As Steward of New London in Frostpunk 2, I'm a bundle of nerves. Maintaining balance in the frozen city is impossible by design: half the citizens hate me because of the law I just passed and the other half is about to hate me for the law I'm planning to pass next. Diverting resources to solve one problem means two new problems pop up in its place, and even success, like when I finally have a big enough food industry to support my population, is quickly countered by failure: while I was building that new food district, 177 people froze to death.

Apart from the angry icons at the top of the screen warning of the plunging temperature and rising crime and spread of disease in my city, there are other angry icons popping up to point out other problems, like which districts have been shut down by riots and which have been shut down because they fell into disrepair. But notifications aren't always about a major area of my city failing—sometimes they're about a single citizen in my city (also failing).

Little pop-ups of commentary from my citizens appear from time to time. Sometimes it's a personal reflection, like an elderly resident who thought “I don't want my grandkids to starve so I'm gonna walk out into the cold and die.” Other times it's a hint that you could make a policy decision in the future, like: “Gosh there aren't as many people to rob at knifepoint as there used to be. I wish this city had a more tolerant immigration policy so I had more people to steal from!” 

And sometimes it's directly related to a law you've passed. “Just FYI, those 20-foot-tall security robots you have patrolling the city completely destroyed my store while chasing down a starving child who stole a candy bar. Uh, thanks for fighting crime?”

I know that all sounds grim, but not all news is bad news. Not long after a 12-year-old girl shared that she'd chosen to burn her one possession, a violin, for warmth, I actually got a nice notification. Some good news? In my city? Finally.

A woman named Jane shared that she'd broken her prosthetic hand but she was happy because she had a spare. In fact, she had several spares, all thanks to a decision I'd made to allocate materials to the production of prosthetics.

Yeah, that's a bit of news I could actually feel good about! For one whole second. Then I thought about it for a second second and realized… wait, why does this woman need a prosthetic in the first place? In fact, why does my city need a specific policy to over-manufacture prosthetics at all? Oh, right, because it's a frozen hellscape where people are losing extremities to frostbite and having their limbs chewed off in industrial accidents because I'm making them work emergency shifts so kids don't have to burn their violins to stay warm.

I learned my lesson quickly: when you get good news in Frostpunk 2, don't think about it too much. I got another pop-up not long after: a woman had received a cornea transplant to restore her vision and was happy she could see again. It was all thanks to me: I'd declared that we should harvest spare parts from all the dead people my city was producing. 

I forced myself not to think about why she'd lost her vision in the first place (perhaps a gruesome accident in one of my many prosthetic limb manufacturing facilities) or who had “donated” the corneas. The latter I inadvertently found out anyway: it turned out to be a young man who'd fallen off a rooftop while trying to break into a hothouse to steal food.

Because he was starving. Because of me. As long as I don't think about that, it's great news.

Unfortunately, you can't get away with not thinking about things for long in Frostpunk 2. For example, people in my city were getting sick and spreading disease, so I had three choices. Do nothing (a popular one!), pass a law where sick people would have to wear little signs around their necks so people could avoid them—gee, something about branding people with labels just doesn't feel right—or pass a law setting aside housing for quarantine so the ill could recover without endangering others. That last one felt perfectly sensible, or at least more sensible than ignoring the problem or branding people. Good news, I passed the law. Now I never have to think about it again, right?

Soon a citizen complained that quarantine housing wasn't getting used when disease was absent, and in a crowded city it doesn't make much sense to have empty buildings when people are freezing to death on the street by the hundreds. They have a bit of a point, I had to admit. Then one faction started complaining that government-ordered mandatory medical checkups are pretty invasive, aren't they? Yeah… I guess I can see the issue there…

Then another problem pops up: when I quarantine sick children, their parents can't visit them, which really doesn't feel great. The good news about my quarantine law was getting pretty sour at this point, so I passed an amendment to the law saying parents, at least, could come and go from the quarantine zones. As you'd imagine, that completely undermines the idea of a quarantine. A pop-up informs me soon after that my leniency quickly led to the death of a mom who got infected while visiting her sick kid. 

Great. Just… great. I love being in charge of all this! Now my council is demanding the repeal of the quarantine law altogether, and I'm seriously considering it. It'll mean we'll go back to rampantly spreading disease and sick people dying in the street… but at the same time it might free up some eyeballs for a few extra cornea transplants. That's good news, right?