If you want to survive 11 Bit Studios‘ next game, you’re going to need a climbing ax and a warm pair of boots.
Frostpunk is the new game from the developer responsible for This War of Mine. It’s a “society survival” game that has players managing the last habitable city on the planet. This metropolis exists on the frozen husk of a nearly dead Earth. Enormous ice walls surround this steam-powered oasis on all side, and it comes down to you to lead the people, manage resources, and make tough decisions to keep the city operational.
The new game will debut later this year for unspecified platforms, and you can check out the first trailer for the game above.
“Frostpunk takes on what people are capable of when pushed to the limits,” the developer explained. “What interests us is what society will do to survive and how it changes in the process. How survival in the end leaves us different beings. If worse, better, stronger, weaker or, last but not least, more or less humane — that is debatable.”
This is not all that different from 11 Bit Studios’ first game, This War of Mine. That release examined the difficulties of surviving as a civilian in a war zone. It challenged players to manage meager resources and make tough decisions to survive. It seems like 11 Bit is taking the ideas it first explored in that concept, and it is expanding that to a larger scale and a sci-fi setting.
But even though 11 Bit is shifting away from the dire wartime setting, it is promising that Frostpunk will still feature “mature” themes. And a mature, city-survival sci-fi game could stand out in the same way that This War of Mine stood out for its themes when it debuted in 2014.
