Dystopika is a city-building toy, but it’s also a place. It’s a place loading before you drop your first superscraper in or pan the camera to frame the luminous smog of the eternal sunset. Just start the game up and there’s a sense of urban life twinkling in the darkness, while the soundtrack moans and warps and chatters to itself. Dystopika is already here. It can feel complete before you’ve started.
A note at the start of the current Steam demo reveals that this design toy is the work of a single creator, Matt Marshall, and it’s been inspired by a year of travelling in Asia and walking huge cities at night. The cities you can make in the game have a definite sci-fi, cyberpunk edge to them, but they wouldn’t be too out of place in the work of photographer and game designer Liam Wong, a poet of the late night urban experience.
Everything is wonderfully straightforward. I suggest setting things to random, and then every click adds a skyscraper to the city you’re building. You can go in deep and choose between a range of different districts, if you want, but a huge part of the appeal of cyberpunk has always struck me as being a sort of hypermodernism, with buildings of different eras, uses, and cultures smooshed together in the night. “Smooshed together” is an architectural term, incidentally.
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