You Are Everyone’s Intrusive Thoughts In Citizen Sleeper Dev’s Upcoming Fungal RPG

The next game from Gareth Damian Martin, the lead developer for Citizen Sleeper and its sequel, is a drastic shift away from playing as a sentient android desperately trying to survive while managing resources and relationships. Called Signet City, the first-person fungalpunk RPG sees you play as a sentient spore who must spread itself through a city by secretly infecting new individuals. As a spore, you become the new guiding psyche of those you infect, acting as a voice that influences how they feel, so you can then shape how they act, and ultimately direct how events play out in the city. Even if it doesn't work like how they do mechanically, narratively, it sounds like you're playing as the sentient skills in Disco Elysium or Esoteric Ebb--you're an outside perspective doing its best to guide your host to what you think is the best outcome. "As a parasite, each day you choose which host to drop into and then you have a limited number of actions that day," Martin told me. "And each host kind of comes with a part of the city that they live in, like a little hub. I think it's better to think of it as more something like Dishonored where you have these little chunks of the city--you don't have a whole city that you can walk around." "The key thing is the parasite feeds on emotion. And the skill system, the RPG aspect of the game, is all based on emotion. So let's say as the parasite, you want to get to this specific area of a [certain] hub. So you load in as that character and you're like, 'Okay, there's this door in my way. I'm going to have to find a way to get through it. One way that I could get through it is [kicking] it down, but if I want to kick it down, I [can] get a modifier increase if my host is angry. So I'm going to take him into the pub and I'm going to get him in an argument with somebody who's in the pub and that will get [my host] more angry and now I can [more easily] kick down this door.'" Like both Citizen Sleeper games, you're still rolling a six-sided die in Signet City, so any choice you make can still fail thanks to the cruelty of chance. Martin talked about how, in the kicking down the door example, you could injure your infected host in the attempt. And that might lead you to try solving the same problem but with a different host. And since no two hosts are the same, the manner by which you can help them out is different. To push someone into a state of adrenaline, you might need to have them discover political posters of a person or policy they don't support, for example, or take them to the top of a skyscraper if they're afraid of heights.  "In a weird way, there's a little bit of Firewatch to it in the sense that when you're one of these characters, you're walking around the space and you're kind of discovering it," Martin said. "And then when you find something that the character can do or react to, you find it by looking and then you hold the left trigger to then bring up the UI that relates to that." What I find most interesting about this is how this type of storytelling plays with the concept of perception. As someone who plays a lot of tabletop role-playing games, I'm engaging in make-believe with other adults several times a week. And during those sessions, players often switch up how they refer to themselves and the character they're playing as. I'll always use first-person "I," when talking about myself, but I'll also use it when I'm pretending to be my character. But not always, though. I'll also say that my character does something as if I were a narrator directing them. So while I'm almost always using first-person, I'll sometimes use third-person, and even second-person on very rare occasions.  In that same respect, Signet City is a game told in first-, second-, and third-person. The camera view is first-person, but the game refers to the parasite as "you," and then the various hosts are talked about in third-person. But it's still just you, the player, behind it all. When I spoke to Martin about it, they said that the relationship of perspective was the exact concept they wanted to explore in Signet City. "The parasite is influenced by observing tabletop play and how when you're playing a character in tabletop role-playing games, sometimes you're using your name, sometimes you use [your character's] name," Martin said. "Sometimes you're like, 'Oh, it would be really cool if this really bad thing happened to my character right now, because that would be really interesting.' And sometimes you're more in their head and you're more like, 'Oh God, I really don't want this to go bad. I'd really, really like [a good roll] to just make this go well.' And I think that is a really interesting space. I think video games don't really get into that--they don't think about the player [as a conflicting perspective] that much. Maybe in Baldur's Gate [3], you get a bit of that when you do a Dark Urge playthrough. But that, for me, is a really exciting part of tabletop games