Steam Next Fest is over, but several games still have live demos, a relief for busy people like me who downloaded a ton and then couldn’t get around to them. Of those I did get a chance to check out, one that you can still check out is Phonopolis, a paper-crafted game about rebelling against a totalitarian regime.
Phonopolis is an in-development game by Amanita Design, the studio behind other cool-looking indie games like Chuchel and the Samorost series. You play as Felix, a citizen of a city run by a supreme leader who controls the population through loudspeakers. Felix has become immune to the speakers, and he has to liberate the town before the leader plays the “Absolute Tone,” which will permanently solidify his power over the people.
The demo is a slice of the game, and it can be a little hard to understand what the characters are talking about at times, but the basic idea comes through. You wander around solving puzzles in the game’s striking world, which the developers say was hand-crafted on paper and then digitized. You shift the floors of a building and distract its inhabitants to get to the top floor, hide from guards in unlikely places in a room, and navigate your way across a hanging sign as a parade for the leader marches beneath you. Everything feels very physical, like you’re really playing with the items around you. All the while, a narrator explains what you’re doing and charmingly does the voices of all the characters, making the whole thing feel like a storybook.
I’m not sure I’m sold on the game itself yet–in part because it was a little confusing to be dropped into its world without a ton of context, and in part because the puzzles could feel a little obtuse, more like trial and error than something I was really solving. But I cannot say enough about how the game looks. Its unique world is full of little details to admire, the animations are totally charming, and the blocky Soviet-era art aesthetic works really well with the cardboard and paper materials the game is made of. The demo contains a behind-the-scenes montage of the team building all this stuff, and getting to see some of the work that went into it made me appreciate it even more.
The demo is about 20 minutes long, and as a person who can barely draw a stick figure, I spent most of those 20 minutes whispering “oh damn, you made this?” as I poked around it. Phonopolis was announced back in 2022 and plans to release this year.
Joel Couture
