Frostpunk

Frostpunk is a city-building game that deals with survival instead of prosperity. The world has frozen over, the last people have gathered around a giant coal generator, and the player's job is to make sure the fire doesn't go out. The city grows in concentric rings around the heat source, so the very first decision - what to build closer and what farther away - determines who freezes at night. On top of that, you manage coal, wood, steel, and above all people, who need food, medical care, and hope. Scouting expeditions head out into the snowy wasteland to look for supplies and other survivors, who will nonetheless bring new mouths to feed.

At the heart of the game is the Book of Laws. You gradually pass rules that govern the settlement, and almost every one has a dark side. You can allow child labor, or instead set up shelters; you can introduce forced shifts that save the economy but exhaust the people. Over time, the paths split into Faith and Order, and both lead to the leader, in trying to save the city, becoming someone they would have condemned at the start. The game never moralizes, it just shows the consequences and lets them hang in the air.

Technically, it's a very impressive piece of work: snow builds up in layers, the generator's sirens echo between the houses, and the moment a great blizzard hits, the screen turns into a gray wall pierced only by red boilers. The music relies on solo strings and silence, and together with the visuals creates one of the tightest atmospheres in the genre. Reception was very favorable, especially for how the game combined city-building with moral dilemmas, and the developers went on to expand it with further scenarios. The campaign isn't long, but every playthrough raises uncomfortable questions. Today, Frostpunk is proof that a city-builder can be tense without an enemy army on the horizon; all it takes is a thermometer that drops a few degrees lower every day, and people watching to see what you'll do. The sequel then took the idea and expanded it to the scale of an entire city.