Frostpunk: The Last Autumn DLC
11 bit studios
When Frostpunk debuted in 2018, it quickly garnered its fair share of praise from both critics and gamers alike. It wasn’t simply just another city management title, it was the first global catastrophe simulator with city-building elements. What made Frostpunk unique was that you had to make some pretty morally dodgy choices about the plight of certain groups of individuals within your frozen community.
Just For reference, after 17 hours, I have managed to complete just one of what are currently four different scenarios that the base game comes with, specifically the one called “A New Home.” Having taken a peek at the other three, this one is almost certainly the most “simple” of the four.
I really wasn’t surprised when I’d heard that a Frostpunk expansion would soon be following the base game. What I didn’t expect is that it would be developed as a prequel. The setting for this new DLC is the titular “Last Autumn” before Frostpunk’s world entered its seemingly endless glacial age. You play as the leader of Site 113 and have been tasked with constructing the central generator featured in the base game.
Frostpunk: The Last Autumn DLC further expands upon the game’s backstory and we find out that your industrial city’s generator is only one of many in production since there’s an encroaching cold age not that far off.
As the Overseer of the city, you must maintain a balance between the needs of your people (by keeping their Motivation high), with the erection of the generator. If the Motivation meter starts to fall too low, you’ll have some issues with your workers completing their various tasks on time.
You also have Administration and Labor Laws which deal with things such as how to look after your sick citizens, how to counteract discontent, how you want to store the dead, and the like. As with the base game, you’ll have to eventually choose between Faith or Authority, which will then unlock different types of Labor Laws.
In The Last Autumn, you don’t have to worry about freezing to death, unlike the base game. At least not right away. One of the main dangers here comes in the form of poisonous gases that slowly affect areas within your workspaces. These can result in injuries, deaths, and workers going to strikes.
Resources didn’t seem to hard to come by in The Last Autumn. But then I realized that building the damn generator was a much more massive project than I’d initially anticipated. Strikes can really hurt you. After experiencing only a couple of them, I fell behind a couple of deadlines and that was that: Game over. Luckily, you can phone home through the new telegraph building, so that somewhat makes up for the extreme harshness of the DLC’s difficulty.
As in Frostpunk, there are some decent exploration mechanics for you to enjoy. You’ll get the opportunity to investigate the surrounding areas and discover clues about other generator sites. You’ll learn about all of the other people who were simply looking for employment, only to get fooled into being relocated to remote locations to work their butts off and attempt to pull off nigh-impossible feats of engineering.
Probably the most impressive thing about The Last Autumn is how it punishes you for playing it like the main game. I haven’t finished a single generator: I’ve restarted once, have been fired twice, and got to the end only to miss my final deadline. Each time was because I was prioritizing the wrong things. As with most survival games, I was focusing more on survival and less on the building that accursed generator.
Although I failed and that failure frustrated me, I think this expansion is incredibly clever for doing it. And at the risk of sounding cliché, Frostpunk: The Last Autumn DLC is unlike any other expansion I’ve played.
SCORE: 84%
The Frostpunk: The Last Autumn DLC has some pretty good looking graphics that make its science fiction-based gameplay truly shine. However, you want to have a pretty beefy gaming PC or gaming laptop in order to play it at a decent framerate. So, you may just want to invest in a decent gaming rig:
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