Frozen city building survival series Frostpunk has passed an impressive milestone, creator 11 Bit Studios has announced – 11 million sales (how appropriate). That’s across 2018’s Frostpunk and its 2024 sequel Frostpunk 2.
“Seeing 11m brave the frost: it’s just unreal,” said Frostpunk 2 game director Łukasz Juszczyk in a franchise update video
The Frostpunk video covered all aspects of the series, most notably including a first look at the upcoming Frostpunk 2 DLC Breach of Trust. This is due 23rd June and revolves around a volcanic eruption nearby your city, therefore turning a resource that’s usually sought in the game – heat – into a suddenly very destructive one. A debut video showed rivers of lava gurgling around the player’s city.
“What you just saw changes everything,” Juszczyk added. “In Breach of Trust, the heat is no longer your salvation: it might just be your downfall.” He went on to say that Breach of Trust will bring an “evocative” story to the game as part of a “massive” scenario and include “fresh” gameplay mechanics. You can either wait until June to play it or sign up for playtests now.
And this is not all for Frostpunk 2. Beyond Breach of Trust, Frostpunk 2 is apparently building to something “big”, which is presumably the “Surge DLC” listed on the game’s roadmap.
Elsewhere in Frostpunk land, we got a brief glimpse at Frostpunk 1 remake Frostpunk 1886, which is apparently more than an Unreal Engine makeover. Notably, it includes a new Purpose upgrade path, which focuses on the strength of a community. Frostpunk 1886 also has a new close-up perspective, wider city views and new explorable areas. “We want Frostpunk 1886 to be the definitive experience of the game that started it all,” said game director Maciej Sułecki.
Finally, 11 Bit announced there’s – at long last – a Nintendo Switch version of Frostpunk 1 coming, though it didn’t specify exactly when. Frostpunk is already available on other consoles, by the way, and from what I remember, these versions do a decent job of translating the city building experience.
Finally finally: there’s a Frostpunk comic coming, made by Rocketship, written by Justin Jordan, and illustrated by Ryan Benjamin. And apparently there’s been a Frostpunk LARP event in Poland too. I can’t think of anything worse than intentionally braving cold weather for an extended period of time – the chilly Witcher School experience was cold enough – but the people who were interviewed in the video after playing it seemed to have a nice time. None of them got turned into stew.
Frostpunk is a series about city survival in extreme cold weather and the lengths you go to persevere; or rather, the boundaries you’re prepared to cross in order to persevere. Frostpunk 1 focused more on an individual perspective of survival whereas Frostpunk 2 considered a larger society. I reviewed both Frostpunk 1 and Frostpunk 2 and liked them a lot, though Frostpunk 1 tends to be more fondly remembered; Frostpunk 2 had a rockier player reaction when it launched.