I tried. I REALLY tried. I had the coal fires burning through the night... Which meant I had to have the coal miners work through the night, and the coal gatherers working through the night, and the watchtowers...
You get the idea.
Frostpunk is just one of those games that come along infrequently that leave you breathless at their sheer brutality. Not the sort of brutality it lets you inflict an NPC (although Frostpunk has this in spades), but the choices it forces you to make while trying to survive the survivable.
The game opens with a beautifully animated cutscene that describes how you are one of the soul surviving groups of people, at the end of the world. The soundtrack and the visuals combine to create a bleak teaser for the hopeless task that lies before you. You are tasked with building an outpost around a central heating tower that can survive the CONSTANT threat of sub-zero temperatures. The cold and snow play an integral part (I am sure you guessed from the name of the game, FROSTpunk) in both creating a dynamic environment that changes with the nightly snowfall and creating a constantly present level of danger that will have you scrambling with every new day.
Every day is a new challenge. The sick are the first to start piling up. Then the hungry. Then the dead. It never stops. You will be under almost constant pressure the entire time you are playing. It took under two hours for me to go from a good stockpile of coal, wood, and steel, to being exiled from the town after causing certain ruin. Accidents happen, people come to you every day with a new challenge and a new problem for you to solve. It is challenging, it is punishing, and it is FUN.
I have kept it very vague in the hopes that I don’t ruin anything for someone wanting to find out what this game has in store for themselves. I hope you play it, I hope you do better than I did.