Frostwake: The Last Ember

THE LAST EMBER

The dead took the world. What was left of humanity fled north by ship and climbed into the crater of a sleeping volcano, where a coal Furnace can still be lit. The dead do not come this far. Up here it is the cold that kills.

Frostwake is a survival city builder where heat is the map and every decision has a bill attached. You build the streets, place the buildings, assign the workers and sign the laws of the last town on Earth, while the calendar counts down to the Great Storm. Whoever is still alive after it will face the Thaw.

Who will you feed first? Who works the mine? And who will you be when the ice finally melts?

KEEP THE FURNACE BURNING

Every tile has a temperature. The Furnace warms a circle around it, roads carry that warmth outward, and a building with no road back to the Furnace simply does not work. Coal keeps it alive; when the coal runs out you can burn wood and watch the city's hope go up the chimney with it. Gusts and blizzards arrive with warning, never with mercy.

FEED, HOUSE AND HEAL

Your citizens have names. Workers, engineers and children walk from home to work and back, eat one ration a day, get sick in the cold and die if you let them. Grow mushrooms, keep greenhouses and fish tanks, turn raw food into rations, move people from tents to shacks to houses, and decide how much a Medical Post is allowed to do when it runs out of beds.

MAKE THE LAW

Thirty-eight laws, one signature at a time. Working hours, child labour, rations for the sick, what happens to the dead, whether the city gets a Tavern or a Fighting Pit. Every law moves Hope and Discontent, and both bars are watched: lose the people's hope, or push their anger to the limit, and they will throw you out of your own city.

CHOOSE WHO YOU BECOME

You are a dictator, one way or the other. When the town splits, you decide how it is held together: found a religion around the Eternal Flame and be called Your Holiness, or side with the armed men and become the Reservist. There is no third road. Each path opens its own laws, its own buildings and its own way of silencing dissent, and the choice cannot be undone.

KEEP THE CITY FROM TURNING ON YOU

Agitators stir up the young and the idle; the Pilgrims of Ash want to leave the crater altogether. Hunger, cold and empty hours feed them both. Negotiate, distract, recruit or crush them, and remember that the sum of small decisions is what people will hold against you.

RESEARCH WHAT THE ICE DEMANDS

Put engineers in the Workshop and choose between thirty-six technologies in five branches: heat, resources, food, exploration and housing. Everything costs Engines, salvaged from the ships that brought you here. There are only so many, and every one you spend is a ship that will never sail again.

BRING THEM HOME

Other boats that fled the dead keep reaching the coast, drawn by the smoke of your Furnace. Light the Beacon, send Scouts, and they come back with survivors, and with steel, wood, coal and Engines. Wait too long and the signal on the shore goes quiet. A town that does not go looking for people will not have enough of them when the walls are needed.

THE THAW

After the Storm the temperature rises, and what froze on the slope wakes up. Hordes of thawed dead come down towards the Furnace, and this is not a number against a number: they walk the map, tear down your palisades stake by stake and kill whoever they reach. Build the Barracks, forge spears or swords, mark where your soldiers form up, and find out whether the city you made was worth defending.

MADE TO BE PLAYED YOUR WAY

• Isometric pixel art, drawn for this point of view.
  
• Mouse and keyboard or controller, and the Steam Deck.
  
• 31 languages, interface and text.
  
• A guided tutorial that teaches the first day without taking the town away from you.
  
• Two difficulties and six optional modifiers to shape each run.