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S2 Ep139: Frostpunk
77 Plays5 years ago
Join Dave, Jake, and special guest Justin as they take shelter from the eternal winter in this week's episode!
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Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
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Transcript
00:00:06
Speaker
you
Introduction and Personal Updates
00:00:36
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going today, Dave? Alright, I feel like this happens every couple of times. You just completely ignore our guests. I'll ask, how is it going today, Justin? It's going pretty good. You know, had some recent life events filled with some cake.
00:00:57
Speaker
It's nice. Yeah, we've all purchased and eaten a cake for ourselves. No, no, no. No, we have to use about a pound and a half of confectioners sugars and make our own wedding cake because Rachel and I got married on Thursday. Hey, congratulations, man. Congratulations. Thank you. This is my first time here.
00:01:21
Speaker
I feel like that could have been something to bring up, you know, when we're preparing for the podcast. Alright, alright. Way to drop that. Congratulations.
Wedding and Gaming Connection
00:01:31
Speaker
It's obviously a big life decision. Do you still think you'll have time for video games? Yes. Okay, that's good. For any lifters who are not intimately aware of Justin and Rachel, they're both huge nerds like us. So they play games together a lot.
00:01:47
Speaker
Our first dance was actually a video game. That's true, yeah. We had it off on the nerdy foot, actually. Literally. Sorry, sorry. It was a little hanging fruit joke.
00:02:02
Speaker
What was the song? It's not what I recognize from DDR. It's Vega. We had always joked about and attempting to do the dance that the background is doing. There's a weird alien bug dude that just has his hands in a V for all of the song and will just thrust them up and down.
00:02:20
Speaker
doing that no bar is incredibly tiring I attempted it in the video is just not we're not good at it it sounds very close to like the praise the Sun yeah yeah
00:02:35
Speaker
excellent yeah i don't know how to pivot off of that what else you guys want to talk about so this cake yeah what kind of cake was it uh vanilla buttercream um
00:02:51
Speaker
But it was my first time making a layered cake and Rachel helped during the process and she was primarily responsible for coloring it. And she got some nice pastel colors for our wedding colors are blue and orange.
00:03:09
Speaker
So the each layer is then there's also cupcakes that are it. It was five hours to make our cake on our wedding night. That was probably not the best idea, but it was definitely a fun experience. Oh, so you made the cake the day of. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's that's kind of dedication, you
Marriage Reflections Post-Pandemic
00:03:25
Speaker
know.
00:03:25
Speaker
I talked about how, like, coming off the pandemic, staying, like, being self-isolated with somebody and then getting married at the end of it, it's like the hard sell on marriage, right? You know you're locked in and it's probably gonna work out there. But making your wedding cake also the same day is a heavy commitment.
00:03:44
Speaker
We had other plans, and once we realized how long the cake was going to make, that was pretty much what we needed to focus on. That's fair. That's entirely fair.
Introduction to Frostpunk
00:03:55
Speaker
Damn, that's impressive on all accounts, though. And red and orange, not red and orange, blue and orange are the portal colors, which could be an allusion to what we're talking about today.
00:04:09
Speaker
a portal to another world that's not our world, but it's also not Portal's world. Frostpunk. I'm going to let you take it from here. That one's smooth. I don't know what you guys are talking about. The game we are talking about today is Frostpunk. Who was the developer again, Jake? It was 11-bit studios, both the developer and publisher.
00:04:38
Speaker
It's a city building but has a story to tell. You're not just developing a city to handle standard management sim, there's a scenario that led to you being in control of this city and needing to resolve a whole bunch of issues.
00:05:03
Speaker
Right. It's kind of like, this is one of those morality games, right? Where it's like, hey, mechanically, we're going to try to push you in directions to do things you're not comfortable with, to explore questions you might not have thought about. 100%. And I think it does that very well. It made me make decisions that I am not necessarily comfortable with. It's like Undertale.
00:05:27
Speaker
Well, hold on. I'm listening now. So obviously Justin has the most experience with this as he's brought this to us as a guest episode topic. I think Jake has spent a good amount of time as well.
00:05:43
Speaker
Yeah, years ago when it came out, I guess, three, two, three years ago now. I completed the first scenario. And then I am a virgin. This is my first time hearing about it. So if you have any questions, we are in the same boat listener. So yes, so far, it sounds like SimCity plus ethics.
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, a decent amount of that storyline than just SimCity, which you said was management. Yeah. Aesthetically, the story is there's an oncoming climate apocalypse that the
00:06:21
Speaker
UK government is essentially trying to find some way of mitigating and saving part of the population. Effectively, there is a great global freeze originating from somewhere around the equator. So they try to set up a
00:06:41
Speaker
islands of heat further north, and evacuate people from major British metropolitan areas to these areas and get them to survive the great freeze. So the, go ahead. Yeah, I was just gonna say like, so this is, these are the cores, right? Like the burner, basically. The generators is the term that they use. Yeah. Yeah.
00:07:08
Speaker
I it's a really interesting kind of idea. It's the opposite, I think, of how I usually expect, you know, or like, like global freezing to come from, right? You think of it expanding from the poles. Exactly. Like, oh, yeah, the tropicals. That's what really gets us. They betrayed us, stabbed us in the back.
00:07:26
Speaker
Yeah, since it's the British Empire, there's a lot of reference to the colonies and how the crops are already failing in India and stuff like that as you're trying to to work on these things. Is this like time period based? So I believe the time period is roughly 1880s, but it is significantly steampunk.
00:07:53
Speaker
So when Jake was talking about it being another world, it's an alternate timeline through and through. Basically, a direct extension of the Industrial Revolution never slowed down the original Steam Revolution. And taking that to fruition and needing to produce even more heat to offset this.
00:08:18
Speaker
It's always it's an interesting setting, obviously, like I'm a fan of steampunk stuff. You know, I love Dishonored, all their technology, everything like that. It's kind of a unique take, I think, to be like, hey, we're going to take this fantastical setting fantasy setting and then inject like ethical questions into it. Because like I would contrast it something like this war of mine, which was like, hey, we're going to take a realistic
00:08:46
Speaker
hyper-modern setting that could literally happen in real life and maybe based off stories in real life and then put you in the situation of people that have lived here. It's kind of like a juxtaposition to me to be like, hey, here's a fantasy setting. Now you're going to deal with world issues.
00:09:03
Speaker
Yeah, and I think the the name Frostpunk is definitely setting up some of that aesthetic trapping. When you're when you think of like cyberpunk or steampunk, you have a mental concept and Frostpunk
00:09:18
Speaker
It definitely leans into the steampunk vibe, but a much more, hey, it's cold. So everyone is, there's just basically oil burners sitting outside a lot of places. Uh, everyone's bundled up. It's gritty. It's grimy. Um, and that, that comes through in their aesthetic too, I think. Yeah.
00:09:39
Speaker
They really, it's been a while since I played, but I like the, I think like when you're dealing with cold, it lends to an isolationist nature for the game. Cause like, I think most of us can have memories of, you know, really cold winters. It's like maybe you're at a grandparent's house and they have like a, what's the name of the thing that burns wood?
00:09:59
Speaker
A stove? Fireplace. Fireplace is what I was going for. And you're like, okay, bundle up, stay warm, stay out of the cold that's trying to encroach against you. And this game, when I played it at least, really seemed to emphasize that the elements are really what you're at war with.
Frostpunk's Environment and Scenarios
00:10:21
Speaker
And all the buildings have different states for when they're too cold for human occupation and stuff like that. And that's represented through the user interface to make it easier to read, but also the buildings will get more and more snow built on top of them. The ground will have snow around them.
00:10:42
Speaker
and where you put these islands of heat generation, however you manage to accomplish that, will affect the areas too. So it's not directly tile-based. There are 3D models full render everything, but there's obvious demarcation points for where it is good for humans to be and where the environment is fully encroached. Yeah.
00:11:11
Speaker
As a side comment, I really do enjoy when, I guess, media, in this case, games, kind of explore very extreme settings. Like, if you remember the movie Waterworld back in the 80s? Oh, yeah. I haven't mentioned that in, like, a couple of episodes. It's a common touch point for us. Yeah. It's like, if you have something go off like, hey, this thing that we take for granted every day, what if it wasn't easily available? In this case, it's heat.
00:11:38
Speaker
Obviously, we bundle up in winter because how do you stop the overall temperature of stuff dropping significantly? You fucking congregate locally and just to deal with that, you can't fix the whole thing. So if you had that happen on a national geographic scale, you'd have to make these small cities
00:12:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's cool. It is cool. I think it helps focus in on the human element too. If you want to deal with us versus them, situations and survivalism at its core and tribalism and the idea of people congregating together to survive. Have a limited resource. Exactly. Have a limited resource. Have an external element that forces people together and make them compete for survival.
00:12:31
Speaker
and yeah I mean it's it's a cool novel driving force behind the human interactions which to my understanding at least are really the core of what the game's trying to get across oh yeah I would definitely agree with that the uh
00:12:46
Speaker
And we spoke on a little bit earlier, it makes you make moral choices. So there are, I think, five or six scenarios that play out. The original game had three, the first one basically being your tutorial slash dealing with the oncoming storm from a pretty OK starting point. Like your group that you are responsible for, they call you the captain,
00:13:16
Speaker
You find these cities via vehicles called dreadnoughts. They're basically giant tank things powered by steam. But you lose a couple of those trying to make it to the first scenario is a new home and you are the survivors of London. So you are making new London. Yeah, it kind of it touches a little bit on like
00:13:44
Speaker
It's weird because you know it's Earth, right? This takes place on Earth, but because of that opener, it gives you sort of that Battlestar Galactica set out into the unknown to establish a place to live sort of feel, which I think is really cool when you can take Earth and make it the unknown environment or the dangerous environment. That's a cool twist.
00:14:07
Speaker
Yeah, and most of the, where the generator, the generator cities are, they're kind of nestled in valleys to try to stop some wind shear and stuff like that. So there's even thought to, okay, how can we have the environment tell us just how harsh it can be outside?
00:14:28
Speaker
I did not even consider that as a factor. But as somebody who's walked outside, wins it, wins the deck. It really is. And the game, correct me if I'm wrong, because it's been a while since I've played. It really escalates that by having different external temperatures. You could have storms that drop the temperature dramatically coming in from the outside, as well as the progressive. Everything's getting colder over time.
00:14:55
Speaker
Primarily, it's handled via meteorological weather stations. So you get a tracker that will tell you whether or not it's going to get hotter and colder in the next coming days. So I guess we should talk about how this is more structured from a gameplay standpoint. Right, yeah. There's a game underneath all these concepts.
00:15:19
Speaker
So your goal is to survive until the major frost hits. And typically, so it's over a course of days. The longest scenario that I've seen I think is roughly a 45 day period. And you're working through standard work shifts.
00:15:40
Speaker
So you're dealing with nighttime, you have to be able to have enough stockpile to keep your heaters running overnight, food to feed people overnight. And during the day, you try to develop that access resource and get enough
00:16:00
Speaker
uh, resources to be able to develop new technologies to try and mitigate the oncoming store. Um, real quick. Is this, is it structured gameplay wise, like management or like to what level of detail do you have to input to have a worker go collect said resource, whether it's color oil as like your heat source generation?
00:16:20
Speaker
I described it one time to somebody as a plate spinning game. So there are multiple types of resources, multiple buildings to work with and for those resources and to try and keep all of them in balance. So the major plates that you're spinning are coal generation, which you need to generate heat.
00:16:45
Speaker
Then you have development resources of steel and wood, but then there's also the human element. After you develop wood first, obviously.
00:17:04
Speaker
there are multiple social classes, and those actually end up playing. And so you have a worker class, an engineer class, children. And in one of the other expansions, there's also convicts. And those will affect different things. The two major meters for the social people, for people resource, are discontent and hope.
00:17:29
Speaker
So when either of those get to their extremes, they basically give you an ultimatum and you will either get kicked out or straight killed. And that's an endgame state. So wait, for clarification on that, are you saying if they max out on hope? No, no, no. Losing all hope or being too discontent? Okay, gotcha. They'll overthrow you. Basically, yeah. Okay.
00:17:57
Speaker
I was confused by it too. If they have enough hope to treat themselves, I don't know. Right. They're just like, we don't need an overseer. Then you get killed. Yeah. They're so hopeful.
00:18:10
Speaker
And then there's some other minor resources for some specific scenarios. But generally speaking, the gameplay is spin enough plates, get enough resources so that you can survive the next day and hopefully be able to develop enough technology so that you survive the final onset. And then the scenarios start playing with some of that.
00:18:37
Speaker
So to harken back to the initial question, how management is it?
Resource Management in Frostpunk
00:18:42
Speaker
Like, do you have to tell a worker to do a thing that kind of go off on a routine?
00:18:46
Speaker
Yeah, so you're essentially just assigning where people will work. So they go from free time to work time, and they have a place to go during that, and you're trying to have the correct number of people in certain places. But you're also fighting the cold during that. If they are working into cold of a location, they have a higher chance of being sick.
00:19:14
Speaker
So, there's a whole medical resource that you have to try and manage also. I remember that. So, you're not assigning specifically one person to one specific job and they don't develop any kind of expertise on their task.
00:19:32
Speaker
It's more of a general, hey, we need X number of people doing this thing, and that will affect how much. But individual people will get sick or have lower motivation, which means that their efficiency will drop.
00:19:49
Speaker
that starts getting into some of the laws that you can enact, which is a whole other system on top of this. So there is definitely a lot of, it's a systems heavy game. Yeah. I think you could relate this in some way to like political simulators or something like that. It's like, what was the Tropico or whatever, you know, where you're like, oh, let's deal with policy, but also there's some city building.
00:20:17
Speaker
some cool concepts like building around that you like build around circles right like yes yeah like layers and then the core is it radiates out yeah just like the heat radiating out so you're trying to get
00:20:33
Speaker
You're trying to get as many people as close to the core as possible because that's the most efficient place for heat generation. Everything that you do that adds heat to the environment consumes coal, and they start scaling very quickly. So you could increase the radius of things that generate heat, but it doubles or triples the coal consumption rate for doing that.
00:21:00
Speaker
So the more condensed you can do, you want to try and have a best pack, you can possibly. And then there's other buildings that have radiate things. So you can build churches or... They radiate religion. Yeah, basically. So there's buffs that certain buildings will have a cooldown for using, and the more people it affects, the more beneficial using that cooldown is.
00:21:28
Speaker
Right. So is there like a specific build strat that is optimal that you found that kind of like works across scenarios? Like if you have church, some other heat generation, like do you have something that you always have? Like, Oh, this is my go to layout. So I didn't have a go to layout. So one of the things I didn't want to talk about is one of the things I enjoyed was the fact that
00:21:53
Speaker
It encourages getting a build order. So all of the scenarios are very scripted. If you do the same things, the same things will happen at the same time. What this means is that when you play the scenario the first time, you're effectively going in completely blind.
00:22:12
Speaker
But if you fail and fail again, you can know what types of requirements are coming up. So on certain scenarios, you might start with a higher amount of initial coal, and you can kind of just push that off to the back, but you might start with absolutely no food. So you need to immediately get foragers set up to go hunt food before everyone starves. Right. And then eat the corpses, obviously.
00:22:39
Speaker
Yeah, there's a heat mechanic with with corpses too. That is that is totally a thing Dead bodies are so underutilized in video games. I'll say it It's mainly just the zombie genre. It's kind of taking hold of that idea Frostpunk uses every part of the human
00:22:55
Speaker
Every part of them you mentioned you mentioned build order so like just to get that concept across our audience who are as heavily into Starcraft this is basically like you got your protoss build order you got your zerg build order you build order screwed up in a frostpunk you get you get that zerg rush by the heat they break down your natural wall it's done or the cold in this case it would be funny if you died to like a heat wave or something that's the that's the day
00:23:25
Speaker
Your people have caught on fire, and they're not in the burner. You're not entirely wrong. One of the other scenarios that came out in the last expansion is called the Last Autumn. It's a prequel to the base game.
00:23:42
Speaker
So in this, instead of having hope, they have motivation, and you're effectively the lead foreman supervisor for the corporation building the generators themselves. And a lot of that scenario deals with workers' rights and workplace safety. So there are multiple times where
00:24:06
Speaker
it just explodes. When you get a certain part of the core to a, because you're actually building the core, you get to a certain percentage done. It's like, if you don't pass this safety check, it just explodes and takes 40% of your build progress away and maybe kills 50 people.
00:24:27
Speaker
So yeah, getting ahead of that stuff is very important. I ended up, I spoke it up in our pre-show a little bit. I was up till 4am to try and finally beat that before coming on to this. It is, and that's playing on, so all of the scenarios that I played, I played on the default medium difficulty, and I had to restart last autumn
00:24:49
Speaker
four or five times and a failure was like an hour and a half, two hours in a lot of times. So it's not an easy game. If you have a lot of city building chops, you might be able to get through, but some of the things that they throw at you, if you didn't get this one check ahead of time, you are set so far back.
00:25:10
Speaker
Okay, so it's less like you have the option to be like, um, this is how I do. This is how I play the game. It's more of like dead of winter where you have an overall for a round. We have to achieve this goal. Also, here's another thing we're throwing onto the mix. So you have to like, I assume manage the individual crises as they come up with the ongoing. I also need to do this.
00:25:36
Speaker
Very much. Yeah, so in the last autumn, because that's a very structured one, you have four major goals that you need to accomplish. But then you might not have enough people or you didn't build your safety up enough, which are just completely different mechanics that end up playing into those primary ones.
00:25:58
Speaker
Uh, so there was a couple of times where, uh, I was trying to build a good enough base to then accomplish the goals, but I had to start rushing the construction. So the safety ended up not being there. And so I had an explosion that led to the progress being set back 40%, which means that I then failed the deadline and was kicked out from the corporation. And it was a, basically a failure at that point.
00:26:28
Speaker
Plates started falling when your plate's been an example. So how do you feel about that? Because I'll be honest, the way that you describe this structure, I think is not the most ideal for the way I go into games. The fact that it doesn't have, like this isn't a rogue-like game, right? It doesn't really have random events so much as at these fixed points in your scenario timeline.
00:26:54
Speaker
here's an obstacle that will come up. Were you prepared for it? But it's like the same obstacle, right? Unless you deviated from that path somewhat dramatically. How do you feel about having those kind of like arbitrary walls, I guess, that you don't necessarily know you have the tools for beforehand? It might need to restart the scenario for. Yeah. So the fact that you're
00:27:22
Speaker
It's a knowledge game, effectively, once you get to that point. And a lot of the social laws that you're making end up having a moral choice. So in my original new home scenario, I refuse to employ child labor. Right, rookie mistake, but go ahead. They don't get much done, I'll be honest. Every day in the Senate, I'm like, hey, what'd you do yesterday?
00:27:50
Speaker
Okay, cool. Yep. Thanks. Thanks for something. Bye. I'll see you guys tomorrow. Am I, am I misremembering or was the choice for that? Like if you, if they worked, they couldn't learn so they wouldn't become like educated. Yeah. So some of the laws have a polar choice. Um, and yeah, so child labor, uh, means that they just turn into regular workers. Um, and then the alternative to that is like schooling. Um,
00:28:14
Speaker
child labor, you just get additional workers, but hope will typically decrease because the parents of those children are like, yo, they're not in safe conditions. They're just going to get crushed by machinery. That's cool. That is what the parents say. It's a weird pop up.
00:28:34
Speaker
But then the schooling requires you to A, build a structure and B, there's taken additional law to actually get any benefit from that besides hope and not maiming children.
00:28:52
Speaker
But you can eventually, you can eventually employ children even with the schooling, but they are specifically to engineering and medical posts as another optional one. So you can get some additional benefit from that.
00:29:09
Speaker
I think I might have had an outcome when I was playing the game where I had a bunch of unskilled people in the medical facilities just hacking off limbs and stuff like that. I didn't have professional overseers and doctors and things like that. They're just like, this guy's got a boo-boo on his toe. I was like, take the leg. Just get that off.
00:29:32
Speaker
Amputees are another social class and you either have to care for them, deport them, or give them prosthetics. So there's mechanics on top of mechanics in this game. I don't think deportation is any sort of happy outcome in this game. No.
00:29:50
Speaker
Given that you're at the sole source of heat and everything out is winter wasteland, now yeah, get out there. It'll be fine. But going back to your question, because there are so many mechanics and adjusting one knob means that your entire resource generation is so different later on,
Moral Decisions and Their Impact
00:30:11
Speaker
The lack of scenario-based randomness isn't a problem to me because the choices I make have discernible consequences later on. If I would have decided to focus more engineers in the workshop, I could have had advanced technology here and I could have saved these people. And I think on a previous episode, we talked about sometimes they will
00:30:41
Speaker
Games will tell you what you did, the Divinity Original Sin 2 thing where it had that ending slide. I think this game does that much stronger. I'm not sure if you remember how that played out, Jake.
00:30:55
Speaker
Uh, I mean, are you talking about just cause and effect? No. So, so at the end of a scenario, if you, if you do successfully complete a scenario, it gives you a timeline of your adventure and how, Oh, oh yeah. Yeah. The, the post game slideshow of how everything happened.
00:31:14
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. So one of my criticisms from that episode also is a minor thing. This is the first callback a guest has had for a previous episode, while the guest was also in attendance. So put that up on the wall.
00:31:29
Speaker
Good job, Dave. We've made it. But so if you do successfully complete a scenario in Frostpunk, it will give you a slideshow of a point shift camera perspective of your base being built. So it takes a snapshot every two hours or something.
00:31:47
Speaker
And does that in like still motion while basically reading off like the choices that you made and the consequences that had so like I lost to build the final generator for the new last last autumn expansion.
00:32:03
Speaker
It's ended up killing 45 workers and 20 engineers. Um, but it's like, but the people of Liverpool will survive and like ends up being a real hopeful thing. If you get to the hopeful payoff, if you don't, then it is just soul crushing. Uh-huh.
00:32:20
Speaker
Does that add anything for you? Like how many city management type Sims have you played and do you like having moral consequences or kind of those decisions injected into gameplay? I think I'm not sure how frequently I would like it, but because that is.
00:32:39
Speaker
for, at least from what I know, a novel concept for this game. Most other city management games, you end up, you have scenarios, but it's basically like, make sure your budgets hit this level or make it a tourist city. So you have eight museums and stuff like that. Having to live with the consequence of
00:33:06
Speaker
trying to appease the workers' rights group so much that they ended up enacting a daily execution to continue raising motivation. And that being the scenario that I was able to successfully complete with is
00:33:25
Speaker
It challenges why you're making these decisions. Why would you not make that decision originally and living with the consequences? So it's it's a very strong emotion because you are ultimately the one deciding
00:33:41
Speaker
how this plays out and is killing 65 people. You killed 60. I killed 65 people building this generator, but I made a perfect generator for the people of Liverpool that will hopefully be able to bring 800 people through the frost. Right. Right. So trolley problem.
00:34:06
Speaker
So do you guys play more ethically minded? Or will you kind of jump for like that? Fuck them. This will help me achieve my goal. Or do you like try and stay good, but you're fine with some like concessions like child labor or burning amputees for fuel? Well, specifically, the last one's fine. I actually I was I was kind of joking a little bit earlier. I believe my first play through was mostly moral with choice sacrifices to
00:34:36
Speaker
try to get there to the end and that was pretty successful I don't think I had to really admittedly so Justin's kind of undercut my experience of the game here because I was like man who got through that scenario got the game beat like feeling pretty good got the experience and Justin's like so the first one's the tutorial
00:34:56
Speaker
Oh, but I think like initially start out good and then make hard choices as necessary for me just because like from a meta perspective a lot of people who make these games where they have moral choices
00:35:15
Speaker
They're either trying to push you toward a moral outcome where you've adjusted your brain to be like moral decisions are right in the end to do the right thing.
00:35:29
Speaker
Or they're less likely to be like, be an evil person, right? Just do everything really evil, like, because that's kind of also a boring outcome for the game too. If you had to burn kids, you know, until we get through winter, then that's not really a choice.
00:35:48
Speaker
yeah i feel like they have different games if you want to play the antagonist if you want to be the asshole right you can just part of that what prototype overlord oh yeah you can just play those um but i do like the fact that they're kind of like making you
00:36:07
Speaker
Actually decide on something and then living with the consequences. That's why I've always enjoyed things like telltale Because afterwards said like hey, here's what happened and that's gonna haunt you in future episodes also it shows you like who made which decisions yeah, oh 70% of players also ripped that guy's arm off or Something like that
00:36:30
Speaker
Yeah, and this game also does some of that. So you'll occasionally get an individual person, they're not named, they're definitely still like scenario snapshots, like this will happen at this point. And you make decisions based on that. One of my favorite dialogue boxes that I had to basically, whenever you click a button is what you as the captain is saying, which the only option I had during this dialogue box was fucking owls.
00:37:00
Speaker
Basically, the people saw Al's hanging over the generator core as a bad omen. But there's ones where an engineer was disgruntled because he was in a tent with workers and he wanted his own engineer tent so that he wouldn't have to deal with the uncaps.
00:37:24
Speaker
And how much making certain decisions with that actually play in the scenarios, I don't know. It seems like there's a chance that by picking the side with the engineer, but then siding with all of the workers' groups, I may have triggered it progressing into where the engineers or traders actually making arson on the construction site.
00:37:48
Speaker
But I can't know that unless I go through that scenario multiple times trying that. So there are things that it's like, or am I just making that decision based on the resources it's gaining? Whereas it's like, nah, dude, just you're working all for one task, believe that you're working towards the good and deal with your own stuff yourself. And am I actually pushing the scenario in a negative direction because of making those decisions?
00:38:17
Speaker
Well, I guess you can't know, like I said, unless you're going back and replaying. But it sounds like they don't personally characterize individuals as much as the people. Yeah, 100%. It's mostly like factions and things like that, even if it's like factions you're trying to suppress or deal with within your own people. I think it's more that than individuals.
00:38:38
Speaker
Yeah, they try to do the individual characterization a little bit in the execution scenario. The final execution I had to deal with was the Voga Heinle supervisor for the engineering core. He got executed because the workers believe that he may have
00:38:56
Speaker
His negligence led to the initial explosion of the first reactor core, so he was always targeted, but they characterized him. His last words were, I'm sorry because he stepped on the toes of the person executing him.
00:39:14
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I like that. It's kind of like a little gut punch. Yeah. You just like apologize for the inconvenience to the executioner, right? Yeah. That's a nice little touch. I don't think you need to go into individual things and death of something like Telltale because it's not a localized person level game. It's a city game.
00:39:40
Speaker
But yeah, adding that little bit I think does add a nice little bit of umami to it. Yeah. And the scenarios are set up in a way to force you to make different choices later on.
Unique Challenges in Frostpunk Scenarios
00:39:55
Speaker
There's a in the base game, there's a scenario called the refugees or no, sorry, the fall of winter home.
00:40:02
Speaker
So, in the original New Home scenario, if you explore enough of the Frostland, you eventually find a failed generator site called Winter Home, which was supposed to be the original London evacuation point.
00:40:17
Speaker
The scenario covers the fall of Winterhome. So effectively, the previous captain, so when you start that scenario, you are the captain who took over after the other captain had a riot and like half of the people left.
00:40:35
Speaker
But you're now dealing with a city that is half in ruin, the generator is broken in some capacity, you don't know what it is, and you still have 580 people to manage. So basically with all of the downsides of a massive population, but the catastrophes already started. Yes.
00:40:57
Speaker
And that's putting out fires instead of spinning plates, basically, and to deal with that. Actually, this is very much a side thing. But I had to look this up because the story sounded really familiar. And according to legend, Marie Antoinette's last words were, pardon me, sir, I meant not to do it because she stepped on the toes of the executioner. So that's where they go. And let's call that. Marie Antoinette. Jake has a touch to the feet detail.
00:41:29
Speaker
Yeah. Where do you guys fall on the ethical side of things? Sacrifice the few for the good of the many or? You have to play this game that way, I think. Yeah.
00:41:44
Speaker
Sorry, I was just gonna say, I think you literally cannot, like by design, and it would be a poorly designed game, right? If they gave you all of these options to make sacrifices and then half of them were necessary, right? You get to the end and like the cutscene or whatever at the end where they're telling you everything that happened is just like, and you made no bad decisions.
00:42:07
Speaker
where they pick out every time you make a concession. You're like, this was unnecessary to send the children out to work. So one of the reasons why I ended up really liking the game when I first started playing it is when I beat the first scenario, I got an achievement called Bad Politician. That achievement is for keeping all of your promises to the people.
00:42:31
Speaker
So, again, it took me multiple playthroughs. I have a problem where it's the safe smurfing issue with certain games. Like, oh, I didn't mean to kill that person. There was definitely some of dealing with that personal aspect of playing games the first time I played it.
00:42:53
Speaker
Um, but I managed to get through the first scenario without having any significant deaths. I can't remember if I did no death run or anything like that, but so there matter to you is what you're right. Yeah. That's the answer to the question. Yeah. Justin's on the line of it's okay.
00:43:11
Speaker
But if I'm committing to certain things, I would like to do what I morally find correct, which is least harm to the most people. Global utilitarianism, yeah.
00:43:32
Speaker
but not in the way that it's always self-sacrifice either. There is a certain amount of give and take to be able to accomplish. I weight negative consequences very high. So no one should have to deal with harm, pain if it can be avoided by just slightly lowering somebody else's positive.
00:44:01
Speaker
emotion or I can't remember the Philosophical or ethical term for it. But yeah, that's why the house is set at 70 fucking degrees Yeah, I think like the game definitely I probably had a similar you like kind of utilitarian vent which was mostly trending towards good but with the the Exception sort of like the I remain in power, right? So if people were like we're not happy with the government and we think we could do things better I'll be like
00:44:28
Speaker
I get where you're coming from, but I'm really concerned with what you guys will do if I allow you to come into power. So the dictator type of policy is authoritarian for the good of the people.
00:44:45
Speaker
Oh, no. You know, that's how authoritarianism and play. And it will push you to keep going down those paths. I the one of my first playthroughs of last autumn, I had sided with the engineers, which basically made social stratification the the Burgess Burgess. Yes. Whatever that word is. Bujoisie. Bujoisie. Bujoisie.
00:45:12
Speaker
I don't do I don't do romance languages. I'm sorry but it
00:45:25
Speaker
made me it basically kept pushing me hey so you have a penal colony now you can just you know start pushing your normal workers to be convicts and if they're convicts they eat less they don't complain about work safety and stuff like that like i'm i first off i failed this already um second i'm not going that path again i'm i'm not comfortable
00:45:48
Speaker
doing forced making people force convicts. You also can hire convicts for cheaper. And you can basically just deny them medical services. And it's it sounds familiar. This is really nice. Yeah.
00:46:09
Speaker
Yeah, so it's definitely a heavy moral game which compared to stuff like Parkasaurus where you're a dinosaur park manager and stuff like that is a complete other side.
00:46:22
Speaker
Very much different. You have like a little crocodile balloon. Yeah, not lost and stuck on something like this is like a cute game Yeah, I picked up cross punk at the beginning of 2020 either right before or Like right when lockdowns are happening. So it was definitely that like not short and Freud but like
00:46:48
Speaker
I need something to bring my mood to be like, how do I resolve the current state of the world by expressing it
Frostpunk's Emotional Experience
00:46:57
Speaker
through video games? And definitely, I think it did actually help a little bit in regards to that, too, which is maybe weird. But it was I know some people that tried hopping in the stream were like, this is entirely too depressing for me right now. Right. So you kind of got some like some
00:47:12
Speaker
Like sympathy sort of because you were also isolated like these people were a little bit That's interesting. I could I could understand both sides to that, you know, not wanting to play a depressing game if you're also Trapped in your room, you know with a little little content. I mean it's the people that enjoy horror movies like that kind of same catharsis a little bit and
00:47:35
Speaker
I watch horror movies at noon, like God intended. I don't watch horror movies. It's too fucking spooky or too depressing. I find the older I get, the less I like affiliating with that type of stuff. Like I've even seen like on Netflix or whatever streaming platform, hey, here's like a little movie teaser. And just like the premise, like,
00:48:02
Speaker
it it unsettles me just a little bit to like i wouldn't enjoy this because it would haunt my thoughts way too much yeah but i'm trying to get out of that space whether it's like this is too real yeah or too spooky because it again borders on reality
00:48:20
Speaker
Like, some of the best horror stuff that I've been aware of feels like very close to home shit. What if, like, your neighbor was a serial killer type thing? You're like, oh, that's my homeless McPumice where I'm safe. What's not? I know my neighbor's not the serial killer because I... The life of the being two this close together.
00:48:44
Speaker
Right. And when they say statistically one of your names, I'm already that one. Sometimes we meet in the hallway and kind of high five. We're like, hey, we beat the odds. So I was just I was just going to say like, yeah, I I guess I guess I kind of get that it's. Emotionally, it's draining, I think is what I'm trying to say to play Frostpunk, if you're already kind of
00:49:15
Speaker
You know isolated I'm like a little bit tired. You're not really talking to people. I didn't get to the end of the scenario and I was like Awesome like I was like I did it right like I accomplished this
00:49:28
Speaker
I don't feel good about everything I did along the way. And again, the ending card very much sells that feeling. It will color code them black or white, very, you know, moral good, moral bad. Be like, yeah, these people died. You live with this. So who would you recommend this game to? No one.
00:49:55
Speaker
Yeah, I mean that that's a hard thing so mechanically Anyone who plays RTS is I think would actually could get something out of it And anyone who's look like we don't get that many RTS is anymore. That's
00:50:12
Speaker
like you get your Starcraft, that kind of stuff, that's gone a little bit more niche with this kind of stuff. So anyone who's looking for that kind of mechanical game, I think would enjoy this game and then
00:50:29
Speaker
are you going to let it tell its story? And are you going to pay attention to how it's trying to teach you something about empathy? I think can be huge for a lot of game communities in regards to making decisions that aren't necessarily always the
Who Would Enjoy Frostpunk?
00:50:50
Speaker
best. You can't optimize for a catastrophe, basically.
00:50:55
Speaker
That's a really deep and personal and probably more correct take. But my answer is no one. And the reason is I don't have specifically anyone that I would recommend Orwell to. Orwell is another game where it's like, hey, we're going to teach you lessons about what it's like to be human and how you can misuse other people and how privacy is important and human rights are important.
00:51:20
Speaker
Abusing all of that leads to this dark, dark path. They both want you to think about those questions, right? Orwell's kind of specifically pushing you there. And this one's like, you can make decisions. But at the end, even if you succeed, they ask the questions of you. And that was the important part, the guy you're thinking about it. But I don't know who to recommend that to, right? You're like, oh, do you like RTS games? Do you like feeling things also? Like a lot when you play RTS games?
00:51:48
Speaker
Um, that aren't just frustration. Cause you know, you got, uh, six pooled out the gate, you know, I stopped cannon rushing. Cause I'm afraid to lose that. Yeah, exactly. A prop has value to me. It's an individual, but like, I guess if you like games for the ask philosophical questions of you, I would put Ross punk up on that list. And it's also much more gamey, I think, then a lot of games.
00:52:18
Speaker
They want to ask questions of you. It's very much, uh, play don't just show, um, because it is, you are the one making those decisions. So I can definitely see if you are a aspiring game critic or something, this is a game that's that falls into that. Like.
00:52:36
Speaker
academic purview, I guess. I agree 100%, but I just want to point out how weird it is to recommend a game to game critics. If you critique games on YouTube, this will be right up your alley. But it's true, actually.
00:52:58
Speaker
Would you consider it in like the same category as was it Academy Award bait type things like it's it's specifically for that kind of audience like But Ford games
00:53:11
Speaker
This game makes you think. Yeah, right. No choices. It really makes you feel like a human. Nine out of ten. I think it kind of is, though. Like, any game... I don't know. We've had so many games that, like, have an emotional focus or ask you questions about mental health or something like that. It's no longer, like, super, super niche. It's still niche.
00:53:36
Speaker
But they're all over the place on Steam, right? And they're usually pretty good. They get reviewed really well. It is interesting to think about it as emotional manipulation on a purposeful sense. You're like, this is meant to manipulate you emotionally. It's meant to make you feel bad about decisions.
00:53:56
Speaker
But also how many of those are would you classify more as like a visual novel to where we talked about this has game mechanics it's taking an existing genre whereas I think a lot of the stuff like gone home like the walking simulator type stuff where they're they're they're less
00:54:12
Speaker
less gamey, like they're using the medium to tell the story and I think they're doing that in a very well good way. But you wouldn't be able to have like optimization discussion about them. Right? Yeah. It's a it's a version. Yeah.
00:54:29
Speaker
Did you hold forward or right? Are you beating the game? That's cool. Yeah, those types of games, like the one I'm thinking of right now is Gris, where it has some very simple platforming and puzzle mechanics. Very fucking simple.
00:54:46
Speaker
And it doesn't have any dialogue or anything. Everything's done visually. And you kind of get the gist. Art game, I think, would be it. It's more of an art game. But you get it. But I think from what I'm hearing, Frostpunk more so stands alone on its own if it was just a mechanics, city building disaster sim. 100 percent, yeah.
00:55:09
Speaker
And I think it's better if you have a game that stands on its own in whatever genre, but then also can like sneak in other stuff. Right. So be a better human. Yeah, exactly. If you can put that in without saying be a better human, it works better. It's like you're saying, like it's better to. Do the action. It's the the movie thing of show, don't tell.
00:55:35
Speaker
Um, but translated for another, like an interactive medium, the, the do don't show.
Games vs. Other Media in Ethics
00:55:43
Speaker
Yeah, it's like if you want to teach kids about the simple ethics of like sharing, it's like your kids like give snacks and play time, whatever the fuck. Yeah, I don't recommend Frostpunk to anyone under like 12. I mean, more of like, I mean, obviously, you can say like, share your toys, Timmy, but don't commit genocide.
00:56:06
Speaker
I feel like you innately will internalize something more so if you see the action and then you see the consequence play out. If you have a role model who is a generally good person and you see how they lead their life and then the consequences of that versus you see the opposite, you go, okay, nobody told me, this guy's good, this guy's bad. And this is how you should be the side you shouldn't be. But you pick that up.
00:56:36
Speaker
Right. Games are the medium where you can let people make decisions, which is important for personal growth, but then also show the consequence of that decision. So it's like maybe you do box your neighbor's car in, and you don't see that they couldn't make it to the hospital later when there was an emergency or something like that, right? Like the butterfly sort of effect. People don't really think about the consequences of what they do unless
00:57:05
Speaker
They're explicitly shown that, and games allow you to do that. And you can only experience that vicariously in a movie, right? And there's, I mean, that talks about a little bit of that shock experiment. I came up with the official term for it, where they had, when you press this button, somebody is shocked. Yeah, yeah. Oh, classical. Yeah, no, it is like that, right?
00:57:32
Speaker
I can't remember exactly where we started on this thread, but I think it was like, is Frostpunk more than just like an art game slash emotional manipulation game or something trying to teach you about philosophy? And I think it is. I think it is.
00:57:47
Speaker
I didn't have a whole lot of replay value. Personally, I didn't play nearly as much because it did kind of exhaust me when I was done with that first scenario. I was like, ugh. Yeah, I think between my play sessions that usually was a week or two of... I always wanted to be able to finish the scenario. There were a couple times where I just straight up had to put it down because the game is also difficult. Yeah. So...
00:58:17
Speaker
not being able to have the catharsis of at least finishing the scenario to offset some of the emotional weight of it made some of the times between play sessions much longer. Yeah. It's like budget light PTSD. What's the plan to start? It's student tag. It's hard. That's one of the reasons I think it's a little hard to recommend for me. Going back to Portal for a second, which is my core comparison for this game.
00:58:45
Speaker
the end of Portal, everybody's partying, there's happy music playing, you know, you've got like, in the co-op one, especially, right? It's just like, we've done it, we've solved science or whatever.
00:58:57
Speaker
This game is very much not that. And one of the scenarios does actually end on hope. The arc is you are a set of engineers trying to preserve the seed vaults in the Arctic. So you need to make sure that you have enough resources for that. And that's a very hopeful scenario. You are dealing with potential refugees showing up and being like, yo,
00:59:24
Speaker
We don't care about these plants. We want to survive. And the engineers are like, Hey, we signed up for this for one specific thing. And if you do not accomplish that, uh, you're a terrible person and all of humanity is effectively done. Yeah. So hopeful, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Let those people die. Too much hope. Otherwise it will overthrow you. And it is bourgeoisie. It's bourgeoisie.
00:59:54
Speaker
Yeah, bourgeoisie. I thought it was bourgeoisie, because if you say something it's bougie. Hmm.
01:00:00
Speaker
No, I don't think that's the thing. I don't know. I googled it and Google told me the truth since Google is always right. So, yeah, do you guys do you guys recommend this game? Would it be a thumbs up, thumbs down if you listen to this whole episode and it was at least intriguing to you? Yes. I don't think there's any reason necessarily not to play it besides
01:00:25
Speaker
All of the points that we talked about earlier. We did talk about a lot of points, how it's emotionally draining and stuff. How much anxiety do you have? That's actually probably a fair question. We were going in on it. And can you deal with that anxiety in healthy ways? Yeah.
01:00:45
Speaker
I think I recommend it. I think it's really good for what it is and the gameplay. I got my hours out of it. That's a terrible metric for games, but it's also it has the content there. Yeah.
01:01:00
Speaker
Uh, I think 70 hours a cyberpunk 2077. So perfect. Now, since I know that you haven't played the game, Dave, would you play it? It's something that it's okay to say category of, I would check it out.
01:01:23
Speaker
on the cheap maybe, or if I got it as like a gift. Sorry, I forgot to leave it right there. But I don't think I would at this point go out of my way to check it out at like standard price. Because it does sound interesting, but typically I don't lean towards those types of games as much. So maybe I want to watch somebody play it more so than play it myself. Gotcha. And then judge them for their decision. Right.
01:01:48
Speaker
Sorry, Justin, you're going to need to stream this. We'll judge you for your decision. Make a spoiler channel so that you have to accept the emotional turmoil that you are about to encounter with disclaimer on it. You can't do that on Discord, unfortunately, because if you have, I guess, spoiler, you can. But if you have an NSFW channel, apparently, because I tried to make politics NSFW, you can't get there unless you have a verified account, which apparently not everyone does. Yeah, you need to put your social security number up to Discord, right?
01:02:18
Speaker
Something like that. Yeah. Anyways, if you guys want to send in your social security numbers, just punch in those digits on the credit card and the three on the back and send them to John Wick. No, the, I don't know if you guys have seen those videos online, but anyways, I digress. We have contact.
01:02:41
Speaker
Forms and ways to do that. One of those is the Gmail soapstone podcast at gmail.com The other is Facebook for the time being until that goes away at facebook.com slash soapstone podcast Yeah, I don't know it's a game this emotionally heavy episode it is man talked about some deep stuff To the generator with you as always. We'll see you in the next one. Have a good night. Thanks for having me