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."