost! The This War Of Mine devs sure can name a good game.

Anyway, Chillypunk is now out and standing about in the cold with a launch trailer, waiting for you to come along and buy it. Xalavier Nelson’s review calls it “one of the most tense, exciting city building survival games on PC”, so you might want to take pity on the poor thing and show it the warmth of your wallet.

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Looking at Digital Sun’s upcoming management sim/action-RPG hybrid Moonlighter, it’s hard not to draw comparisons to excellent Japanese indie of yesteryear, Recettear. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s just fine, because I haven’t played anything that quite scratched that itch in nearly 8 years. Run a generic fantasy equipment shop by day, crawl through the dungeons for more stock by night. How else did you think those merchants make money?

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Hello from the Game Developer’s Conference, where every building comes with a blizzard-spewing air conditioner. I’ve just been to see Frostpunk, the societal survival game set in a pseudo-Victorian hellwinter, from the developers of This War of Mine. The frosty management game will support modding, they say, and there are plans for “additional scenarios”. That means both smaller, free updates and bigger packs of paid DLC. Although mod support “probably won’t be from day one”. And the developers haven’t decided what these later scenarios will contain. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine: Frostpunk, the city builder about ensuring a society’s survival by making trying moral decisions, is at your door demanding to know if you’re sheltering any innocent video games. Do you lie and turn the personified would-be game murderer away, or accept that there’s a universal moral imperative to tell the truth regardless of the consequences?

I’d imagine that’s exactly the sort of dilemma you’ll have to wrestle with when Frostpunk comes out on April 24th. It’s the latest effort from the This War Of Mine devs, and when Adam played it last year it was shaping up to be a chiller success.

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In Frostpunk, what doesn’t kill you definitely doesn’t make you stronger. It probably makes your arm fall off, or convinces everyone that you’re no longer a capable part of the workforce so that they feel compelled to save some power by cutting off the heat supply to your house. And, hey, if you’re lucky, you might be able to contribute to the survival of your pals even if you do die because there are lots of hungry mouths to feed, and what’s a little cannibalism between friends?

I’ve taken a good, long look at Frostpunk already and I liked what I saw. I’ll admit, I did wonder why there were no towering quadrupedal automatons that filled me with equal parts awe and dread. Guess what just WHIRR-STOMPED into view…

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If you like your emotional gut-punches delivered via authored narratives rather than emergent stories, then I’ve got some great news. This War of Mine is stepping away from the wartime survivalist Sims strategy that makes up the the main game, and now wants to tell you about how miserable the lives of specific people are in more detail. “Father’s Promise” is out today, and it’s the first entry in the “Stories” DLC series that will tell a different story with each episode.

If that tickles your tear ducts (in a good way, I’m presuming), you can check out the trailer below.

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Frostpunk [official site] sounds like a musical subgenre invented on the hoof by a jolly Kerrang reporter but it’s not. It’s an upcoming videogame invented by the makers of the very un-jolly (but not bad) This War of Mine. It’s set in a freezing future where earth is caught in a global whiteout and you have to manage a circular city that’s growing around a generator – your people’s principle source of warmth and energy. All the while tough decisions have to be made, like: “Graham is dead. Should we eat Graham?”

Here, there’s a new vid to show you.
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