Welcome to Sintopia: Team17’s latest publication that is due for an Early Access release this September, but until that time, you can hop on to the demo via Steam. It’s a management game where your actions have deathly consequences, and while you are just an administrator, you have god-like abilities in that you have a command over mortality, choosing who will die and make you a sandwich in the fiery pit that is Hell.
Fortunately, as an administrator, you don’t have to balance the books nor go on an Excel training course, as Lili, the Succubus, will give you some pointers, also indicating how to keep the big boss, the Chairman, happy. Is it wrong to have a ‘thing’ about a succubus? Not only is she weirdly hot, the voice talent is sultury, too. Ahem. We know what my first sin will be.
Sintopia takes place in the Overworld. With an incredibly high birthrate where a subject isn’t quite born every minute, but at the crack of dawn (dirty Dawn), new citizens, or ‘Humus’, will spawn and be assigned a role and their fate will be shaped by the Overworld’s appointed leader, and indirectly, but mostly directly, you. Using a handful of spells, you can influence the world, which in turn affects what is happening in Hell and raise enough pennies to start construction in the lower depths.
If you grow fond of any of your Humus, they can be resurrected from Hell once they have been removed from sin, but most will eventually die, decay in the appointed graveyard, then slowly descend back into Hell, courtesy of bus driver Steve. Seems a bit of a fix, right? Where’s that bearded fella? But wait! The tutorial, should you decide to follow it, is quite deceptive. It appears that you’ll be managing this utopia of vacant Humus, when in fact, you’ll be pulling the strings back at the office, and we all know where that is. It’s that place with the intermittent AC.
Sintopia is a little like Hell Architect, but a city builder that focuses on automation, well, kinda. You will build structures that promote Humus to be sinful, and then extract those sins to continue to build your kingdom underground. Hell is a conveyor belt of sorts, so you will construct soul roads that, unlike most games of their ilk, will prompt characters to head in the direction of flow rather than use the roads simply to move faster between structures. Additionally, there are three types of employees you’ll hire, some costing more than others due to their traits and their actual ideal roles. Eventually, the flow of sins will deplete, the Humus will return to a care-free life, and you’ll have an unfinished bathroom to sort out how to fix. Scratch the earlier comment: you’re heading back to the Overworld.
On the surface, you can get creative and sacrifice folk in exchange for coin downstairs. Go a little gung-ho, and the population will become wrathful and make things unnecessarily complicated. On top of that, the Overworld will have a Humus ruler that may or may not be beneficial to your needs. They can promote a happy lifestyle and increase the civilisation’s lifespan, or they can be wrathful and result in you trying to get blood out of a stone. Speaking of bloody stones, Sintopia offers a fair amount of freedom, so if the leader is in the way, throw them onto a rock and after their timely death, a new leader will be appointed.
Sintopia shows an uncanny number of features with the classic Black and White, so expect plenty of future reviews referencing that. It’s undoubtedly a good thing as you essentially have the freedom to do as you please, but have to hang around for the consequences, such as letting the Humus descend into debauchery, where their initial ‘cheeky little habit’ accelerates into deviancy, and eventual evolution into demons on Overworld. Yep. Black and White, sure, but now we’re seeing signs of Dungeon Keeper and, quite frankly, I’m excited for September.
