When I finished one of Frostpunk’s campaigns for the first time I didn’t feel like I had won. I felt hollow and empty, like a part of my soul had been taken from me. I had won. But at what cost?
I’m going to spoil both George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Frostpunk in this article. If you don’t want to learn how different mediums deliver a message then there are some other things you can read.
Hollow
I’ve said it before, but Frostpunk is a game that forces you to make tough choices. As soon as you start the game you are asked to put the children to work. I did so, but even then I would try to avoid making them work too hard. I would build automatons to do the work for them, try to find more survivors so less of them would have to work. But as the final storm approached I knew I may have to compromise my values.
As you play the game, more choices like these keep coming. I tried to allow the people to be free at first. Despite my choices one man killed himself, leaving poetry and writings that could lead to dissent. Hope was low and discontent was high, so I chose to destroy his work. I’m not sure if that was the first choice I regret. And I’m not sure how it led to the book burnings.
For the most part I kept everyone alive. Some would suffer from frostbite, but I would have prosthetics built for them so at least they could continue to live a mostly normal like. Some would die. One man committed suicide because I wouldn’t let him leave the city to look for his daughter. I was trying to save his life. I knew she would die out there, I didn’t want him to die as well. A few days after he killed himself, she returned to the city, alive.
With discontent rising and hope falling, the people were becoming harder to control. They were threatening to overthrow me. I had no choice but to implement martial law. Many died in the riots that followed, but the rest chose to survive under my leadership.
I would look at the list of names of people who had died often. Only a few. Most will survive. After the riots I stopped recognising the names. When the great storm hit that list became a blur. So many people died I lost track. At least some of them survived. That’s my only solace.
When the storm ends, you win the campaign. But there is no score. The game doesn’t congratulate you. It simply tells you that humanity has survived. And asks at what cost?
I felt hollow. I didn’t feel like I had won. Somehow I felt I had failed. I had become the very thing I had tried not to be. A dictator believing he knew better than anyone else how to save the world.
Pigs in Suits
George Orwell’s Animal Farm tells the story of a group of farm animals that overthrow their farmer and take over the farm. They try to establish a new society, and eventually the pigs start to lead them to their freedom. They come up with some base laws to ensure no one will ever lose their freedom again.
Eventually the pigs start to take more and more control. The rules are altered slightly, yet they insist they have always been that way. Eventually they start trading with humans from other farms. In one pivotal part of the story they send an injured horse to a glue factory, but try to convince the other animals he’s going to a better farm.
In the closing scene the surviving animals peer into a meeting the pigs are having with human visitors. The pigs are laughing, drinking, and eating with them. They are wearing suits and top hats, and walking around on two legs. They look just like the humans.
The allegory here, at least my reading of it, is that all revolutionary governments will eventually look like the governments they overthrew. It may take months, years, decades even. But it will happen. It’s a horrify ending, and I still remember the sinking feeling when I read it for the first time.
I had that feeling again when I finished Frostpunk.
Hope…?
In a way, Frostpunk’s ending is similar to Animal Farm’s. You go into the game hoping to create a new society, one that is free and ready to start a new era for humanity. What you don’t realise is that this game won’t let you.
It forces you to face the harsh realities of a potential Armageddon. It forces you to think about the things humanity might have to do to survive. It forces you to realise that you need to enforce order and control so everyone contributes to that survival. It forces you to realise that once you start down the path of dictatorship you cannot turn back.
You have become the very thing that you were trying to avoid.
Only Frostpunk delivers this gut punch in a way that Animal Farm never could. In Animal Farm it is the characters on the page that eventually become the oppressors. When you get to the end of the book you are seeing the pigs from the perspective of the animals, the perspective of those being oppressed.
Not so with Frostpunk. When you play the game, you make the choice. You start to cover up and make excuses. You implement a dictatorship. Frostpunk forces you to become a pig in a suit, and it makes you feel guilty for it.
It’s something only an interactive medium can do, and it’s why this game is utterly fantastic. By not being scared to give you a hollow victory, it creates one of the darkest and depressing endings we’ve seen in a long time.
One of the game mechanics really highlights how dark the end truly is. Throughout the game you have to maintain Hope for the people. Eventually you will implement the dictatorship so that you don’t need to worry about Hope anymore. At first you might think this is because people will never lose hope anymore.
In the end you realise that it’s actually because all hope has been lost.
