11 bit studios has officially revealed the first Frostpunk 2 gameplay trailer, showing off what you can expect when you fire up the upcoming frozen city-builder.
In the trailer, we see a massive icy metropolis belching smoke into the skies as snow continually falls. In other words, it's pretty much exactly what you'd want from a Frostpunk sequel.
The trailer shows the player building highrise housing across an area of hexes as a tooltip informs them that the housing will be beset by smog, increasing the Squalor statistic.
It's all wrapped up in a rather beautiful minimalist interface that seems to communicate all of the game's key information without getting in the way, which is an impressive feat for a city-builder.
As the trailer proceeds, we also get glimpses of how the citizens of your city will voice their thoughts about you, and we also get to see a couple of Frostpunk's characteristic moral decisions.
One of these involves dealing with the Technocrat faction, which, in the trailer, has begun to protest the city's focus on "mere survival" rather than advancement.
This protest leads to a proposal for equal pay, which is rejected (in the trailer, at least; it doesn't have to go that way for you, of course). All in all, Frostpunk 2's looking pretty bleak, which is just how we like it.
As well as revealing the first gameplay for Frostpunk 2, 11 bit has also announced that the game will be available via PC Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass on day one, although the console release will come "later" than the PC launch.
Frostpunk 2 was originally revealed back in August 2021. It's the followup to 2018's chilly city-builder Frostpunk, and it'll once again put you in charge of building a city in a harsh post-apocalyptic wasteland.
New features include a bespoke district system, different factions to negotiate with, and expanded city-building mechanics.
Frostpunk 2 is set to launch for PC "in the first half of 2024", according to 11 bit. It'll arrive on consoles later, so stay tuned for more on that.
