Sintopia – Preview
We’re probably considered old when some of our favorite sim games are titles such as Theme Hospital or Dungeon Keeper. These games truly let us go wild with silly shenanigans while also offering engaging and difficult gameplay mechanics. Theme Hospital, for example, was a tough-as-nails game but had loads of charm that kept players coming back for more. When we first saw footage of Sintopia, we were immediately taken back to those days when we enjoyed the aforementioned titles for hours on end. When the demo dropped, we couldn’t contain our excitement and decided to dive in immediately. While still not that rich in content just yet, Sintopia has managed to entertain us so far.
Sintopia is all about absolving one from their sins after dying and hopefully living a better life the next time around. You’ll do this in a management sim setting, where you’ll have the overworld where the sentient chickpea ‘Humus’ are living their lives while committing the occasional sin. When they perish, they’ll be picked up by the bus to hell, and here they’ll undergo corrective torture, hopefully making them a better Humus. If you don’t want to wait until the Humus die of old age before absolving them of all their sin, you can gently force push them off a cliff to make their trip to hell come a bit quicker. All of this is presented in a silly, comical style that, once again, reminds us of the aforementioned older titles. Everything looks neat, and the overworld does have a lot of smaller details to make the world feel alive. Hell is more barren, but this is also because you get to build your own buildings, roads, decorations, and so on. This is supported by a fair amount of voice acting, bringing some of the key characters to life. The SFX are decent too.
In Sintopia, you’ll have to watch the overworld to see how everything evolves and possibly get a fresh batch of Humus for your ever-evolving hellish corporation. You can choose to interfere in other aspects too, but that’s all up to you if you want to be a benevolent invisible force or if you would rather see the population dwindle from time to time. In hell, you’ll have to place structures that basically torture the souls of the Humus. You can’t just go around building structures all willy-nilly, as you’ll need staff, specific structures for specific sins, routes leading to the buildings, routes for your workers, decorations, and so on. Sintopia is actually a fairly complex game that feels a bit overwhelming at the beginning. The in-game tutorial does its best to teach you the basics, but even then, there’s going to be a lot of trial and error when tackling the different challenges in this demo. When you are allowed to spread your own wings, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of micro-managing to do and, luckily, the game can be paused at any given time to fine-tune different items.
The current demo offers several hours’ worth of content. You’ll be able to play through two extensive tutorials and three challenges. These challenges are already quite tough to complete and feature rather complicated gameplay mechanics. While we are unsure what the Early Access build, and by extension the full release, will offer, it’s already worth it to check out the demo if this is a title on your wishlist. Playing through what the Sintopia demo currently has to offer will already paint a great picture to see if this is a game for you.
Conclusion
Sintopia is shaping up to be a very interesting title by the time it goes into Early Access. While the core gameplay loop will clearly involve a lot of trial and error, Sintopia’s demo was entertaining from start to finish. As a whole, we loved the concept and are curious to see how this quirky title evolves during its upcoming Early Access period. If you’re a fan of silly management sims such as Theme Hospital and Dungeon Keeper, Sintopia will probably be a title for you.
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