There have been many games where players get to essentially play a god all without saying you're playing god. Whether controlling the lives of the Sims or playing city builders and causing natural disasters, it isn't a new concept. But what if this time you could play as one of god's employees? Welcome to your new role of Hell's Administrator in Sintopia!

In Sintopia you are in charge of how humus find their way to resurrection. Build out your own version of hell, sin management, resurrection on a cycle of rinse and repeat. Of course, hell isn't the only place where you have some powers to interact. You are an angel, you're hells administrator, and you're powerful. 

Tutorial

While it can be tempting to dive head first into Sintopia, I do highly recommend completing the tutorial first. The tutorial also gave a bit of the backstory and a very good understanding of the game mechanics overall. While it doesn't give you all of the answers you need to know, it does provide quite a bit of clarity, and time with Lili who is quite enticing. 

You'll begin by seeing the overworld, filled with humus, totally not a play on humans, not at all. In this world, you'll get to see just how the overworld lives. By day they go about their jobs, wandering the town, enjoying time at the market, fishing, building homes, and all the boring stuff many humans do. However, by night, these humus are getting it on and producing even more humus for the next day. You'll know they are having a bit too much fun by seeing all the eggplants, peaches, and hearts coming out of the houses when it’s dark out. You can stop them if the humus are repopulating too quickly but keep in mind you do need souls to get to hell. 

Lili will walk you through a basic layout and everything else you need along the way before giving you creative freedom. In the tutorial they will also give you the nice balance between the underworld and overworld to get you in the habit of revisiting both and making adjustments as needed. For now, let's focus on the underworld. 

Hell, Hell, Hell Inc has its laws

Building your underworld is really all about how you choose to prioritize the area. The underworld is your domain and it needs a lot of work. It's a blank slate waiting for you to reform the humus, make some purgadollars off of them, and spend them on continuing to upgrade hell. You can also acquire faith coins from the humus to continue to use spells on the overworld. More on that a bit later. 

You want to be mindful of how you reform them. Reform them too much and they become saints, reform them too little, and they become demons who can wreak havoc in the overworld. In hell, it isn't all about the humus. You aren't the one doing the work of reforming them, so you'll have to be sure to hire the right employees to do the job. Hire from the pool of Sadimps, Secretarimps, and Workimps to reform the humus in the appropriate way. There is in fact a good way to do this. If you can keep the humus in the right sin score, you'll be able to claim hearos which you use to upgrade your abilities, buildings in the underworld, the skills of your underlings, and even unlock some new spells for yourself. 

Part of Your World

Of course, it’s not all about the reform of the humus in hell, it’s also about what’s happening up top. What good is power if there is no one there to worship how strong you are? In the over world, while you could just watch the humus go about their day, it’s a lot more fun to get involved in their flow. Sure, you can watch them while the work, or while they procreate, but it’s more fun to show off your powers to allow them to worship you. In Sintopia, as your influence grows, so will your resources. You need Faith coins in order to cast your spells, and the cultists will leave you blessings in your honor. A great way to then continue using your spells to gain more cultists.

Your cultists can also complete different tasks while in the over world. In order to change how they go about their days, you’ll need to ensure you have an ever growing number of cultists. More reason for you to spend time in the over world growing your influence.

As the over world civilization grows, so do the roles the humus take on. You’ll see fire fighters, fighters, medics, and more throughout the town so be sure to keep an eye on them. The doctors are extremely important as they’ll be ensuring that dead humus don’t turn into zombies. Oh, did we mention there were zombies possible?

Zombies, or zhumbies, are not the only threat the overworld faces. You can be invaded by Guacas who will attack and burn down your buildings if you aren’t careful. The nice thing is that these are also great ways of building up your influence with the humus. When invaders come along, use your powers to save the humus and earn their respect and adoration.

When your society seems to be growing too big, you’ll want to make sure you handle the ever growing population by stopping them in the evenings. Yes, sex is a part of life, but there is a real problem of over population in this game. Too many dead bodies and not enough handling of them will potentially have your over world overrun with zombies. Plan carefully administrators!

For the Streamers

While games are not necessarily made for Twitch and streaming, occasionally they find ways to incorporate streams into their game. This is especially true when streamers can get their viewers involved in the game. If you are a streamer who chooses to play this with your chat, viewers will have the possibility of seeing themselves as an imployee or a humus. Will they be a good imployee? Will they be a believer and cultist?

Some will say that streams are an additional way of free promotion, but a game such as Sintopia doesn’t even need it. It is a nice addition and while we didn’t get to try this out, it’s worth noting it’s an option for those who are interested.

Final Thoughts

Sintopia is quite fun and addictive for those who enjoy simulation games. If you have a bit of a god complex and just want to play it out, this is also a great one. It has just enough building aspects in the underworld which allows you to balance the management with the building in a way that keeps the game feeling fresh. Sintopia will be available in early access starting September 4th on Steam. A demo for Sintopia is available on Steam to download right now if you can’t wait!

Thank you to the publishing team over at Team 17 and the developers at Piraknights Games for the preview code.