The broil of ideas that make up Signet City have been growing in Gareth Damian Martin’s head for years and they’re about fit to burst. The creator of In Other Waters and Citizen Sleeper describes their new game as a first-person fungalpunk RPG, a game that draws inspiration from the history and culture of the northern England, the whalepunk tech of Dishonored’s world, and lifts systems from cyberpunk tabletop game The Veil. But it’s as much a manifestation of projects they’re reacting against, as those they’re reverently lifting from.
We’ll get into all that, but put the highbrow, high concept references to the side for a moment. It’s maybe easier to think of Signet City as a bit like Monsters, Inc, but with more mushrooms.
In another life, before becoming a game developer, Damian Martin worked as a visual designer and animator for 59 Studios. The work led to them contributing to the sets for Sting’s musical, The Last Ship, a show about the faltering shipbuilding industry in Tyne and Wear. “I spent the whole summer researching Newcastle in the ’80s,” Damian Martin tells me, recalling black and white pictures of vast ships towering over streets of terraces. “At the time, I was reading William Gibson, and I just had this thought that this is somehow science fiction that happened in the past. There’s something so literal, having a big shiny ship towering over the houses of the people who built it, and those houses being 100-year-old workers’ terraces.”
It’s an image Damian Martin’s played with in the original Citizen Sleeper. The sci-fi RPG takes place on a creaking space station that still bustles with life despite its age, in part, because it’s home to a shipyard. For much of the game, you play in the shadow of the Sidereal Horizon, an under-construction generation ship. The massive vessel stretches alongside the Eye, dwarfing the station’s dry dock, storage yard, corporate hangars, and towers of apartment blocks. Though, despite the ship’s obvious size, because of the game’s explicitly sci-fi setting, it doesn’t capture the sense of juxtaposition Damian Martin describes from their research. To capture that, they needed to build a world closer to that original source material
The town you explore in Signet City, is drawn from the culture, history, and architecture of the UK’s industrial North in the ’80s. It has a skyline of smoking factory stacks, brutalist apartment buildings, and concrete underpasses. Though, while it may evoke Newcastle, Manchester and Glasgow, it has something none of those cities can boast: The Canker. A fungal plate that grows over the water of the city’s bay. Within Signet City’s world, this is the only place where the fungus grows and it is uniquely valuable, spawning an industry that has driven the city for a hundred years. The smoke stacks that score its skyline are algae burners that refine the fungus into a potent fuel, and drench pollution on the people below.
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Signet City’s reveal trailer begins with the start of the game, a character waking up on the shores of the bay. The woman has no memory of how she came to be there, and in another game her quest to find that out would be the total story. However, you aren’t technically playing her. Inside her head, there is another waking happening. A fungal parasite is stirring into life. It, too, has no memory of how it came to be there. It, too, doesn’t know what it needs to do. That’s you.
Damian Martin was also coy about what has stirred your parasite to burst into life at this precise moment. However, in recent years, Signet City’s scientists have discovered other unique properties within the Canker, leading to a boom in “fungal computing”. The wristwatch device at the end of the trailer is a ‘signet’ and it enables wearers to access the “fungal network” and use machines around the city that won’t function without one. Likening the fungus-powered biotechnology to the whale oil tech in Arkane’s immersive sim series, Damian Martin says “Dishonored is a key reference point, but if we jump Dishonored forward to the 1980s.”
While the host isn’t aware of you, you see not only the world around the human but also what is going on in their head. “The parasite exists in this kind of psychic space where emotions and experiences, memories are like a landscape,” Damian Martin explains. “The parasite’s sensorium is tuned [so] emotions are almost like smells and textures and colours.” Think of it as similar to Disco Elysium interiority and its cacophony of chatting skills, each providing insight on events. You are discovering the world of Signet City through your host, but your parasitic position in the backseat of her mind gives you a much better view.
Enter a bar for instance, and you might see a grubby concrete basement but your host may feel warm affection for a place that’s offered them sanctuary in the past. It may open memories you can explore, learning more about the host and what motivates them. You can then swap from the host’s perspective to the parasite, with the UI inverting from black and white to white and black, and through these new eyes, spot things your host can’t. Damian Martin explains it’s “Like how a mantis shrimp can see colors we can’t, the parasite can see the world in a way that the hosts can’t.”
Hosts plural.
The parasite has an aim – not one Damian Martin would reveal – and to achieve it, you need to reach different parts of the city. You don’t walk between these areas, you spread your spores and let nature take its course. “There are only certain people, for genetic or various other reasons, that can be [viable hosts],” Damian Martin explains. Each time you move to a new area, you will wake in a new host’s body and have to learn who they are and what they’re doing in the world. “You’re trying to figure out how you can get to the thing that you’re trying to do from the vantage point of that person,” they add.
Each host has a different standing in the world of Signet City, a different past and a different plan for their future. What makes one happy and another angry could be totally different and it’s important you learn what makes them tick because you feed off their emotions, turning them into a resource that you can spend on actions.
“The more you make a character feel emotion, at the end of the day, the parasite extracts that emotion out and it’s converted into a chemical, and that chemical can then be spent as influence,” Damian Martin explains, giving a crude example of getting your host riled up in an argument so they’re angry enough to kick down a locked door. “I want players to be actively trying to push these hosts around and trying to find the emotional core of them.”
Damian Martin says the system is inspired by rules in cyberpunk tabletop RPG The Veil, but to me it sounds a lot like the energy economy in Monsters, Inc, where Mike and Sully scare children to harvest their fear to charge batteries. We’ll agree to disagree, but hopefully you get the idea. As you move through the world, you’re monitoring your host’s responses to learn how to wield their fickle, emotional natures – “When you see a sign or a poster on the wall and that poster makes that character uncontrollably angry, you learn something about that person,” Damian Martin says. And that wild response? That’s something you might be able to use to get what you want.
If that sounds horribly manipulative, that’s very much the point.
“There are discussions in biology that say there is no such thing as symbiosis, it’s just a form of parasitism,” Damian Martin says. “Others say there’s no such thing as parasites, that most parasites are actually symbiotically aligned rather than being purely parasitic. So, my question for the player is: are you symbiotic or are you parasitic?”
Every time you enter a new host you arrive in the middle of their lives, Damian Martin explains, “They’re usually in the middle of some situation, a struggle.” While you have a mission as the parasite, you will “come up against [the host’s] desires and the path they’re trying to take in the world” and you decide whether you care about their wants. You can choose to get involved, improve their lives, or you can simply focus on your own task, tweaking their actions to get the emotional fix you need to progress. “I want to try and allow for the player to have a discursive relationship with manipulation and what manipulation means,” Damian Martin says.
As Damian Martin tells it, Signet City is a culmination of influences from videogames, boardgames, and beyond. But it’s also a reaction against tropes they’ve hit up against as a critic and a developer.
“One of my problems I have with RPGs is this kind of protagonist syndrome, where everybody has to want to give you a quest,” Damian Martin explains. “I especially found it when working on Citizen Sleeper. It doesn’t matter how clever you want to be as a designer, it’s so hard to get away from ‘Hi outsider, do you want to help me with these varmints?’ It’s actually fundamental to the form. It’s really limiting on the kind of stories you can tell. You spend so much time as a writer just passing objective information to the player, and I don’t want to do that in my writing. I want to spend time dealing with the interior life of the characters.”
The design of Signet City is their attempt to attack those structures. By arriving in already fully-formed characters, Damian Martin avoids casting players as the helpful outsider. “When you drop into the mind of one of your hosts, that host has friends, they have family, they have struggles, they have psychic battles internally that they’re struggling between whether or not they go one way or another, whether or not they’re going to follow tradition or strike out somewhere new,” they explain. “Each of the characters is built around this.”
By casting the player as a brain worm, Damian Martin sidesteps the introduction scene where you meet a questgiver and they lay out the stakes of their life before recruiting you to help them. “It’s almost like the host is the character giving you the quest,” Damian Martin says. “They’re the one who needs something from you, but they don’t know you exist. You’re a silent influence in their mind, you can see their thoughts and experience them.”
In another way, though, Damian Martin says your role in the game is very traditional, it’s just the parasitic framing makes the implicit relationship with a player character explicit. They explain what they mean using Mass Effect as an example. “You’re not Commander Shepard. You’re this weird little angel or devil on his shoulder that’s poking him or pushing him around. There’s huge potential in literalising this inherent part of the RPG form, putting it into the game and being able to narrate into it and work with it and develop it.”
Even though Signet City as an idea predates 2020’s In Other Waters and the subsequent Citizen Sleeper games, Damian Martin says they couldn’t have made it before. “I’ve learned so much about making RPGs, writing in RPGs, and what writing works for players. All of these things just tumble together and become an inevitable part of the project. I now feel competent.”
While Signet City is still in the middle of development and more than a year away from release, it’s clear that this game has been living inside Damian Martin’s head for years. It’s fed on their experiences, what they’ve seen and made, and it’s grown into something that reflects what they admire and reacts against what they dislike. When it’s ready to emerge, I’ll be eager to play it.
