Frostpunk

Frostpunk is a city-builder game set in an apocalyptic landscape of global cooling. Your city is centered around a giant coal furnace that provides warmth. As temperatures fluctuate, storms come and go, and special events arise, you must manage the Hope and Dissatisfaction of your city.

Basically, this game is like SimCity except every day you are about to die.

What I found impressive is how straightforward all the resource management is. You need food. You need coal for the furnace. You build with wood and steel. Sickness comes from cold. Injuries come from unsafe work practices. Everything is simple in theory but very tricky to balance.

Frostpunk has numerous scenarios all with significantly different challenges, all with variable difficulty. Tons of replayability and very addictive.

The aesthetics of this game are amazing and absurdly bleak (this game is made by the same studio that made This War of Mine). Like there’s a realistically rendered image of a child coal miner in this game. Management of Hope means there’s lots and lots of things that destroy people’s hope. At the same time, it has a defiant survival-against-the-odds attitude. And a fantastic strings-centric soundtrack.

Frostpunk is the coolest management game I’ve ever played (pun intended). It’s simplicity makes pretty easy to pick up, and it’s variety of scenarios and challenges makes it hard to put down.