Frozen Ship: gorgeous, a little frightening, and far more Frostpunk than Firewatch

Some games catch you on an image before you have touched a single control. Frozen Ship is one of them: an endless white expanse, an enormous machine pushing through it, and the unpleasant certainty that you do not want to be outside when night falls. It is beautiful, and it is genuinely anxious-making.

On the comparison, though, two adjustments are needed.

Firewatch, yes and no

What Frozen Ship shares with Firewatch is the first-person view, the solitude in a vast setting, and that diffuse tension coming from the landscape rather than from a monster. The atmosphere, in other words. But Firewatch was a narrative walk with no management, whereas here you command a crew and an economy.

The snow survival game you were reaching for, the one whose name refuses to come, is most likely The Long Dark: first person, absolute whiteness, cold that kills, and that permanent sense of being an intruder somewhere that does not want you. For the exploration half, that is the right reference.

For the other half of the game, the one where you keep a mobile city running with furnaces and hungry residents, the reference is Frostpunk. And truthfully, that half dominates.

What you do aboard

You are the captain. After a catastrophe that permanently changed the climate, you lead an expedition aboard a massive ship able to cross the frozen wastes, with twenty people, a few buildings, supplies and the hope of finding somewhere liveable.

In practice you assign the crew, manage furnaces and crafting, decide what gets built aboard, and head out to explore in first person before returning by nightfall. That back and forth between managing in the warm and heading out into the cold is the game's good find: every excursion is a bet on the time you have left.

Outside, the world is procedurally generated and changes between runs. You meet predators, hunting, hospitals, shops, houses and entire cities to search, but also settlements of survivors with their own rules, factions locked in conflict, and the option of settling things through diplomacy or through weapons. The studio also announces a redesigned ship control system in which you move around inside the vessel and interact with its systems directly instead of going through menus. Good direction.

The reservation, and it counts

Frozen Ship launches in Early Access, and Nionetix makes no secret of it: the launch build contains the basic mechanics and part of the story, with the bulk of the plot and locations arriving through successive updates. You are therefore buying a building site, with the promise of a building.

And that is precisely where it pinches for this type of game. A title mixing survival, procedural exploration, crew management, economy, factions and narrative is five systems that have to answer one another. At launch it is common for them to coexist without really talking, and a small studio's ambition is measured exactly by its ability to make them converge over time. No user reviews exist yet to settle it.

The atmosphere, though, is already there, and that is the hardest thing to manufacture. If the cold appeals to you and the idea of a Frostpunk you inhabit in first person speaks to you, there is plenty here worth watching closely. Just perhaps wait for an update or two before boarding.