by Amr (@siegarettes )

• Frost
  
• Developer- Jérôme Bodin
  
• Publisher- Studio des Ténèbres 
  
• Switch, PC, PS4, Xbox One
  

Some games use their user interfaces to great effect. They become expressive tools that communicate mood, give tactile sensations, or reveal and obfuscate information as contributions to the narrative. Then there’s Frost, which gives a somewhat interesting digital deck building game all the fussiness of a physical board game.

At its core Frost is a game of resource management. Each turn you make decisions on how to spend or conserve resource cards, with your actions determining your distance between the deadly frost storm following you. Resources can be spent to fulfill the requirements to escape an area, or used towards activating an event, or obtaining Idea cards that contain useful tools for future situations. The key is that these resource cards will be recycled into your deck, and each turn there’s a chance to draw them again. That is, of course, unless you’ve decided to burn them permanently to pay for special effects.

For example, you may begin in an area that requires 2 food, 1 wood and 1 survivor to navigate. Additionally, there’s an added wrinkle of wolves in the area, and you’ll have to contend with them to pass safely. You have no weapons, so you’ll have pay the cost for an Idea card that will allow you to create on by paying an additional unit of wood. Alternatively, you could travel through and allow yourself to take damage, which will either deplete your health or remove one of your survivor cards from your current deck, your choice.

If sounds complicated, and it felt even more so when I began Frost. The tutorial does a passable job of explaining how to play, but feels like it leaves out key terms and assumes a familiarity with the language of its card game that I didn’t have. Basic conceits, like how resources return to your deck, or are barred from it, aren’t properly explained, and even now, after being able to complete a scenario, I’m still not totally sure the exact mechanics of it.

Frost also relies on terminology and symbology that physical card games use as shortcuts to get information across within limited space. This works fine, until you come across a card with an unclear function, and even the “detailed” view of it feels like its obscuring information. In a physical card game this obfuscation is a limitation you just have to accept, but in a digital board there’s no reason why it can’t give you the exact effect, instead of a generic breakdown of the parts of a card.

There’s a lot of small interface problems like this that make Frost frustrating to play. For example, if you did, say, take damage from wolves, you’d have to manually place a damage token before performing other moves. Which means either placing it on a survivor to sacrifice them, or subtracting it from your health. You do the latter, not by placing the token on the big character portrait that your health counter sits next to, but by clicking in the left stick??

There’s tons of small control quirks and inconsistencies like this. There are touch controls, but several functions are left out if you use them, limiting how useful they actually are. But then the button controls also do things like place the “Travel to next area” and “End turn” functions right next to each other on the Switch’s shoulder and trigger buttons, which led to more than a few turns unnecessarily wasted. And in a game where death creeps closer each turn this is a pretty big problem.

All of this before I even got to my frustrations with the game itself. Deck management games often bring to mind the feeling of playing Solitaire. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Games like Pocket Card Jockey and Cultist Simulator manage to play upon the strategic aspects of those card games, and the simple satisfaction of solving small problems by stacking cards.

Frost, at least initially, brings to mind Solitaire’s frustration in feeling that luck matters a lot more than foresight. This isn’t true: there’s plenty of strategic considerations, and when I was finally able to parse the interface I began to appreciate the planning required. Still, I can’t deny that the game also began to feel a lot more stacked in my favor as I failed games and unlocked new cards, each which added new possibilities to be drawn during future games. This system allows Frost to keep things fresh and introduce a sense of progression, but felt it undermined my own efforts.

All of this is made more frustrating because past these many annoyances and problems is a solid game. There’s an easy satisfaction to being able to properly manage resources, and dealing with problems that impede that. Learn the possibilities and expectations and it becomes easier to plan for survival. There’s even custom game modes and scenarios that allow you to play within certain limitations, which brings variety after you’ve come to grips with the regular game. Frost is rather relaxed for a survival game as well, which lends itself well to casual play in spare moments. But those interface issues go a long way to making it feel like you’d be better off carrying an actual deck of cards in your pocket instead.

Frost carries over the fundamental appeal of deck builders, but at least on Switch, feels like it fails to make it compelling as a digital game. It doesn’t take advantage of a computer game’s ability to streamline and deobfuscate complicated rulesets. Instead, it feels like a bad digital translation of a card game that already exists. It not unenjoyable, or totally imparsable, but it’s more work than it needed to be.