Dystopika is the epitome of chilling and building a cyberpunk city of my own design. The lack of stakes, instructions, and guidance instills an experience of simply doing and being rewarded for creative designs rather than carbon-copy cities that look and function alike. If you’re in the market for a relaxing citybuilder to play in your downtime, look no further.
Dystopika is a game that tasks you with one thing only: building a city. That’s it. No repetitious quests, no artificial constraints as to what you can, cannot, and/or should do. No messages blinking across your screen to remind you of managing your city and keeping it alive. Just build and marvel at what you’ve built in a cyberpunk city sandbox set to two soothing music tracks.
Even at the midpoint of 2024, the cyberpunk aesthetic is alive and well. It’s made its way onto keyboards, a Netflix series based on CDPR’s intellectual property that started out rough but rebounded long after launch, and even crept into other games long after CyberPunk 2077’s launch. It makes sense for players gravitate toward this aesthetic given how it portrays a darker, grimier, neon-infused future loosely based on the lights of NYC and Tokyo.
Dystopika captures the cyberpunk aesthetic in spades, giving players a moment of reprieve in their otherwise hectic gaming lives. From the moment you start building a city, soothing music sets the tone of this citybuilder as one that is relaxing, peaceful, and broody.
When starting from scratch, I was presented with an empty black landscape peppered with white dots. My cursor turned into an ethereal red shape. Upon clicking, a building rose from the ground along with some other smaller structures. Right clicking cycled through other buildings I could select and place wherever I wanted. Every new building built up the surrounding area with technological life, floating cars, and small blinking lights.
With another tool, I could literally paint on holograms, neon billboards, and glowing lights that rose out of my little buildings. With each stroke of my cursor, my city grew in size, color, and activity. The small little flying cars that had spawned around my first building began making their way toward other buildings. My city, which was once a smattering of black and white buildings, now had districts, activity, life.
Every so often, I would be jolted out of my city building and informed that I had unlocked a new decoration, like a cylindrical hologram or a beautiful floating whale. As I continued to place buildings together, I continued to unlock small things that I could add to my city to give it additional color and life. Dystopika treats unlocking visual content like Bob Ross’ happy accidents. In the decorations menu, there are a lot to unlock, but no explanation as to how. Instead, the player is rewarded for placing buildings together any way they choose. For all I know, there may be set requirements for some of these decorations, or it could just be happenstance. Either way, it felt rewarding to be given something new at a seemingly random pace.
Dystopika avoids telling the player what or how to build their cities, making it a game for those wanting to decompress and let their imaginations run wild as their cities take shape and grow. It lacks missions, instructions, and other intrusive UI elements that would otherwise ruin the flow of building and marveling. The “now unlocked” notification is the only notification I would receive when building my cities.
I know that sandbox players might like the idea of missions, notifications, and other things to guide them into building the perfect city. Dystopika lacks all such instructions and gentle hands, instead opting to let players do whatever they want within the confines of the game’s engine and available content to place in the city. If you’re hoping to get something complex out of a city of your own design, you won’t get it in Dystopika.
On the topic of Dystopika’s UI, I found it to be not the most intuitive. While I recognize that this is meant to be a simple game, some icons didn’t really make sense. For instance, the icon in the taskbar that looked like an old-school video camera ended up being the tool that would remove/demolish buildings. Hovering over the icons yielded no pop-up/preview that told me what each button was meant to do. There aren’t any stakes in the sense that clicking a button ends up screwing up my city, but having some information rather than the bare minimum would be appreciated.
I could change my city’s weather and lighting in the “My City” section, making it so that if I wanted a foggy or rainy ambiance, I could easily achieve it. I would have loved some additional settings, like snow, thunderstorms, and other forms of inclement weather. I would have also loved other biomes – as a cyberpunk world can exist near a beach or in a desert. Here, I’m given a single biome that is a slightly mountainous region.
Dystopika’s sole developer, Voids Within, has promised additional content in the pipeline to give players things like new districts, new megastructures, new camera modes, and other presets to let players achieve the city they want. I won’t go so far as to say that Dystopika lacks content, but I was able to unlock most of it within my first hour of playing. Regardless, the cities I built were gorgeous, and I wanted to do something with them. If there was a way I could import my city into Wallpaper Engine, that would be great for me to see what I’ve built and be reminded of how relaxing the entire process was. I can’t wait to see what Voids Within adds in the coming months!
Dystopika is the epitome of chilling and building a cyberpunk city of my own design. The lack of stakes, instructions, and guidance instills an experience of simply doing and being rewarded for creative designs rather than carbon-copy cities that look and function alike. If you’re in the market for a relaxing citybuilder to play in your downtime, look no further.
