A new hybrid of god game and town-builder looks to marry the appeal of games like Dungeon Keeper with modern management game structures. Sintopia, forthcoming as an early access title in 2025, puts you in charge of hell's bureaucracy to be sure that people get properly punished for their sins and can behave in the next life. That means doing good layout and construction of Hell's infrastructure to keep that flow of souls moving and repenting. You'll also need to be sure that you hire competent "Imployees" to get the work done.
Sintopia really stands out because it adopts the multi-layered overworld/underworld dynamic that makes games like Dungeon Keeper really intriguing. Your job is to punish people so that when reborn their souls won't get weighed down with too many sins and corrupt the world—because too many sins will trigger a "demonic invasion." Also, so that you can invoice heaven and get paid for your hard work.
In true god game fashion the administrator of Hell can do stuff to the overworld as well as their own domain. A zap spell, for example, might let you convince a slothful person to speed up—or just be used to burn their house down.
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"In Sintopia you will demonstrate your hellish existence to the Humus populating the Overworld by casting spells and influencing sins. Reign over your rabble of Imployees in the bureaucratic administration of Hell as they punish the dead souls, generating profit to help you build and sustain your Hellish empire! Sintopia mixes all the sandbox fun of a God game with the deep systems and processes of a management sim all packaged in a 1980’s pop culture hellscape," say developers Piraknights Games.
Piraknights also says that Sintopia will launch into early access with a loop representative of the final game, with most of the "straightforward / early-mid game" stuff included and as much procedural generation variety for the overworld as they can muster. They say it'll stay in early access for about a year.
You can find Sintopia on its website and on Steam.
