My city has become far too egalitarian for the Icebloods. Marxist policy choices mean the faction are now protesting in my coal mines, shutting down a vital heat pipeline and fomenting further dissent among the now freezing broader populace. It is, regrettably, time to talk. They want me to pass the Apex Workers decree, a darwinian shift towards culling the weak while enhancing the strong. That’ll mean a tasty increase to production efficiency, so I’m not complaining - but the Technocrats will, so the vote won’t pass unless I can persuade the Machinists, their less extreme cousins, to support the bill. Not to worry: I promise the Machinists they can choose the next law we vote on, and watch a chunk of undecided voters shift towards implied eugenics.
The Frostpunk 2 beta has rammed home how different my role is to Frostpunk 1’s dictator. I’m more of a smooth talkin’, palm-greasin’ mayor tasked with keeping a dozen ideologically-opposed plates spinning above a city that could be one harsh blizzard from disaster. I like it, even though at times this jaunt to the a-popsicle-ypse can feel less like solving a crunchy puzzle and more like wading through politics soup.
]]>In the frozen hellscape of Frostpunk, you eked out your existence in hours and days, clinging to your heat- and life-giving generator at the centre of your fledgling city like there was literally no tomorrow. In 11 bit Studio's forthcoming sequel, Frostpunk 2, the apocalypse is yesterday's news. Now you're dealing with "what happens when you survive the un-survivable," as the game's co-director and design director Jakub Stokalski neatly puts it when I sit down for a hands off presentation at this year's Gamescom. And to do this, Frostpunk 2 is going big, measuring its time not in days, but weeks, months and even years.
"If we want to show the evolution of societies and different utopias/dystopias, we need breathing room," says Stokalski. "And this breathing room really is in the scale, both in the physical sense but also in the sense of time. It's difficult to show meaningful social change in the space of a month, so the time ticks now in weeks and months, and in a long playthrough you'll get up into years, so you can see the consequences of your choices."
]]>Hot (weeks) off the back of Sons Of The Forest and the Resident Evil 4 remake coming out, we're celebrating your bestest best, most favourite survival games this month. Your votes have been counted and tallied, and your accompanying words of praise and affection matched accordingly. But which game has survived to make it to the top of the pile? Come and find out as we count down your 25 favourite survival games of all time.
]]>Some games are just December games. When the air turns biting, I hear their siren song in my bones. They Are Billions. Frostpunk. Phoenix Point. Factorio. None of them are exactly what you would call a Christmas-y game. In fact, they're all pretty bleak and threatening in tone. But they're also amazingly comforting.
Just imagine: sitting down in your favourite chair, electric heat pad on your back, cat on your lap, mug of hot chocolate or coffee by your side. Legions of undead roiling at the gates, trying to break through your cosy little town's defences. Ahhhhh. It's Christmas.
]]>After some not-so-subtle teasing back in June, 11 Bit Studios have announced that their next game is Frostpunk 2. It's another management survival sim, set 30 years after the original, and there's a cinematic trailer below.
]]>Tis the season to spaff your marketing budget on big announcements with lavish trailers and cars descending from auditorium ceilings, but Frostpunk developers 11 Bit Studio are playing this one low-key. Today they put out a video titled "A Tease Of Things To Come..." which sure looks like something Frostpunk-y, though they say absolutely nothing about what it is. They have previously mentioned wanting to make a RPG spin-off, so maybe this is that. Or a straight sequel. Or... dunno. They say they'll actually announce the game in August.
]]>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.
]]>The last couple of years have been pretty good for management games, but only the select few have made the cut for our list of best management games you can play right now. If you're looking for something to sink into over the holidays, check out our picks below.
]]>There's never been a better time to get into survival games on PC, as the recent revival of the genre means Steam is now awash in some truly great games, both in early access and in full release. There are more arriving every year, too, which is why we've done the hard work for you and ranked the very best survival games to dive into today. Fair warning - there are some early access games on this list, which mean they might be a little janky early on. Give them the time they deserve, though, and you'll find they often blossom into some truly great games over subsequent updates. We've only included the very best and most complete-feeling survival games on this list, though, so you can rest assured that every game here will leave you hungry for more. It's by no means exhaustive, but it should give you a nice selection of wolf-taming, base-building, carrot-picking action to choose from.
]]>From our first years we know what it means to build. As babies we're given clacky wooden blocks and colourful Duplo bricks. We are architects long before we are capable eaters of raw carrot. If you're anything like the staff of RPS, you've not outgrown the habit of child-like town planning. Yes, building games often take a managerial approach (at least many on this list do), but a sense of play is always present. It's there when you draw out a road in Cities Skylines, just to watch it populate with toy-like traffic. When you brick up another hole in your mighty Stronghold to fend off enemy swordsmen. When you painstakingly dig a trench for water to flow in Timberborn, just like you did all those years ago on the beach, in an effort to stop the tide washing away your sandcastles. You'll find all these games and more on our list. So here you go: the best building games on PC.
]]>Frostpunk's final chapter has thawed, and it's awful precarious. In part because On The Edge literally places your town on a cliffside, sure, but also because 11 Bit's final DLC wraps its story on a political turning point - tasking you with no only surviving the bitter cold, but wrangling the rest of your frostbitten compatriots in determining a future outside of the oppressive gaze of New London.
]]>Summer is for squares, according to me, the liker of snow. So I'm quite glad to see that Frostpunk's next DLC expansion is putting an emphasis on the "frost" bit after its prior expansion, The Last Autumn, was a prequel story taking place before endless winter set in. On The Edge is set after the original Frostpunk campaign, sending some New London residents out into uncharted territory on August 20th.
]]>Post-apocalyptic videogames, the ultimate escape. How wonderful to venture to a strange land, so different from our own, and see what the world may look like an entire week from now. Well, today the PlayStation clan secluded themselves behind their barricades with The Last Of Us Part 2, leaving the PC tribe to suffer in the harsh elements of reality alone. But never fear, wanderer. Here are some similar games to play if you want to leave your austere existence behind, and indulge in a grim struggle instead. Pull up a plastic bucket, break open a tin of Pedigree Chum, here are the 8 bleakest post-apocalypses in PC gaming. A post-apocalyst.
]]>You know how it is. You think you're into videogame soundtracks, then you go and hear someone perform ten of them on a Mongolian string instrument. I recently spent 20 minutes listening to a man do just that, and I think you should too.
Genius Jaavka is the man. The morin khuur is his instrument. Songs from Horizon Zero Dawn (coming to PC this summer), Mortal Kombat, Dota 2 and Fortnite are just some of the ones he treats us to. He's really very good.
]]>Get your gloves and toques because eternal winter hasn't started yet but you can be assured it's coming. The post-snowpocalypse strategy game Frostpunk is all about keeping civilization lukewarm in the end times but its new campaign DLC is set before the big freeze actually happens. Total dystopia hasn't set in just yet, but it will probably arrive right on schedule with your help.
]]>Last month, the hellishly cold city management game Frostpunk announced an upcoming DLC telling the story of civilisation just before the freeze. At the time, there was only an animated teaser trailer for The Last Autumn. This week, 11 Bit Studios are showing off gameplay from the new DLC with some of the elements you can expect from the prequel story.
]]>The world of Frostpunk is a hellscape where the cold will kill your entire city despite all those tough choices you made to allow cannibalism or put children to work in coal mines. Brendan Caldwell called it one of the harshest winters in games which is, if anything, an understatement. There had to have been something before the Game Of Thrones style winter that never ends. 11 bit Studios are going back to when it all began in the upcoming DLC for Frostpunk called The Last Autumn scheduled for January.
]]>‘Tis the season / use a brolly / tra la la la / la la la la.
Hello, it's me, the list goblin, here in this festive first week of December to deliver a big black bin bag of presents to you. And by presents, I mean a single irrevocable inventory of the most disastrous and terrible winters in the videogames of recent history. Yes, there will be cannibalism. Yes, thousands will die of exposure. But from this great compendium of coldness will come knowledge, strength, and, okay, at least one adorable puppy. Here are the 9 harshest winters in videogames. Wrap up.
]]>In Vectorpark’s Sandcastles, you build fantastic towers and watch the waves erase your work every 10 seconds. It’s a very direct metaphor for the global climate crisis that threatens to flood coastal cities and exacerbate natural disasters. Sandcastles confronts us with our totally predictable watery doom, but we also find fun and expression in our totally foreseeable destruction. When the planet dies, at least we’ll be entertained.
Before you commit to starving and drowning, you should probably understand how and why it’ll happen. To imagine this nightmarish hellworld, readers can flip through climate fiction novels (“cli-fi”) and movie-goers can watch a big unprofitable climate disaster blockbuster every few years. But us mouse-clickers, we obviously don’t read books or watch movies. Instead, we play with climate. Behold, the climate crisis game.
]]>Frostpunk is a very pretty game about trying to build the last city on Earth after an icy global catastrophe. I, like many others, spent about 25% of my time giving orders to build and gather and research, and the other 75% of my time zooming in as far as the camera allowed to watch my miniature hooded citizens trudging through the snow, or clustered morosely about the central generator.
But after a while, I began to pay attention to what the game was actually doing, both to the city's populace and to me, the god-player looking down upon it all. And what I found was rather fascinating. Disturbing, but fascinating.
]]>John had the presence of mind to take today off, after flying back from San Francisco on Sunday. Young Matt and I got a red eye that took off on Friday night and landed on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t sleep for 30 hours, then slept for 12, was wired for the next 16, and then slept for another four. Which brings us to today, when I am writing these charts, unsure which meal I should be having next and shaking off a lingering dose of The Fear, which I get from long haul flying more than I ever did from hangovers.
With that in mind, it’s me, back once again with the ill behaviour, to fill in doing the Steam Charts. I’m very much flying by the seat of my pants here, so let’s see what I come up with, shall we?
]]>My people are fed, my homes are warm, my resources are abundant, and my generator is purring like a well-fed cat. For the first time in Frostpunk, things aren’t looking so bleak.
It’s a strange feeling. Typically by this point in 11-Bit Studios’ icebound strategy game, I’ve lost half my populace to sickness and the other half are so ravaged by frostbite that I can split a pack of socks between six families. But playing on the game’s new Endless Mode’s “Serenity” variant, I’ve finally got the time, space, and resources I never had before to build a city designed for more than just survival.
]]>We ask the tough questions here at RPS. We’re like Jeremy Paxman but in a very long bear costume. We once asked 15 developers what they’d do if they were stuck in a room with a clone of themselves. This is important stuff.
Today, we ask another question: What would you gift the games industry for the holidays? We put this query to a bunch of game artists, writers and designers to see how charitable they were feeling. Today, you get to open these presents. Happy holidays!
]]>"And since we've no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow" is a tad more grim in a post-apocalyptic world where everything we knew is frozen over and everyone we know may well freeze to death, but Frostpunk has still made space for Christmas. A little festivity can bring hope, after all, and mercy knows we'll need it. That's the possibility offered by a Dickensian new quest in 'A Christmas Carol', the survival strategy game's new update released today by developers 11 Bit Studios.
]]>The inhospitable icy wastes of Frostpunk don't look so bad if you've picked Serenity, one of two routes to take through new free Endless Mode DLC. According to 11 Bit's video dev diary (which you can find below along with a launch trailer), Endless Mode took longer to develop because they got a little carried away on the new content front. There are four different maps to pick from, determining how free you are to expand your icepocalyptic city outwards, and players can pick between two styles of play as they build without the threat of a looming, story-ending disaster.
]]>My body betrayed me last month, trapping me in my bed when it wasn’t sending me rushing to my poor, overworked loo. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t work and so I turned to management games to take my mind off the virus squatting inside me. Juggling budgets, disasters and production chains might not sound particularly relaxing, but there’s also a swathe of low-pressure sims that serve as a brilliant panacea for stress.
]]>Have you ever stopped to wonder what life is really all about? To get to the bottom of why we exist, what our purpose is, where this is all heading?
]]>If you've not already had (and caused) your fill of tragedy and disaster in Frostpunk, you might want to check out the fate of another doomed settlement in the apocalyptic survival manage 'em up with a new free expansion released today. Set before Frostpunk's main campaign, 'The Fall Of Winterhome' explores a place you'll have heard of--and possibly visited--during that, the fallen/exploded town of Winterhome. Only here it hasn't quite fallen just yet. I'm sure you can fix that gap in the continuity, you and your bright ideas about child labour. Come meet the new home you're about to muff up.
]]>11 Bit's Survival management sim Frostpunk did a lot of things right. It turned Alec into a monster, for starters. It made moral decisions feel like they mattered, beyond the stat gains or losses they resulted in. It also painted a picture of a large, harsh world where other people were living out their own stories, and sometimes they ended badly.
Teased at in the original campaign, next week players will be able to find out the story behind The Fall Of Winterhome - it's probably your fault, somehow. Due out on Wednesday, September 19th, this free new scenario promises more worldbuilding, new challenges and a new map to build in. Below, an all-to-brief teaser, giving us a momentary glimpse at the new environment.
]]>Thank God you're here. Listen, I don't want to over-hype things, but this might be the most essential and life-changing article you ever read. Because if you only click through to read this, you will LITERALLY find out the top ten (nine) grossing games on Steam last week, and seriously, if you bought one of them, you will feel so bloody validated.
]]>We're just about halfway through 2018 (which has somehow taken both too long and no time at all). As is tradition, we've shaken our our brains around to see which games from the last six months still make our neurons fizzle with delight. Then we wrote about them here, in this big list feature that you're reading right now this second.
And what games they are! 2018 has been a great year so far, and our top picks run the whole range, from hand drawn oddities made by one person, to big mega-studio blockbusters that took the work of hundreds. And each of them is special to us in some way. Just like you are too. Click through the arrows to see the full spread of our faves so far. Better luck next year to the games that didn't make the cut this time.
]]>That big shop on the internet, Amazon, has been selling pirated copies of PC games, some do-gooders have discovered (or rather, sellers using Amazon as a storefront have been selling the pirate goods). The dodgy games include icy societal survival game Frostpunk and dusty martian city-builder Surviving Mars, which were being sold for the suspiciously cheapo prices of $3 and $4. If you bought one of these games, you got an illegitimate installer to download, which contained some files ripped from GOG store versions of the games. Oh no.
]]>We've just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It's a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you'll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.
2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets.
]]>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.
]]>Concluding my brutish and short first play of survival-management curio Frostpunk. When last you left us, we had survived disaster by the skin of our teeth, and even welcomed a giant robot into the fold. Now, as the nights draw in and the fires dim, can my proud people survive the rest of this calamitous winter?
]]>The ongoing tale of a desperate first run in survival/management sim Frostpunk.
Mission: coal. Participants: everyone, basically. I need engineers researching a Coal Thumper in the workshop, so my frostbitten waifs can extract the life-giving ore from otherwise unbreakable deposits which remain. I need workers pulled away from wood and steel collection to build and then staff that Coal Thumper. I need everyone who's off sick from our last near-death experience to bloody well stop being sick so they can work. And I need everyone, everyone, to survive in -40 conditions for a full day, so that our last coal isn't depleted before we can fix this.
]]>Hallo! John's away so I'm taking over for our latest weekly rundown of the biggest-selling games on Steam over the previous seven days. Familiar faces are here, of course, but the charts also include more survival games than I've seen in yonks. The slightest peek of sun outside and you lot start acting as if it's the end of the world, eh?
]]>The ongoing tale of a desperate first run in survival/management sim Frostpunk.
When last we spoke, everyone was starving, everyone was ill, there weren't enough homes and people were choosing death over amputation. It's day 10 in the frozen remnants of what was once Britain, and it looks like it's all over already.
Oh ye of little faith.
]]>With just ten hours left on Frostpunk’s clock, the people of my city decided to steam me alive. I got those ingrates just ten hours away from the final daybreak, and they treated me like human dim sum. Some of them even clapped with prosthetic hands I had built for them during the harshest of winters. The last thought that popped into my boiled mind? I wish I had watched a YouTube video explaining eight ways to survive the cold in Frostpunk.
]]>Snow and coal simulator Frostpunk has gripped a few of us in its cold prosthetic claws over the past week. We especially like the warm feeling it gives us when you switch to heatmap mode and see the temperature rise in your new houses. But it also isn’t the steam-powered morality trolley it often tries to be. Here, city bosses Katharine, Matt and Brendan discuss how they kept their people alive and whether they’ll play again. SPOILER WARNING: Cold details of the story await.
Brendan [sniffing]: Hello, friends. Hello.
Katharine: Were you also playing Frostpunk into the early hours, Brendan? Did you feel the cold creep into your weary, weary bones?
Brendan: I might’ve been. I built a big church and now my people want the priests to be in charge of crime and punishment.
Matt: What could possibly go wrong?
]]>Continuing an increasingly doomed attempt to survive the endless winter of Frostpunk.
Overwork and hunger: the very bedrock of a failed society. Strained beyond belief mere days into proceedings, my people fall ill faster than the attendees of a three-year-old's birthday party in an airless room. We need all hands on deck to gather supplies for the building of a hunter's shack and cookhouse, but the only way to achieve this is to forcibly remove a few hands.
]]>Hullo! John is preoccupied with wizards right now, so I'm taking over for the rundown of last week's top ten on Steam. It was an interesting week, bringing back some welcome old games and slamming in some shiny new ones. Largely, it's all about robots and survival.
]]>The fate of humanity, or at least a slim and freezing remainder of it, rests upon the bewildered shoulders of someone who can't even keep a basil plant alive for more than 24 hours. Frostpunk does not forgive. Frostpunk does not have mercy. Frostpunk will kill everyone. Unless I can stop it.
]]>Bit nippy in here, isn’t it? Let’s throw another game on the fire and warm ourselves with some electro-soup. Yes, it’s the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, and this week we’re talking about freezing cold city-builder Frostpunk. Katharine lost a third of her people to cold when she forgot to turn the heat on, while Brendan dug up his society’s dead because he "needed the space". Matt is horrified by these tales, but soon proves he’s just as horrible when he completes our Frostpunk-themed ethical dilemma quiz.
]]>As I drag my groggy-faced body to the monitor at 6.30 each Monday morning, I click the bookmark for my Steam Charts RSS and scrunch up my face so my forehead and nose curl over my eyes. How bad will it be? How familiar will the list of five-year-old games be? How will I think of... BUT WHAT IS THIS?!!?! FOUR new entries! Far Cry 5 taking up only one slot! No Witcher 3! No Skyrim! It's like Christmas, where Christmas is a day you just about get through without things being as bad as they were last year.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>When I signed the law drafting children into my city’s workforce, I should have felt resistance. Some sense of remorse, or an impulse to explore other options—anything but this. Instead, I was simply surprised at just how many kids lived here.
Then I sent them to the coal mines.
]]>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.
]]>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.
]]>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...
]]>No. Let's not be ridiculous. But there are so many examples of bad survival games that it’s important to remember the good ones. So that’s what we are doing on the latest RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. We're breaking stones over the heads of rubbish survival games, but cooking, salting and eating the delicious ones. Adam wraps himself up in The Long Dark but reluctantly sets Project Zomboid on fire to stay warm. Matt gets sea sickness from Subnautica but wants to swim again anyway. And Brendan freedives into Subnautica too, in an attempt to escape from all the mediocre survival games set on red planets.
]]>As we lay 2017 to rest, let us remember all of the wonderful games that flickered across our screens and occupied our hearts and minds. But now we must promise never to think of them again because times have changed. This is 2018 and if we've learned one thing from the few hours we've spent in it it's that there are games everywhere. Every firework that exploded in the many midnights of New Year's celebrations was stuffed with games and they were still raining down across the world this morning. We cannot stop them, we cannot contain them, but we can attempt to understand them.
Hundreds of them will be worth our time and attention, but we've selected a few of the ones that excite us most as we prepare for another year of splendid PC gaming. There's something for everyone, from Aunt Maude, the military genius, to merry Ian Rogue, the man who hates permadeath and procedural generation with a passion.
]]>What do you mean there's a whole month of 2017 left? Well, the disembodied mouths of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, are tired of waiting. This week the team look at some of the most exciting upcoming games of 2018. Adam is looking forward to smashing big robots with other, bigger robots in Battletech. Matt wants to make trousers from dinosaur skin in Monster Hunter World. And Brendan forgot all about how much he's excited by surreal isometric detective game No Truce With The Furies.
We've also got some chat about Viking strategy game Northgard and yet more love for FTL follow-up Into The Breach. Plus, our Patch Adam quiz is back!
]]>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.
]]>In the first week, we put the children to work. They weren't forced into dangerous jobs, so we told ourselves, but when you're living on the brink of extinction, what work is truly safe? One afternoon, a man collecting coal complained of numbness in his arm. Frostbite had taken hold. We could have left him to die but instead we opted for an experimental treatment.
He lost the arm and he's no longer capable of contributing to our dying society. One more mouth to feed with no body of work beneath it. What should we do?
Frostpunk [official site] is a city-building survival sim from the studio that brought us This War of Mine and it is beautifully bleak.
]]>It's warm! Luckily the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, have come together to talk cold games, like chilly survivalist city-builder Frostpunk. That's because Adam is back from E3 and can tell us (Brendan and Pip) all about it. He's also played Destiny 2 and Middle Earth: Shadow of War, the lucky sod. Spill the beans, Adam! No wait, don't. We need those.
This week's back-to-normal-length episode also sees us talking about Darkest Dungeon's latest expansion, The Crimson Court, esoteric desert survival RPG Kenshi, and some news about GTA V and the sad fate of its modders. Also: the return of our patch notes quiz, Patch Adam, this time featuring Dwarf Fortress.
]]>As we recover from the trail of destruction left behind by E3's news conferences, it’s important to take a breath and remember not all the cool kids are hanging out in LA this week (and even if they are, they don’t always get heard). Here’s seven neat-looking games that have yet to be released, to whom we will gladly extend some of the industry’s overflowing hype.
]]>As you might have heard, the folks who put together the civilian survival management of This War of Mine are working on a chilly follow-up called Frostpunk [official site]. It’s set in a permanently wintry world where humans cling to life thanks to steam-powered machinery. We haven’t been able to discover much about it (and that will still be the case by the end of this post) but developers 11 Bit have at least graced us with a new trailer, offering a glimpse of where humanity has made its last stand against the nippiness.
]]>As Old Father Time grabs his sickle and prepares to take ailing 2016 around the back of the barn for a big sleep, we're looking to the future. The mewling pup that goes by the name 2017 will come into the world soon and we must prepare ourselves for its arrival. Here at RPS, our preparations come in the form of this enormous preview feature, which contains details on more than a hundred of the exciting games that are coming our way over the next twelve months. 2016 was a good one - in the world of games at least - but, ever the optimists, we're hoping next year will be even better.
]]>This War of Mine developers 11 Bit Studios are returning with another grim survival scenario to ponder how much we're willing to give up our humanity etc. This War of Mine's modern-day-ish setting was inspired by the Siege of Sarajevo, with regular people trying to get by in a war-torn city, but 11 Bit are going a bit more unreal with their next. Today they announced Frostpunk [official site], set in a frozen world with steam-powered technology. I'll tell you one thing about morality in this hard world: I'll devour the first nobber I see wearing a top hat with goggles.
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