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"Climate change isn’t about AI itself, it's about progress" - 11 Bit talk Frostpunk: 1886 and questions of scale
It’s always a pleasure to write about Frostpunk, but I’m glum that Frostpunk has boarded the Great Videogame Remaking Train. I don’t think the original Frostpunk is beyond improvement, but I do find it very complete. Chilly finitude, obsessive symmetry are its narrative ethos and aesthetic. It’s a three-act story in a genre that tends to be exhaustingly open-ended. Its dramatic stakes are stark and inescapable – who and what will you sacrifice so that everybody else can survive? In place of the hopelessly indulgent, always-extendable gridiron of SimCity it gives you an Omelasian foxhole, with construction rigorously defined by distance from the coal burner at the heart. The Last City's inner configuration may vary, but it must describe a perfect circle, because it has to dissipate heat evenly against the apocalyptic winter. It can’t afford to sprawl.
But sprawl Frostpunk has - firstly in the form of DLC expansions, and then in the shape of Frostpunk 2: a looser, fragmented game of expansionism, bickering council members, tangled ideologies, and petrol politics. And now here’s Frostpunk: 1886, an Unreal Engine “remake plus plus”, as game director Maciej Sułecki puts it, in a sector saturated with boutique revivals, some of them landing a handful of years after the original game - a forcing of embryonic nostalgia, huffing on embers, that suggests an industry running out of fuel, giving itself over to cycles of regeneration.
Still, perhaps I’m being too gloomy. I’m definitely being melodramatic. As you’d expect, Sułecki has a more hopeful analysis.
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"Climate change isn’t about AI itself, it's about progress" - 11 Bit talk Frostpunk: 1886 and questions of scale
Game director Maciej Sułecki explores the thinking behind the Unreal remake
[A view of a huge towering coal burner through crowded smoking rooftops in Frostpunk: 1886.]
Image credit: 11 Bit Studios
[Edwin Evans-Thirlwell avatar]
Feature
by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell
News Editor
Published on Feb. 20, 2026
It’s always a pleasure to write about Frostpunk, but I’m glum that Frostpunk has boarded the Great Videogame Remaking Train. I don’t think the original Frostpunk is beyond improvement, but I do find it very complete. Chilly finitude, obsessive symmetry are its narrative ethos and aesthetic. It’s a three-act story in a genre that tends to be exhaustingly open-ended. Its dramatic stakes are stark and inescapable – who and what will you sacrifice so that everybody else can survive? In place of the hopelessly indulgent, always-extendable gridiron of SimCity it gives you an Omelasian foxhole, with construction rigorously defined by distance from the coal burner at the heart. The Last City's inner configuration may vary, but it must describe a perfect circle, because it has to dissipate heat evenly against the apocalyptic winter. It can’t afford to sprawl.
But sprawl Frostpunk has - firstly in the form of DLC expansions, and then in the shape of Frostpunk 2: a looser, fragmented game of expansionism, bickering council members, tangled ideologies, and petrol politics. And now here’s Frostpunk: 1886, an Unreal Engine “remake plus plus”, as game director Maciej Sułecki puts it, in a sector saturated with boutique revivals, some of them landing a handful of years after the original game - a forcing of embryonic nostalgia, huffing on embers, that suggests an industry running out of fuel, giving itself over to cycles of regeneration.
Still, perhaps I’m being too gloomy. I’m definitely being melodramatic. As you’d expect, Sułecki has a more hopeful analysis.
[[Cover image for YouTube video]
Frostpunk 1886 | Developer Update | Digital Showcase 2025](https://www.youtube.com/embed/6CcZfqQ8kws?autoplay=1)
He frames the remake as continuing 11 Bit’s experiments with building empathy for characters in order to perform ‘moral choice’ experiments, while managing groups of different sizes. That journey began with 2014's The War Of Mine, which put you in charge of a household. Frostpunk gave you hundreds of townsfolk, while Frostpunk 2 gave you tens of thousands, living in districts strewn across the ice.
“All of those three games are about the similar moral dilemmas, but set in different scales,” Sułecki tells me over videocall. “So this is really cool for us, for me – it was very interesting to develop those games, and think about how the game mechanics should act in games of a different scale, while in all three games, we are basically testing the player's morality.”
While he views Frostpunk 2 as a success, Sułecki concedes that “when we finished development of the second Frostpunk, we had a clear view that the bigger the scale, the harder it is to attach players to those characters…” More difficult, after all, to feel the gravity of mandatory gangrene amputations when you can’t quite see your individual workers, shoving through neck-high snow towards skeletal timber reserves. In Frostpunk: 1886, Sułecki wants to make players more attached to the townsfolk by giving your people a new range of animations – for example, expressions of family bonds and friendships.
“We will show those people more as people, less as NPCs or pawns,” he goes on. “And this knowledge comes from analysing all of those three games. I realised that those small animation changes in This War Of Mine - it was a very easy feature from the development side, because we are changing how people walk depending on their state, simply a change of animation set. But those small details allowed for this bond between the player and the those characters, and this bond is crucial if we want to test the player’s morality.”
Speaking as somebody who found Frostpunk 2 frustratingly removed from the lives of everyday citizens, for all its element of haggling with their representatives, I’m very curious about the relationship between empathy and sheer numbers. I wonder aloud if 11 Bit have considered making a Frostpunk game with a population size parked between Frostpunk and This War of Mine.
[A chimney of some sort is alight, smoke flowing out of it, a cloudy sky about it in a trailer for Frostpunk 1886.]
Image credit: 11 bit studios
Sułecki is happy to speculate on the subject. “Just yesterday, I was talking with my colleague about games of different scale,” he says. “And we mentioned that 30 people, 20 to 30 people is basically a really universal scale, like maybe not ‘universal’ but very relatable. Because this is the scale of, for example, one classroom, or one team in a company, or I don't know, one unit in the military.”
Sułecki himself would love to work on more Frostpunk games, and in the event, the question of population size would be fundamental, but that hypothetical classroom-scale project could also be set in a different gameworld. “I personally was thinking about a game in this scale of 20-30 people,” he adds. “Not necessarily in the Frostpunk world, but it would be really interesting to explore morality and other human relations, and show those dilemmas in something a little bit bigger than This War Of Mine, and smaller than Frostpunk 1. But those are just my designer dreams - not a plan, for sure.”
Frostpunk: 1886 will introduce a third Purpose path, Purpose paths being a series of optional decrees that shape your society, and which explore the “creeping normality” of one, relatively unobjectionable decision creating a pretext for brutal measures, down the road. The original game’s Purpose paths are Order, culminating in autocracy, and Faith, culminating in theocracy. Sułecki is tight-lipped about the new Purpose path, beyond calling it another kind of “radicalism” that “will start really promising and unfortunately, all of those things could end very, very badly.”
I’m intrigued to hear more about the new Purpose path, not least for how it might reflect what’s changed in society since the original Frostpunk’s day. The 2019 game makes no bones of being a historical commentary, however speculative: its inspirations include the Luddites, English factory workers who rioted in response to the erosion of their livelihoods by new automated textile machinery. Discussing the game's creation, 11 Bit have elsewhere tethered these events to on-going conversations about the workplace impacts of generative AI. So how does it feel to revisit the game's alternative history? Does Frostpunk’s grim portrayal of labour conditions and rights amid an escalating crisis now seem outlandish, quaint, or more relevant than ever?
[A dead sperm whale frozen into a crater wall in Frostpunk: 1886.]
Image credit: 11 Bit Studios
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