D-topia Review – A Cozy Sci-Fi Puzzle Targeted at Artificial Intelligence | games

IIn the distant future, on a planet other than Earth, artificial intelligence is in charge. This entity is not a Skynet-style killer robot but a machine that cares for humanity. Clearly manifested as cute robots, this technology is prevalent in everything from elegant architectural design to gorgeous, often sunny, artificial weather. The so-called improvement system has only one responsibility: to ensure the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people.

In less skilled hands, this game might have looked like a college seminar on the limits of utilitarianism. But Japanese studio Marumittu Games elegantly combines its philosophical concerns with smart design choices. You play as an unnamed young facilitator tasked with looking after the city’s robots and its human inhabitants. You wake up every morning, head sleepily to the bathroom before sitting down to eat your wonderful breakfast, and then go about your daily work. Like everything else in this near-future scenario, the work is designed to cause as little frustration as possible, the equivalent of simple brain-stimulating math games on the grid – nothing too stressful, but enough to keep you occupied.

That’s D-topia in a nutshell: its daisy-chain design, seamlessly transporting you from one tranquil slate-blue interior to another (and from one easy task to the next), mocking the future of comfort. In the downtime moments between work and sleep, you can chat with more eccentric residents for whom this is not paradise but something much more ridiculous. Gentle giant Tut has a computer chip connected to his brain to help regulate his emotions and hunger; Eebie longs to express herself through flamboyant fashion, and is an outcast in a world where everyone dresses anonymously but very stylishly in the Arket style.

You can improve your relationships with these people through direct conversation and, sometimes, identifying how you can help when offering alternative courses of action. At one point, in an attempt to lighten Tut’s mood that had been darkened by the fake rain, she manipulated the weather system (another easy puzzle) to bring back fake bright sunshine.

It’s a deceptively simple game that’s brilliantly told, and its fun lingers on the periphery of its narrative (as does a subplot that recalls Kazuo Ishiguro’s horrific organ-harvesting dystopia, Never Let Me Go). It arrives at a moment when AI has never been more controversial, with AI company executives hailing it as the savior of the world’s thorniest problems, and those with a more sober disposition deriding it as an engine of more misery. But Marumittu Games is never alarmist: it’s smarter than that, upending cozy trappings to insidious effect, and leaving its existential questions hanging in the worryingly odorless air of D-topia.

The effect is somewhat strange if hypnotic in actual gameplay: the AI ​​not only flattens D-topia’s culture, it dampens its places and people. With its tranquil environments, well-maintained green spaces, and strict temperature controls, it resembles a high-end palliative care ward. Humanity’s decline is carefully managed, and its obsolescence is mapped. When the kiss of death finally arrives, we barely notice it.