Dystopika is a toy for making cyberpunk cities and it's rad
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 d
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.
What's Your Reaction?
