It’s always a pleasure to write about Frostpunk, but I’m glum that Frostpunk has boarded the Great Videogame Remaking Train. I don’t think the original Frostpunk is beyond improvement, but I do find it very complete. Chilly finitude, obsessive symmetry are its narrative ethos and aesthetic. It’s a three-act story in a genre that tends to be exhaustingly open-ended. Its dramatic stakes are stark and inescapable – who and what will you sacrifice so that everybody else can survive? In place of the hopelessly indulgent, always-extendable gridiron of SimCity it gives you an Omelasian foxhole, with construction rigorously defined by distance from the coal burner at the heart. The Last City’s inner configuration may vary, but it must describe a perfect circle, because it has to dissipate heat evenly against the apocalyptic winter. It can’t afford to sprawl.
But sprawl Frostpunk has – firstly in the form of DLC expansions, and then in the shape of Frostpunk 2: a looser, fragmented game of expansionism, bickering council members, tangled ideologies, and petrol politics. And now here’s Frostpunk: 1886, an Unreal Engine “remake plus plus”, as game director Maciej Sułecki puts it, in a sector saturated with boutique revivals, some of them landing a handful of years after the original game – a forcing of embryonic nostalgia, huffing on embers, that suggests an industry running out of fuel, giving itself over to cycles of regeneration.
Still, perhaps I’m being too gloomy. I’m definitely being melodramatic. As you’d expect, Sułecki has a more hopeful analysis.
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He frames the remake as continuing 11 Bit’s experiments with building empathy for characters in order to perform ‘moral choice’ experiments, while managing groups of different sizes. That journey began with 2014’s The War Of Mine, which put you in charge of a household. Frostpunk gave you hundreds of townsfolk, while Frostpunk 2 gave you tens of thousands, living in districts strewn across the ice.
“All of those three games are about the similar moral dilemmas, but set in different scales,” Sułecki tells me over videocall. “So this is really cool for us, for me – it was very interesting to develop those games, and think about how the game mechanics should act in games of a different scale, while in all three games, we are basically testing the player’s morality.”
While he views Frostpunk 2 as a success, Sułecki concedes that “when we finished development of the second Frostpunk, we had a clear view that the bigger the scale, the harder it is to attach players to those characters…” More difficult, after all, to feel the gravity of mandatory gangrene amputations when you can’t quite see your individual workers, shoving through neck-high snow towards skeletal timber reserves. In Frostpunk: 1886, Sułecki wants to make players more attached to the townsfolk by giving your people a new range of animations – for example, expressions of family bonds and friendships.
“We will show those people more as people, less as NPCs or pawns,” he goes on. “And this knowledge comes from analysing all of those three games. I realised that those small animation changes in This War Of Mine – it was a very easy feature from the development side, because we are changing how people walk depending on their state, simply a change of animation set. But those small details allowed for this bond between the player and the those characters, and this bond is crucial if we want to test the player’s morality.”
Speaking as somebody who found Frostpunk 2 frustratingly removed from the lives of everyday citizens, for all its element of haggling with their representatives, I’m very curious about the relationship between empathy and sheer numbers. I wonder aloud if 11 Bit have considered making a Frostpunk game with a population size parked between Frostpunk and This War of Mine.
Sułecki is happy to speculate on the subject. “Just yesterday, I was talking with my colleague about games of different scale,” he says. “And we mentioned that 30 people, 20 to 30 people is basically a really universal scale, like maybe not ‘universal’ but very relatable. Because this is the scale of, for example, one classroom, or one team in a company, or I don’t know, one unit in the military.”
Sułecki himself would love to work on more Frostpunk games, and in the event, the question of population size would be fundamental, but that hypothetical classroom-scale project could also be set in a different gameworld. “I personally was thinking about a game in this scale of 20-30 people,” he adds. “Not necessarily in the Frostpunk world, but it would be really interesting to explore morality and other human relations, and show those dilemmas in something a little bit bigger than This War Of Mine, and smaller than Frostpunk 1. But those are just my designer dreams – not a plan, for sure.”
Frostpunk: 1886 will introduce a third Purpose path, Purpose paths being a series of optional decrees that shape your society, and which explore the “creeping normality” of one, relatively unobjectionable decision creating a pretext for brutal measures, down the road. The original game’s Purpose paths are Order, culminating in autocracy, and Faith, culminating in theocracy. Sułecki is tight-lipped about the new Purpose path, beyond calling it another kind of “radicalism” that “will start really promising and unfortunately, all of those things could end very, very badly.”
I’m intrigued to hear more about the new Purpose path, not least for how it might reflect what’s changed in society since the original Frostpunk’s day. The 2019 game makes no bones of being a historical commentary, however speculative: its inspirations include the Luddites, English factory workers who rioted in response to the erosion of their livelihoods by new automated textile machinery. Discussing the game’s creation, 11 Bit have elsewhere tethered these events to on-going conversations about the workplace impacts of generative AI. So how does it feel to revisit the game’s alternative history? Does Frostpunk’s grim portrayal of labour conditions and rights amid an escalating crisis now seem outlandish, quaint, or more relevant than ever?
“I think it’s an interesting question because in general, when you take into account Frostpunk and This War Of Mine, we are making those morally testing games since 2014,” Sułecki comments. “I believe that the world didn’t change at all during that time. Basically, there were always some problems in some different parts of the world, so probably maybe we as westerners have more exposure on that right now.” 11 Bit have already expressed these melancholy sentiments in a 2024 DLC pack for This War Of Mine, titled Forget Celebrations. “It’s our way of celebrating and not celebrating,” Sułecki says. “Because basically the world is, for sure, not better than back then.”
Sułecki does, however, feel that more games are now “tackling such different and difficult topics” and that the medium is overall becoming more “mature”. While I’m not sure I agree with this overall characterisation, I’d argue that Frostpunk has been influential on this count. It’s the heart of a subgenre of more emotive, story-led city-builders that respond to some wider environmental catastrophe: The Wandering Village, Ixion, Generation Exile, Airborne Kingdom, to name a few.
This being the year of our Altman 2026, I also have to ask about 11 Bit’s own policy towards generative AI. The developers made headlines last year for leaving some “placeholder” AI-generated elements in The Alters – rather macabre, given that The Alters is a game in which you generate workers from your own, reconstituted life history. Frostpunk 1866 will make use of the technology, though 11 Bit have yet to specify how. Apparently, it won’t be for anything “final”.
“Basically, everyone is using AI – when you even search in Google, you get these AI descriptions, but we are really using AI as nothing more than a tool,” Sułecki tells me. “And in this project, for sure, we want to have a human touch at the end, with every asset we are creating. So, I believe in using AI as something that could speed up some process, but it’s basically depending on the artist, or the developer, or the designer. It’s okay as long as the final asset is made by hand by the developer.
“And this is basically the current state in our team, but we are experimenting with some different approaches. I think we are open to everything that the future will bring, because it’s really hard to say what will be the state of – certainly of AI development, but also of the gaming industry in a few years.”
These arguments likely won’t surprise you, if you’ve been keeping up with the bet-hedging rhetoric at other genAI-curious studios, like Larian. Still, it seems worth pushing back a little. Frostpunk is a game about the ravages of climate change. Generative AI is making a rapidly growing contribution to rising temperatures and habitat destruction – data centres consume electricity and water for cooling, while driving up demand for minerals and earth elements. Does Sułecki have any thoughts on the use of generative AI for game development in that context specifically?
“I believe we cannot stop the progress, basically,” he says. “And when we are using progress to do immoral things, it’s obviously bad, and this could bring us as a world, as a civilisation to a very, very bad situation. But it’s really hard to stop right now.
“We had global climate change even before AI, right? Because climate change isn’t about AI itself, it’s about progress in general. So obviously, if the AI can add to that, it’s a bad thing for sure. But I think we need to look at that more widely. And think about how we could like, proceed with the progress, maintaining the world we are living in the same shape.”
I take the point that climate change is bigger than generative AI. Still, “progress” is a… complicated word, often deployed by the rich and powerful to justify the systems and technologies they wish to impose on everybody else, hiding or downplaying their own self-interest. Much as I’m cool on Frostpunk 2, I think it offers some useful cynicism here. It frames “progress” as an in-game factional ideology with some strengths and drawbacks, one among many “radicalisms” thrashed out by people in meeting rooms, rather than some fundamental tendency of history. You can see that ambivalence in Sułecki’s appeal to progress as both a thing to maintain, and a thing that can’t be stopped – both the fire, and the blizzard bearing down from the north.
I’m not sure “progress” exists in the original Frostpunk. The whole game is a defensive action, dedicated to a generator that is always guttering out. And Frostpunk: 1886? By virtue of being a “remake plus plus”, it expresses an onwards-and-upwards mentality that, once again, strikes me as alien to the clenched and despairing subject matter. Which I guess is what most interests me about this project. Perhaps that’s something 11 Bit should investigate in the third Purpose path. Read more about the game on Steam.
