Developer Gareth Damian Martin, known for titles like In Other Waters and Citizen Sleeper, is developing a new first-person RPG titled Signet City. Described as "fungalpunk," the game draws inspiration from the history and culture of Northern England, the aesthetic of Dishonored, and systems from the tabletop game The Veil. It offers a unique premise where players embody a brain fungus that feeds on the emotions of its human host.
The game's setting is a city inspired by the industrial North of the UK in the 1980s, featuring smoking factory stacks and brutalist architecture. A unique element of this world is "The Canker," a fungal plate growing in the city's bay, which has spawned an industry refining the fungus into a potent fuel. This process, however, contributes to pollution affecting the city's inhabitants.
Players awaken in Signet City not as a human, but as a parasitic fungus with no memory. The core gameplay revolves around navigating the world through the host's senses and emotions. While the host is unaware of the parasite, players can perceive the environment and the host's internal emotional landscape, which is visualized as a psychic space where emotions manifest as colors and textures. This interiority is compared to the internal monologues of skills in Disco Elysium.
When entering a new area, players inhabit a new host, each with their own unique life, history, and motivations. The parasite's goal, which remains undisclosed, requires traversing the city. Players achieve this by spreading spores to new potential hosts. Understanding each host's emotions is crucial, as these emotions are harvested and converted into a resource called "influence," which can be spent on actions. For example, a host's anger might be exploited to force open a locked door.
Damian Martin likens the emotional harvesting mechanic to the energy economy in Monsters, Inc, where fear is collected to power batteries. The game encourages players to actively manipulate their hosts to extract emotional responses, blurring the lines between symbiosis and parasitism. Players can choose to aid their hosts or solely focus on their own objectives, using manipulation to progress.
Signet City actively challenges traditional RPG tropes, particularly the ubiquitous "protagonist syndrome" where characters are often relegated to the role of a helpful outsider. By placing players in the role of an unseen parasite within a host's mind, the game sidesteps typical quest-giving introductions. Instead, the host's own needs and internal struggles implicitly drive the player's actions, akin to an angel or devil on a character's shoulder, a dynamic explored in games like Mass Effect.
Although the concept for Signet City predates Martin's previous works, the development of In Other Waters and Citizen Sleeper provided valuable experience in RPG design and writing, making the project feasible now. The game is still in development and is slated for release more than a year from now.