Sintopia (PC) Preview

I really do try to be a good person in real life, in no small part so that I can be an absolute menace in video games without potentially affecting my karma. It’s games like Sintopia that encourage (or even outright require) me to be evil that give me enjoyable reminders as to why I bother trying to maintain that karmic balance. Sintopia is a city-building management sim in which you’re “charged with managing the bureaucratic administration of Hell.” Based on what I’ve played of its currently available content, I find Sintopia to be “devilishly delightful,” if you will.

That being said, however, I need to acknowledge an elephant in the room before I explain why I like Sintopia so much. Sintopia’s developers, Piraknights Games, recently announced that they’ve decided to entirely cancel Sintopia’s planned launch into Steam Early Access and delay its full release until sometime in 2026. Sintopia was originally supposed to launch in Early Access on September 4th, 2025. However, it became yet another game that had to have its release window shifted because of Hollow Knight: Silksong. I’m only able to play Sintopia right now because I received a preview key before that decision was made.

Since that’s the case, I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to gloat about the fact that I get to play Sintopia before anyone else who isn’t part of a gaming journalism outlet because Piraknights Games sent my preview code before they cancelled its tenure in Early Access. It’s unfortunate that so few people now get to play Sintopia before its full launch, but I’m definitely going to take this opportunity to explain why I think you should keep it on your radar until it eventually releases. I’ve got roughly equal lists of positive and negative aspects of Sintopia in its current state.

I’ll start off with a couple of the positive points that are related in some way to negative aspects. All the voice acting I’ve heard within Sintopia is excellent, and its soundtrack is great as well. The voice acting is let down a bit by the fact that the spoken dialogue frequently doesn’t match the captions, however. Speaking of captions, I have to “be that guy” yet again and point out that I’ve noticed spelling and grammatical errors within Sintopia’s in-game text. In fairness, I haven’t seen anything major on this front.

I’ve likely only noticed the relatively few errors I’ve encountered because I have a subconscious “eagle eye” for this sort of thing. These are all minor points that can (hopefully) be easily addressed now that Sintopia will have at least a few more months in the metaphorical oven. That brings me to Sintopia’s core gameplay loop, which expertly combines with its atmosphere and sense of humor. In Sintopia, life’s metaphorical “bad ending” is mainly hellish in the sense that it’s a bureaucracy from the ground up. For starters, you play as an “Administrator” employed by Hell, Inc.

That means you’re already decently high up in the chain of command. The “big boss” isn’t referred to by any names you might be familiar with, but he’s called “The Chairman” and he looks pretty much exactly like how you would probably imagine someone in that role would look in this context. There are obvious religious themes in Sintopia — that’s an unavoidable part of its shtick — but I think Sintopia manages to be tongue-in-cheek enough when addressing those aspects that it’s at least somewhat less likely to cause offense among players. That could just be a reflection of my personal perspective, though.

As an administrator of Hell, Inc., your job has many interlinked parts to it. You have to bring sinful mortal souls to Hell in order for them to be processed, cleansed of their sins, and ultimately resurrected. However, you’ll need to be much more concerned about precisely how many steps there are in the “soul purification” process and what forms those steps take. That’s because, since Hell, Inc. is a bureaucratic corporation, your main goal is to maximize your profits from cleansing mortal souls of their sins. Hell, Inc. provides a service to those mortals, after all, and its services don’t come cheap.

As you process sinful mortal souls before you send them to be resurrected, you extract monetary value from them in the form of a currency called “Purgadollars.” You spend Purgadollars to construct new buildings of various purposes, build and maintain infrastructure like road networks, and pay the wages of all the workers (called “Imployees”) you’ll need to hire to manage more minute aspects of the operation of Hell, Inc. When you manage to entirely cleanse a mortal soul of sin (or at least get close to that), you’ll earn a different currency called “Hearos” when you send that mortal to be resurrected.

You spend Hearos on new research in the “Liber Administratum,” or to use its much less fancy name, the technology tree. Unlocking upgrades in the Liber Administratum gives you access to things like buildings that can squeeze more Purgadollars out of mortal souls that have particularly large amounts of any of the seven deadly sins, more ways to care for the needs of your Imployees, and new spells you can use in the mortal Overworld. You can switch between Hell and the Overworld at basically any time by pressing Tab, and there’s a crucial reason you’ll want to do this often.

The Overworld is inhabited by “sentient chickpeas” called “Humus” (usually, but not always, pronounced “hummus”). Gee, I wonder what they could equate to in real life? Anyway, humus are almost guaranteed to sin during their lifetimes, which means there’s profit to be made from processing their sinful souls. The main issue is that business in Hell, Inc. would grind to a halt without frequent busloads of new souls, so you don’t have time to wait for the Humus to expend their natural lifespans and die of natural causes. So, you’ll have to use what’s called “Administrative Magic” to, well, speed things along.

Okay, there’s no point sugarcoating it or beating around the bush: You’re expected to use magic to kill Humus en masse to ensure that there’s a never-ending supply of profitably sinful souls in Hell. As you’ve probably noticed by now, basically everything about Sintopia is dripping with satire at the expense of modern bureaucracy and capitalism. You might know I’m not the biggest fan of parts of the subject matter, so any game that takes a satirical tone is nearly guaranteed to get my attention at the very least. That’s one of the biggest reasons I enjoy Sintopia so much.

I’m barely scratching the surface of why I enjoy Sintopia so far, though. It’s also worth noting that Humus are led by a monarch whose beliefs will strongly influence the lifestyles of all the other Humus. If the Humus happen to crown a new king or queen who, shall we say, won’t make the souls of their subjects as profitable as you would like, you can use Administrative Magic to arrange some “unfortunate accidents.” Specifically, as many as necessary until the Humus crown a new monarch who will lead them on a path that’s much friendlier to your business.

That’s right: Sintopia occasionally encourages — and even expects — you to commit regicide to further increase your industry’s profits. Sintopia’s gameplay is divided into days, which are further broken into morning, afternoon, and night periods. Humus usually explore and gather resources during the morning and afternoon hours, and then after the workday ends at nightfall, they (to quote Sintopia directly) “tend to shaboink a lot.” This means you have a decision to make every night, depending on what your business needs right then. If you allow the “shaboinking” to proceed uninterrupted, that will mean more new Humus are born the following day.

Additionally, all the Humus who engage in “shaboinking” each night are more likely to be lustful the following day, which is one of the seven major sins from which you can maximize profits. However, if you think it’s necessary for business (or if you just feel like it), you can use Administrative Magic to disturb the “shaboinking ceremonies” in various ways. This will lead to a reduction in the total Humu population. It will also cause the affected Humus to be more wrathful than they otherwise would (I can’t imagine why), which could be useful for business.

When any Humus die, their souls will travel to the nearest graveyard, where they’ll await the arrival of Steve, the one and only Reaper. Steve has recently entered into a partnership with Hell, Inc., and agreed to provide his services by driving his bus between graveyards and Hell every so often to deliver fresh souls for processing. The more souls you can fit into a bus each time Steve gets to a graveyard, the better. Upon reaching Hell, the souls of Humus will follow the road networks you’ve set up as best they can. This is where city-building aspects really kick in.

Each soul ultimately wants to reach the resurrection portal that’s positioned a good distance away from the bus stop where Steve dropped them off. Your job is to ensure that each soul has no choice but to stop at enough buildings along the way that they’ll have as much sin (and, thus, profit) squeezed out of them as possible. You’ll need to make sure that each building you place has both its entrance and exit connected to the road network somehow, and that there’s at least one path souls can take to reach the resurrection portal after they’ve been processed.

Of course, once you’ve placed all the buildings and roads you think you’ll need, you’ll also have to hire Imployees to work at each structure. There are three types of Imployees with different specialties: Sadimps, Secretarimps, and Workimps. Sadimps work at soul processing and punishment buildings, Secretarimps can do things like keep Humu souls waiting in orderly lines to be processed, and Workimps do basically everything other than those two jobs. Imployees won’t work for free, of course: You’ll have to pay their daily wages in Purgadollars each morning. If you don’t have enough money to cover expenses, that’s when trouble starts.

If there ever comes a time when you can’t afford to pay any number of your Imployees their full wages, a percentage of your Imployees will go on strike until you pay them what they’re owed. You could do everything in your power to pay any striking Imployees as soon as possible, or you could do what the Reagan administration did to 11,000 unionized air traffic controllers who were also on strike: Fire them and replace them with different Imployees who (hopefully) won’t complain so much. I really can’t emphasize enough how much I love Sintopia’s humor and use of satire.

Sintopia could definitely use some more time in the metaphorical oven, and I’m glad it will theoretically be getting that time now that it’s been delayed. I don’t know what sorts of additional content Piraknights Games may intend to add between now and Sintopia’s eventual release, but I’m looking forward to it nonetheless. I’d particularly love to see a sandbox mode implemented, since those gameplay modes are often what I enjoy most in similar city-builder and management sim games. I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on Sintopia, and if your interest is piqued by anything I’ve described here, I’d highly recommend you do the same.

A PC review key for Sintopia was provided by Team17 for this preview.