Sintopia is coming to Steam with a new take on hellish bureaucracy

Team17 and developer Piraknights Games are launching Sintopia, a hell management simulator, on Steam on April 16. The game puts players in the role of a freshly promoted middle manager at Hell Incorporated. You are tasked with processing the sins of the "Humus" (a civilization of chickpea people) and keeping the underworld's production lines running smoothly.

The core premise treats eternal damnation as a bureaucratic optimization problem. You watch over the Humus in the Overworld as they farm and inevitably commit various misdeeds. When they die, their souls are shipped down to your facility. You have to build specialized purification centers and punishment contraptions to scrub their souls clean.

Managing the underworld

The gameplay loop is split between two realms. In the underworld, you construct a neon-lit industrial punishment facility. Souls arrive at Hell Plaza and follow the routes you design. You build roads and specific punishment stations tailored to different types of sins. The goal is to extract the sin and keep the operation moving efficiently.

You cannot run the facility alone. Players hire "imployees" to handle the day-to-day paperwork and operate the machinery. These demonic workers require management of their own. You have to monitor their performance, hand out raises, and offer praise to keep the production line from stalling. If the purification process backs up, corruption levels rise. Too much unmanaged sin leads to demonic invasions that can wreck your carefully planned factory layouts.

Once a soul is completely scrubbed of its sins, you direct it to the resurrection gate. The clean soul is sent back to the Overworld to start a new life. If you rush the process and resurrect a soul before it is fully cleansed, it carries those remaining sins into its next life. This creates a compounding problem that will eventually overwhelm your processing centers. Nobody wants to deal with a backlog of compounding generational sin when they are just trying to hit their profit targets.

Influencing the Overworld

You also have direct influence over the Humus while they are still alive. As a middle manager of hell, you have access to administrative magic. The game has 10 different spells that interact with the chickpea people in the Overworld. You can cast Healing Rain to help a settlement thrive or use an Extinction Event to wipe the board clean and send a massive influx of souls down to your facility all at once. Sometimes you just need to meet your quarterly quotas, and wiping out a village is the fastest way to get fresh inventory.

The Overworld is not entirely defenseless. The Seven Deadly Sins exist as physical entities with unique powers. They will occasionally attempt to take over your Humus settlements, forcing you to intervene to protect your future supply of souls.

Campaign and sandbox options

Sintopia includes a fully voiced story campaign available in both English and French. The campaign starts with two tutorial maps to explain the basic routing mechanics before opening up into a larger story across six different maps. Each mission acts as a puzzle focused on specific management systems and introduces new threats.

The campaign has four difficulty settings ranging from Easy to Masochist. A customizable sandbox mode exists for players who just want to build without the pressure of quotas. You can adjust the settings to create a relaxed city-building experience or crank up the difficulty to test your factory layouts.

The god game genre has mostly given way to traditional city builders and factory automation games over the last decade. Piraknights Games is trying to merge those two styles together under a 1980s corporate aesthetic. The combination of god-game spells and conveyor-belt punishment processing is an unusual mix, and we will find out how well the systems interact when the game unlocks next month.