Sintopia has bespoke punishments for the seven deadly sins, and it has me thinking about which one I’d end up with. Probably not Sloth, as ever since turning thirty, I struggle to sit in one place for too long without my spine complaining. I don’t consider myself very envious, lustful, prideful or wrathful. Nor am I particularly greedy. ‘What could it be?’ I wonder, as I reach over to dunk my seventh custard cream into my cup of tea.
Anyway, my eternal damnation aside, Sintopia gives us a look into the super secret tenth circle of Hell: bureaucracy. Death comes with a lot of paperwork, it seems. As a result, Sintopia splits itself in half. Human chaos and self-destruction on the surface, neat and tidy rubber-stamped damnation in the underworld. A game splitting itself in two is a risky move, as it becomes all about balance. Sintopia connects its two halves very well, but the balance does get a little wonky, and neither side feels like its bringing its full A game.
As Above, So Below
Let’s take each of Sintopia‘s halves in turn. The surface is something like a diet God Game, not dissimilar to something like Black And White. A bunch of people, called ‘Humus’, scurry around on the surface, living their daily lives as dictated by the type of ruler in place. Our only real interaction with them is a set of spells. If we show off enough, they join our cult and we can influence what they do at night. We can also butcher the ruler if we don’t like their focus. The goal is to keep their main temple in one piece, as it constantly gets raided by giant lizards and plagues of zombies. As they go about their lives, these Humus gather a quantity of the seven deadly sins, before dying.
Once they die, their soul is scooped up by Steve, the reaper, and sent to Hell. In Hell, their sins are purged for petty cash and then they’re sent back up, smelling all fresh and clean. Hell plays like a management sim where humus constantly move forward. You need to build roads carefully to prevent queues building up. If humus accumulate too much of a sin they become deviants, which needs a special building to cure depending on sin type. So by the late game, you have a system of roads and logic gates all splitting up your humus sending them where they need to go. It’s smart and strangely mesmerising.
Sintopia‘s biggest strength is the interconnected nature of these two worlds. You need cash to pay your employees and deal with the growing population, so your humus need sins and they need to die. Similarly, the humus are the main line of defence for the temple so you can’t kill too many. But they also can’t live for too long, as too much sin will cause them to explode into demons. So a lot of the playtime is spent filling your graveyard with souls, then trying to milk them for cash so you don’t get too genocidal. It’s a very clever balancing act of a mechanic.
Abandon Hope
So the connections between Sintopia‘s worlds are great. It’s when we start focusing down on one or the other that I find some nits to pick. Again, let’s take each half in turn. For the overworld, I think we might have too little control. We can cast spells, but this requires mana which can be slow to build up. Even when fully upgraded, we can only pick away at the giant lizards. We have some control over cultists, but building up a cult also takes mana (and a lot of time) and only operate at night. Meanwhile the soldier AI isn’t flawless, and will frequently ignore the giant demons and lizards to battle a slightly perturbed frog in the next town over.
That means that when things start going wrong in the overworld, it’s very difficult to pull it back. I had to drop the campaign difficulty down to easy in the end, as most goals were combat focused. Meanwhile, we have a bit too much control down in Hell. It’s fairly easy to stamp out a standard road template once you’ve got a basic cash flow, then knock off for lunch. All you need to do then is watch out for queues, and ensure you’ve got a good flow of souls to shake down for pennies. A lot of my time with Sintopia was spent on fast forward, and I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. Ideally, the overworld needed some sort of panic button that allows you to step in, and Hell needed some random element to shake it up.
Still, something kept me coming back after the frustration. A large part of that is down to the presentation. It feels like I’ve been catapulted back to the heyday of something like Bullfrog. The Humus all look silly, and the bespoke punishment animations are great. The writing metronomes between amusing and excruciating in the campaign, but this is more of a visual comedy game. The desperate run that humus do when they’re next in line for the throne will never not be funny.
Sintopia – A Solid Cycle
It’s best not to approach Sintopia like a city builder (at least not at first). It’s better to approach it like a game of mousetrap. You set up all the pieces of your worlds, but inevitably the cage will fall and it’ll all go horribly wrong. The more skilled you get, the longer it’ll be before the cage falls but it inevitably will. I think Sintopia understands that, as its strongest modes are the Campaign and Challenge modes. These give you set goals to aim for, which give you an endpoint. The sandbox feels more like watching someone get kicked in the crotch in super slow motion.
At the end of the day, Sintopia‘s current state is one of an excellent foundation. It’s plagued with minor frustrations. Like the fact that you can barely zoom out, so finding anything is a right pain. But the core is solid. The linking of Hell and the overworld is very clever and it naturally means you can’t spend too much time focused on each one, but the gameplay is simple enough to not get overwhelming. It just needs to balance itself a bit more. Hell needs to be more hellish, and we need a way to take the gloves off in the overworld. At least then I might be a bit less terrible at it.
