Developer 11 Bit Studios’ superb, if rather bleak, post-apocalyptic city-builder Frostpunk is poised to receive another sizeable chunk of DLC on 21st January. Known as The Last Autumn, its pre-freeze setting shakes up Frostpunk’s core mechanics in surprisingly significant ways, and 11 Bit has offered a closer look at these changes in its latest developer video.
The Last Autumn, as its name suggests, unfolds prior to the apocalyptic freeze that’s decimated civilisation by the time the base game gets underway. Some have already predicted its arrival, however, and are making preparations should the worst come to pass.
This is where you come in, charged with constructing a generator tower in the middle of the wilderness, in order to establish a safe haven for humanity and support the evacuation efforts of the British Empire. The result, according to 11 Bit, is a “completely revamped experience”, affecting “pretty much every layer of the game”.
Frostpunk: The Last Autumn | 12 minutes of gameplay with dev commentary! Watch on YouTube
The most obvious change comes from The Last Autumn’s aesthetic, which ditches the barely hospitable snow-covered wastes of the base game in favour of environments inspired by Iceland and Greenland, cold but still green and full of life. The shake-up to Frostpunk’s familiar formula runs deeper, though, switching up mechanics – and outright eliminating the likes of generator and temperature management – to introduce new strategic challenges.