Gareth Martin reveals Signet City, a first-person fungalpunk RPG
The Citizen Sleeper creator casts you as a parasite in a monochrome 1980s British industrial city, with dice checks swayed by your host's emotions.
Gareth Damian Martin's Heterotopias—the games-and-architecture project that grew into a magazine and then a design career—started as a column here at Killscreen. So watching Martin reveal Signet City at June's PC Gaming Show felt a little like watching the column grow a skyline.
Signet City is a first-person "fungalpunk" RPG from Martin's one-person studio Jump Over the Age, published by Fellow Traveller. You play a parasite born in the brackish water of a declining coastal city's bay, moving between human minds in a world where biological computing beat out the silicon chip. Underneath sits the tabletop-derived system Citizen Sleeper made famous, mutated: dice checks whose odds shift with your host's emotional state.
What holds me is the look and the history underneath it. The monochrome isn't a filter—Martin cites documentary photography, screentoned manga and pen-and-ink drawing—and the setting begins with the Winter of Discontent, the 1978-79 season when Britain's coldest winter in years collided with a national strike wave, which Martin has described as a labor struggle and an ecological event at once. Even the trailer keeps the register, cut to "Abandon" by the Irish garage-punk band SPRINTS.
Martin has spent a decade arguing that game spaces deserve to be read the way buildings are—in In Other Waters, in both Citizen Sleeper games, in those early columns on imagined space. Signet City looks like the thesis stated as a city. No release date yet; you can wishlist it on Steam.
More of Signet City’s black-and-white streets (via Steam)
