Naming a game must be incredibly hard. How many more Dark Fallen Journeys and Noun: Verb of the Noun games can fit into the market? And yet certain games just appear with a near-perfect, properly descriptive label.
Metropolis 1998 is just such a game, telling you what you’ll be doing, how it will look and feel, and what era it harkens back to. You can verify this with its “pre-alpha” demo on Steam and Itch.io. There’s plenty more to come, but what is already in place is impressive. And it’s simply pleasant to play, especially if you’re the type who wants to make something entirely yours. Not just “put the park inside the commercial district,” but The Sims-style “choose which wood color for the dining room table in a living room you framed up yourself.”
You start out in a big field with no features (yet) and the sounds of birds chirping. Once you lay down a road, you can add things at a few different levels. You can, SimCity-style, simply plot out colored zones and let the people figure it out themselves. You can add pre-made buildings individually. Or you can really get in there, spacing out individual rooms, choosing the doors and windows and objects inside, and realizing how hard it is to shape multi-floor houses so the roof doesn’t look grotesque. You can save the filled-out house for later reuse or just hold on to its core aspects as a blueprint.
Kevin Purdy The author is quite proud of his first real home build, though he now realizes that living rooms have a big empty space, and it's up to us to figure out just how empty it should remain. The author is quite proud of his first real home build, though he now realizes that living rooms have a big empty space, and it's up to us to figure out just how empty it should remain. Kevin Purdy It takes a bit to get used to it, but the detailed building designer is full of wonderful little pieces, like this classic speaker cabinet with the black and red wire clips visible on the back. It takes a bit to get used to it, but the detailed building designer is full of wonderful little pieces, like this classic speaker cabinet with the black and red wire clips visible on the back. The author is quite proud of his first real home build, though he now realizes that living rooms have a big empty space, and it's up to us to figure out just how empty it should remain. Kevin Purdy It takes a bit to get used to it, but the detailed building designer is full of wonderful little pieces, like this classic speaker cabinet with the black and red wire clips visible on the back.
The game is still early in development, so its mechanics are not introduced in tutorials, and the interface requires a lot of clicking, reading, and wondering. I got a reasonable feel for it after about 30 minutes of tentative placing and bulldoze-deletion. You can save your game and come back to it, though the developers note that your saves may not transfer to future versions. You’re putting your time in now, so you’ll be ready to start fresh when the game releases into early access (“ETA sometime between Q4 2024 and Q2 2025”). If you’re into this kind of fine-toothed builder, a fresh start is a gift, anyway.