On Day 41, in the middle of a snowstorm that drops the temperature below -110°C, the mines on the outskirts of New London almost collapse from the cold. Thirty volunteers offer to descend into the lower levels and replace the hydraulic roof supports that keep the tunnels open. Without coal powering the titanic generator at the heart of the colony, every citizen would freeze to death in hours. I send in the volunteers. All thirty die.

After the funeral ceremonies—enacted by law on Day 17—I click on the cemetery to view the deceased. There he is: Gideon Fleet. No family. Thirty-seven.

I pull up a list of New London's citizens, looking for a specific name, but I don't find him, either because he's dead, or because refugees recently grew the list to an indecipherable six hundred. I check the amputees list—nothing, maybe because of his prosthetic limb?

I was nineteen when I enlisted in the Air Force and shattered my tibia and fibula into shards. My NCO, guessing I had a sprain, ordered me to walk to the nearest clinic, two miles off. Although I wouldn't show him pain, my troubled gait irritated him—maybe he saw it as a performance?—and while I limped across the asphalt, trying not to fall over, I heard his voice screaming for me to hurry up, still screaming until I was all the way out of his view. The radiographs looked like spilled Doritos.

From his name to his age, Frostpunk randomly generated every aspect of Gideon Fleet, the same as any other citizen in my colony of hundreds. Most people in Frostpunk remain abstractions, just frail cogs in a machine dedicated to keeping an entire community alive through the apocalyptic onset of an ice age.

The first time I met Gideon, the hair on my arms stood up. A story event popped onto my screen with artwork, some text, and a simple choice: Gideon needed an amputation due to frostbite, but instead, he wanted to die. I could tell the doctor to perform the surgery, or let gangrene take his limb and life. Already, this reminded me too much of other post-apocalyptic fiction, where people with disabilities are burdens to be killed, no possible future but suicide or abandonment.