Summary
While a few great business management sims launch year after year, I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed a decent god sim. My favourite by far is the Black & White series—likely doomed to never resurface—but other than that, the most recent one I enjoyed was Tethered, which launched back in 2016 for PSVR. There’s clearly room for someone to launch a banging god sim game, and that game might just be Team 17’sSintopia.
As a lover of both business management and god sims, Sintopia’s blend of the two genres was too tempting to resist, and so back in August, I checked out a hands-off preview at Gamescom and spoke with Piraknights Games founder Eric Leru.
In Sintopia, you are the administrator of hell, and the more sins you remove from souls, the more money you make to help your hellish economy boom. You have to expand your domain by building roads and structures, hiring personnel, paying salaries, and keeping it all running smoothly to punish the incoming souls according to the sins they’ve committed.
As Leru shows me Hell and the various facilities, with different buildings tailored to punish souls for each of the capital sins, he likens the gameplay to other well-known titles. “There is a mix between Two Point Hospital, a bit of park builder, and a bit of Factorio in there because there is automation as well.”
The other aspect of the game is the Overworld, where gameplay becomes more god-sim. Faced with a weird but adorably quirky population of chickpea people, you can influence their actions and ultimately damn them for the sins you prod them into committing. Plus, you can just kill people on a whim, which is always fun.
The population have their own little lives. They have jobs, they gather food, they eat at lunchtime, and they go to bed at night: everything is automated, so the settlement ticks over by itself. But of course, it wouldn’t be fun without being able to meddle with them in some way.
Leru acknowledges my old favourite, Black & White, saying it plays similarly with spell-casting abilities, though you won’t have any creatures here. “You’re kind of a divine entity. A hellish entity, but divine. You can influence them, you can manipulate them, kill them, help them. You’re free. No moral judgment, you can be cruel, you can be helpful. The catch is that the two worlds are connected by the circle of death or life.”
Rather than swamping you in far too many spells, instead, Sintopia offers a select range that can be used creatively. The Lightning spell can destroy buildings, kill people, or even resurrect the dead. Another example is the Push spell, which can prod your little people around, but can also be used to push open flame torches into the building they’re next to. You can then push fire to make it spread as well, effectively turning your Push spell into a Fire spell. You unlock a proper Fire spell later, but it costs more, so thinking outside the box with the spells you have at your disposal is key.
You’re not the only power at play in your civilisation, as a king oversees the populace, sort of. Once coronated, he’ll randomly be given a personality that dictates the priorities of the civilisation. Le Reu shows me the current king is an Anxious Patriot, “He focuses on soldiers, a little bit of doctors, and he’s pretty bad at buildings. He hates merchants, and he hates priests. So more military stuff. If you need defence, he’s a great guy.”
If you’re unhappy with a king, perhaps you want one that focuses more on merchants or something else, you can simply kill them and another will take their place, giving you another random personality. Ultimately, you are the only power that matters. Sorry, king.
As your citizens can be attacked by barbarians, zombies, demons, or wolves, you need some form of defence. But this isn’t an RTS game, you can’t give orders when battles spill onto your land. You’re largely just a spectator, though you can use your spells. However, trying to help or harm your citizens might mean accidentally helping or harming their enemy too, as Le Reu explains, “All spells are meant to be not overly precise. We really want to lean into the collateral damage thing.”
During their lives, these silly little chickpea people will sin. You can see the seven sin categories for each person, and depending on their circumstances or what they do, their ratings will change. Someone without a home or who lacks building materials will have higher Envy, while someone without a job will have increased Sloth. There’s a variety of things that can influence sins, and leaving them unchecked may lead to epidemics. You can intervene to help them, or you can let it all play out and see them sin their way right into the worst of your punishment rooms.
When a person dies, their soul goes to the cemetery. The Reaper Bus regularly comes and collects the souls waiting and delivers them to Hell. This continues the cycle that sees you switching between both gameplay elements. Souls go to the public administration before being distributed based on your layout, eventually being funnelled into appropriate punishment rooms.
“The idea is that in hell, it’s a very bureaucratic administration that is very inefficient,” Le Reu says. “A lot of paperwork and stuff like that. This kind of hell, and you are at the head of that. You go to the public administration, you are waiting in the waiting line, you need to get that paper, and they lost your file, or whatever. And you wait for hours, and nothing happens. That’s the kind of thing we try to emulate here. You build that, basically. Your own crappy administration.”
You choose how to build the whole layout, it’s your own personal hell, and you can make it however you want. You can also use logic to sort your little chickpea sinners. For example, you can filter it so that people with a certain level of sin, such as Greed above 30, go to exit A, while those with Lust above 30 go to exit B, and so on. You can create custom paths with specific rules to keep things orderly, ensuring that sinners with high Envy go to the Envy specialist punishment room.
There are generic rooms that punish all the sins, but they’re not as efficient or cost-effective. You might have to rely on them at first, but as hell grows and you build a larger web of paths and buildings, you’ll want to optimize your operation to become the big hell boss you were always meant to be.
And what happens after the sins are removed? Well, once the souls pass the check for being thoroughly sin-free after all that punishment, they can be resurrected. They’ll rejoin the Overworld, where you’re able to torment them into sinning once again to repeat your hellishly funny cycle and earn that hard cash.
But it’s not just a simple cycle at play here as Le Reu warns me, “If you don’t do your job, they will be resurrected with the same level of sin that they had at the start. And from death to death, their sin will get out of hand, and then bad stuff happens.”
Once people reach 50 percent in any given sin, they become a deviant for that sin, and their behaviour will get out of hand and harm their civilisation. If they get to 100 percent, they transform into a demon of that sin. Each demon has its own appearance and skill set, and is a corruptive entity that will make others even more susceptible to that sin, causing sins to snowball out of control.
You can hunt the deviants to ensure things don’t get that far, or perhaps you want to encourage a specific sin and deviants that spread it so you have a hell tailored to be supremely efficient in your sin of flavour.
“you’re able to be a corruptor just to capitalize on it, or you can be just the good guys that just want everyone to be as low as possible all the time,” Le Reu tells me. “There is no wrong way to play, but if you play as a corruptor, it’s more dangerous because then you’re playing with the line when I should kill them.”
I already know I’m going to aim for absolute chaos and try to be the worst god ever who kills everyone for funsies. As for how well that’ll affect my earnings, I guess we’ll have to wait and see. Sintopia is set to launch in 2026.
You canwishlist the game on Steam hereand check out more informationon the official website.
