The world is full of places we can already consider “cyberpunk”. Dense cities and cramped spaces dominated by enormous constructions, bright lights fighting deep darkness, and anonymous figures crossing the night. Dystopika draws inspiration from that aesthetic to offer a true cyberpunk city builder, a sandbox where you can place gigantic structures, holograms, and entire districts, without the demands or objectives of other similar games.
One of the most notable aspects of the cyberpunk subgenre is that it embraces contradictions. From a bus stop with flickering lights in the middle of nowhere to enormous towers that seem to pierce the clouds, both extremes can be cyberpunk without difficulty... but it goes much further. It's the clash between precariousness and high technology, the feeling that the world has gone to hell, mixed with wonderful advances. Now imagine building an entire city with those parameters, that essence. Welcome to Dystopika.
Dystopika: The Closest We've Been to a “SimCity Cyberpunk”
The game comes from the mind of a single creator, Matt Marshall. After spending a year traveling through Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Thailand, Marshall took those sources of inspiration and poured them into a sandbox for creating cyberpunk cities. However, any similarity with other city builders ends there: no objectives, no budget adjustments, no useless advisors, no RCI, no traffic, no pollution... nothing. It's just you, trying to build that cyberpunk metropolis stuck in your head.
Dystopika also doesn't spend too much time on tutorials or guides. There's no optimal pattern to follow, nor reasons to find it. Everything starts with a building: you can change its general position, apply some rotation, or modify its height. That will also make nearby buildings grow, and help you unlock new resources. I mean holograms, advertising screens, logos, flying car ports, and other details that contribute to the aesthetics of your city. In fact, Dystopika supports loading local content, enabling an extra layer of flexibility.
The 1.0 version of Dystopika is already available on Steam, at a price that averages 7 euros.
Dystopika on Steam: Click here
