Relaxing games come in many flavors. You have your cosy, comfortable life sims in which you can bask in day-to-day tasks, stripped of their tedium. You have your mind-cleaning soft puzzle games, where you impose order on little chaos. And finally, you have what I like to call toy boxes - loose offerings of emergent entertainment, in which you make your own fun from the pieces offered to you. TINY GLADE - a game that I finally must review at some point this month - was a pinnacle of that genre for me. A game with no tangible goal, no score, no hassle. Just you, a pretty little scenery, and tools to build castles, homes, abodes, and ruins to your heart's content.
DYSTOPIKA is definitely an odd duck here because even the very title does not sound like a cosy, wholesome experience. I mean... how can you make a relaxing, soothing game set in a cyberpunk dystopia, where megacorporations run rampant, taking over the lives of every citizen? Where monolithic structures are raised as unyielding symbols of their wealth and dominance? A city of gloom and darkness, covered in a thick fog of undying industry. With stacks of chimneys from countless factories, to meandering highways and garish advertisements at every corner?
Well... You can, it seems. DYSTOPIKA is in the same ballpark as GARDEN GALAXY or previously mentioned TINY GLADE. The game is casual to the extreme, and as a proper toy box, doesn't tell you what you should do. It gives you a spot of terrain, bleak and run down, and gives you a set of tools to raise your city of dreams! But it's not going to be a gorgeous, overgrown town of whimsical trees, parks, and cute little ponds. No, it will be an ominous landscape of towering skyscrapers, giant industrial districts, and holographic displays of various entertainment. It will be a dark monument to technological supremacy over nature, long pushed aside.
It's a strange vibe, really. On the one hand, the tools given are pretty generous and reactive. When I said there's no intrinsic goal, I wasn't lying, but there's definitely a well-designed drive to keep on playing with unlockable elements. It's always a bit of a delight to mess around with various compositions of building and their height only to see the tiny cutscene showing a new thing showing up, being added to our growing collection. On top of the buildings - which form the basic blocks to paint out our city - we also get a plethora of decorations to play around with. Countless neon signs, advertisements, posters. Antennas, helipads, big displays of light sculptures. It's never overwhelming in any way and is a lovely addition to make the city you craft feel yours. With your personal touches.
It also allows you to have a bit more fun with some theming! The buildings come in a few different flavors. Mixing them makes for a more lively city, with visible differences in districts, but you can also just stick to one design to make a more unified-looking cityscape. Then you can focus on one type of decoration as well and go for a particular vibe. Stack countless antennas, satellite dishes, and rugged constructions of steel beams for a high-tech, communication district. Doable. Litter every structure with countless advertisements for a market town? Check. I am not going to make up stories and tell you that the fun is limitless. The components, while flexible, do not organically merge to create new things. And the box of toys to play with does have a bottom to scrape through. At some point, you will run out of new things to play with.
And that's fine because DYSTOPIKA was never meant to be your forever game, I feel. It can, however, stick with you for a long time as a lovely way to destress. A short session here and there, painting your landscape of neon and concrete, of steel and glass. It might be a perfect fit for anyone who craves that casual, relaxing experience but doesn't do well with the more cutesy, colorful aesthetics that this genre of play often mingles with. I enjoyed my time with this game a lot, finding it intuitive and strangely hypnotic at times, and I am sure I will keep dabbling with it for the foreseeable future.
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