Dystopicon Review: A Fascinating Dystopian Simulator

Dystopicon is a simulator of living in a dystopian society that keeps people trapped in their homes. Created by indie Spanish developer Palitroque, the game showcases extreme surveillance methods and plays with this overwhelming oppressive control through gameplay systems with constant limitations based on costs and demands.

An Over-the-Top Taste of Dystopian Control

Reflecting on society and its potential configurations has been a big part of fiction for a long time. Sometimes, stories try to reflect on smaller social issues and at times they come swinging with stories dripping with sarcasm and contempt for certain aspects of humanity.

Generally, when a story in any media format tries to conceive a dystopian society, it comes from a place of reflection about how things can get worse than they currently are. In this case, exaggerating traits can sometimes be a tenuous line between conceiving a compelling world and making a parody that may sound a little too on the nose.

For Dystopicon, things end up getting too on-the-nose in a way that could be interesting for a parody, but it’s a little inconsistent. The government communication can send mixed signals when the player is looking at the big picture, and it feels like the game could be more clever in how it handles this.

Watching TV As a Living

In this dystopian society, players will have to manage their routine to survive, earning enough money to handle basic tasks. The government provides services, like food and water, but they’re locked behind a “pay first, get later” mentality. It’s like having everything in your house locked behind a paywall.

The thing is that even leaving the house is not possible in this simulation game and, in fact, getting out is one of the possible big objectives of the game. Getting the license costs a lot, so going out to work isn’t an option and there are no remote job positions to try either.

To get money in this society, citizens have a special opportunity: watching television programs. Earning money from home is a way to keep people under control, and there are variations in how much everyone gets out of this. Namely, specific content, like political and religious channels, are worth more, while entertainment and news are less valuable.

Wasting away watching TV, the player has to be careful about their routine to balance out four status points. If any of them goes out, it’s game over, so it’s important to know what each action can do to avoid an early grave. Depending on the player’s actions, there are multiple possible endings, which include early death through a failure in balancing things. There's even a euthanasia machine encouraged by the government to free up space for more citizens.

Progressing Through the Social Ladder

As time goes by, the player will get the chance to learn more about this society through small interactions with neighbors, such as the president of the department block and a police officer. Players start as a second class citizen and can shift to other social ranks after four weeks.

The choices when interacting with people and picking the channels for television will raise the value of the player’s citizen rating, which is used to determine this progression. It’s possible to rank up and eventually become someone with more power in this society or to go down to prison, being even more limited in what you can do with your time.

Every day, the government sends a letter, sometimes introducing new systems or giving hints to interaction events that can be found by opening up the window, for instance. Choosing to be a good citizen or not is up to the player, and one of the interesting aspects of the game is carefully paying attention to the environment.

...things end up getting too on-the-nose in a way that could be interesting for a parody, but it’s a little inconsistent.

Sometimes it may be possible to find items around and secrets that can be particularly helpful to circumvent the limitations and get some perks. While figuring out what to do is part of the charm of the experience, it can be a very confusing experience at times. For instance, in the first room, there are times in which specific items in the background start glowing up, which adds new info for the player to access.

While these small letters add an interesting interaction option to see, it feels like a random unlock. It feels more like it randomly showed up instead of making the player wonder how it came to be because they’re revealed out of nowhere instead of having some clear trigger. Even a visual hint like a part of the wall just peeling off with time would help here.

Closing Comments:

Dystopicon is a fascinating simulator that demands proper management of resources and encourages discovery through interactions with the environment. While the dystopian setting taken to a parody-like extreme and the clever gameplay systems can be engaging, the experience feels crude and significantly below its potential. It’s a good concept that perhaps, with future experiments of the developer, can become something even more engaging through a more consistent tone to the storytelling and proper understanding of how to explore its mechanics to feel less random and more meaningful.