A Polish LARP event will let you live out Frostpunk in real life for a few hundred euros: 'Drag injured teammates through volcanic fumes… comfort the dying while your own fingers go numb'

Are you ready to struggle for survival? To abandon your morals just to see one more day? To shiv someone for a can of food or a thimble of dirty water?

You are? Concerning! You should maybe speak to someone about that. Your options are A) a licensed therapist, or B) the good folk at LarpVenture, a Polish live-action roleplay (LARP, you see) studio currently putting together Frostpunk: The Last Recon, an upcoming, 40-50 player roleplay event happening in Poland this February.

No, you haven't misunderstood, this is an event whose main draw is collecting a load of people to spend three days eking out a hard-scrabble existence in a real-life version of Frostpunk's very cold apocalypse.

The event costs between €415 and €490, depending on how early you get in, and participants are given prewritten characters with full character sheets to act out. "You will chop wood to feed the stove, scavenge for supplies, cook real food over open flames—and then decide who eats," says the blurb. "You’ll drag injured teammates through volcanic fumes, light oil lamps in the ruins, argue policy in freezing shelters, and comfort the dying while your own fingers go numb." So it's a lot like Butlin's.

I don't think I quite have the stomach for it, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't look very impressive. The photos dotting the event page show a whole bunch of people in authentic-looking Frostpunk gear doing authentic-looking Frostpunk things: clinging to each other for warmth, eating steaming soup, sobbing over injured comrades on the surgeon's table, eating steaming soup in a graveyard. You know, Frostpunk stuff.

The organisers say they ship in "a literal truckload of props, lamps, heating stations, and mechanical game tools," as well as "scavenged food" to make the event as realistically unpleasant as possible, but fear not: there's also a heated out-of-game area and "plenty of hot food" away from the action. Which sounds like cowardice to me; go big or go home—if I'm not chowing down on a frozen rat popsicle by day two then what are we even doing?

Anyway, I kind of love and am kind of baffled by the whole thing. Frostpunk is one of the last videogame series I'd name as a likely candidate for LARPing, but by god if this event doesn't look remarkably well-put-together. To be fair, it seems LarpVenture has a long history of form for this kind of thing: in addition to February's Frostpunk LARP, there's also a Cyberpunk event, a Witcher thing, and, uh, a "trailer park larp about Broken American Dream."