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This War of Mine developers announce new game, titled Frostpunk

11 Bit Studios has announced a new game, and it’s not This War of Mine 2. Instead, the studio will be heading to a frozen, steam-powered world in Frostpunk.

There’s a fair pit of -punks already. There’s your grandfather of -punks, cyberpunk, and there’s steampunk, dieselpunk, atompunk, clockpunk, biopunk, punkpunk, even a stonepunk. One of those isn’t even real and this list on Wikipedia is not even exhaustive. So it does beg some scepticism when you hear yet another made-up -punk word. Frostpunk sounds like it should involve machines and technology developed out of ice and snow, perhaps like some dark, gritty reboot of Disney’s Frozen. That’s not the case this time.

Instead, 11 Bit Studios’ Frostpunk is just regular old steampunk, except it’s set in a really, really cold place. It’s not clear off the bat whether this is set in a future marred by ecological disaster, but the game’s official site does suggest that “society in its current form becomes ineffective”. This might ring familiar to fans of the studio’s previous game: This War of Mine.

The rest sounds a lot like This War of Mine: morality standing in the way of existence and survival changing you into a different being. It seems that even if 11 Bit Studios are taking on a wildly different setting, they’re running with a shared theme of morality and survival. Of course, their games would be far from the first games to deal with the topics of morality and survival together, but This War of Mine did express itself uniquely through its Sims-like gameplay. How will Frostpunk play, then?

We have little to go on, but here’s a teaser any way, featuring a poem by Thomas Campion.

Details are scant on the game so far. No platforms have been announced, and there’s no gameplay information either. All we do know is that the game will release some time in 2017. That is, assuming, we don’t accidentally turn the world into a giant refrigerator before then.