They Are Billions plays to one fantasy of steampunk-the untapped wilderness, the wild and unknowable denizens that you have the power to slaughter indiscriminately.

You were not concerned with the populace, but the constant war effort, the feverish expansionism. While I enjoyed They Are Billions greatly, it never felt like a game where I could indulge the interiority of the city. It is fascist in a boldfaced way, the fascism of survival, the fascism that is вЂњthe only good option.вЂќ It is refreshing in its honesty. Your position is not a war commander, as in They Are Billions, but the overworked city ordinator. Citizens are packed into the few tents or bunkhouses available, and life is a dull trudge of tightly regimented work and rest. Most of your settlements in Frostpunk rarely break a couple hundred inhabitants. Frostpunk is less about the conquest-driven expansionism that formed the backbone of They Are Billions, and more about the city. They Are Billions, in its constant colonization of zombie-ridden land, looks outward, but Frostpunk feels tight and inward-obsessed, with your settlement built out radially from a central generator, the only source of heat in a world bereft of the sun. The result is a strange half-child tied to the aesthetics of an imagined past but grappling with the adventurous technologies of a new and unknown future.

Both games use the aesthetic in their own way to show a vision of post-apocalyptia, and both seem (either subconsciously in the former or consciously in the latter) to make a comment on its tumultuous historical inspirations.ДЄs I wrote in my piece about They Are Billions back in January, steampunk is an aesthetic movement with a weird mish-mash of varying inspirations, from Victoriana to the 1980s obsession with the neon future of cyberpunk. IвЂ™m not sure if we can say that weвЂ™re in a Steampunk Renaissance, but two recent strategy games, Frostpunk and They Are Billions, make the case.

Frostpunk order or faith