Build-a-Brrr

Of the myriad subgenres of video games—zombie schlock, cozy agriculture, existential detective sims—few are as chill as City Builders. SimCity established the template all the way back in 1989: a player begins with a blank canvas of landscape and, starting with a few farms and ramshackle ramblers, slowly paints a thriving metropolis of skyscrapers and strip malls across the artificial hills. SimCity dominated the genre for nearly twenty years with increasingly complex and visually impressive sequels until a flop in 2013 allowed new titles like Cities: Skylines to flourish. But even these newer titles struggle to break free of the tropes established by the SimCity franchise: bright colors, relaxing vibes, and an uncritical commitment to making lines on a graph ascend into a sky sans horizon. But Frostpunk 2 rejects these elements in pursuit of a grungier, sharper edge. By pitching itself beyond contemporary settings into a post-apocalyptic world of intense scarcity and deathly cold, it goads players into creating cities more brittle and flawed than anything within the genre standard, subjected to pressures designed to shatter them completely.