Amanita Design built a dystopian city out of real cardboard, then digitized it

Phonopolis is a game about being told what to think, built out of the most obedient material there is: paper does whatever you fold it into. Amanita Design constructed every set physically in cardboard, then digitized the models into 3D—the studio calls it a departure from its hand-drawn past, but what it really produces is digital stop-motion, a city you could imagine knocking over with your hand.

The city deserves it. In Phonopolis you play Felix, a garbage collector in a metropolis wallpapered with "amplions"—loudspeakers broadcasting the Leader's subliminal commands. Felix gets hold of headphones that mute the signal, and the game becomes a quiet campaign of sabotage against the Leader's pursuit of the Absolute Tone, a frequency that would end disagreement for good. The visual language is late-1920s Soviet constructivism, with futurism and suprematism in the seams—propaganda's own aesthetic turned against the propagandist, in cardboard.

The game took the IGF award for Excellence in Visual Art back in 2024, two years before anyone could buy it. It began outside the studio entirely as a project by Hammeware that caught Amanita founder Jakub Dvorský's eye and moved in-house in 2016—which makes it a decade-long build. It released May 20 on Steam, GOG, and the Epic Games Store.

Amanita's whole catalog has been drifting toward the physical for years. When Samorost 3 shipped a physical edition, we noted how badly that world wanted to be touched and Samorost itself began with photographed organic matter. Phonopolis completes the loop: the handmade isn't a texture pack on top of the game, it's the argument. A dystopia about mass-produced thought, made one glued seam at a time.