The Aggressor Frostpunk
About the game
The game “Frostpunk” was developed and published by “11 Bit Studios” in 2018.
It belongs to the genre of “Survival.” It is part of the series “Frostpunk.” It is a single-player game.
The game is classified by the database as one with a “Designated Aggressor,” a “Fictional Setting,” and a “Passive Player Role.”
About the Aggressor Categories
Aggressor Type: Designated
- This game features the “Designated Aggressor." It indicates that the game tends to focus on one side of the conflict, either constantly or episodically. The Aggressor(s) are set by the narrative and rules of the game and cannot be changed by the player, meaning that the perspective on the Aggressor is fixed.
Setting Type: Fictional
- This game has a fictional setting that, nonetheless, is strongly influenced by historical events or processes. This can serve to provide a layered sense of meaning or separation between darker or more serious topics of history and sometimes requires the player audience to do more decoding in order to grasp the historical commentary.
Player Agency: Passive
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In this game, the role of the player's agency towards the Aggressor(s) is limited or even completely disabled, their role therefore often passive. The player tends to witness the aggression or acts within it, but is unable to take action against the cause of the aggression, i.e. the Aggressor themselves.
Individual Assessment
“Frostpunk” is a game that puts the player in control of a group of survivors huddled around a coal generator in a fictional dystopian scenario where the world has descended into an Ice Age. With steampunk technology, the player is tasked to keep the colony alive, yet the weather gets harsher and harsher, making players opt for increasingly drastic options to survive. The Aggressor here is quite literally the environment itself, with the cold as the designated enemy of the colony. What is most interesting is how the Aggressor makes the players act within this system, choosing either authoritarianism or religious zeal to make it through the storm. Therefore, it technically allows for a dynamic creation of the player as an Aggressor by limiting their actions so much that there is no other way than to become an Aggressor under the Aggressor himself. It should therefore be viewed as in-between when it comes to the Aggressor type.
