Metropolis 1998 is a fetching isometric blend of SimCity and The Sims, with customisable house interiors

Image credit: YesBox

According to certain Terran lore, God created the universe in seven days. Well, I got up this morning and made a small suburban village with a hospital, school, police station and a cafe in the space of 20 minutes. This is the backwater burg of Edwitherington. Population: 8 – one for every non-residential building in town. Major imports: ornamental lampposts, because I like to cultivate an old-timey mood. Major exports: traffic jams, because I’ve laid out my village in the form of a small crescent leading back to the freeway, which means that there are two traffic light junctions about 100 metres apart.

That freeway used to be all but traffic-free, a spotless tarmac embroidery for a whistling and seething expanse of woodland. Cars? They were practically fairytales, glimpsed once in a blue moon. Thanks to my abortive town-planning efforts, the freeway has congealed into a diabolical map-length sardine can of isometric roadsters straining to move past each other. Meanwhile, the eight residents of Edwitherington drift from one hauntingly empty municipal building to the next. Please stay away from the hospital: I forgot to give the bathrooms doors, and the beds are engulfed in shrubbery.

The game I’m playing is the demo for Metropolis 1998, and it’s not nearly as hellish as I’ve just made it sound. It’s a colourful throwback city-builder with lots of deft little touches, of which the most important is probably being able to see and tinker with interior layouts. You can choose from ready-made offices, groceries and so on, but the true craftsperson will of course want to fashion a bespoke building and, as the case may be, turn the game into a Simmish penal colony.

Solo developer YesBox (who is collaborating with two external pixel artists) is at pains to note that “this is not a real game yet” and that it only has “a sliver of game loop”. As of June, the demo only really lets you place and mess with a small number of buildings, with pops buying homes and going to work on weekdays, but no economy to speak of. Cities Skylines it ain’t. But the prototype has bags of charm, and YesBox has Grand Designs indeed. These include more developed inner lives for your citizens (including a choice of religion), town councils with roles such as head of education and chief firefighter, celebrity visits and parades, individual citizen bank accounts, and disasters such as hurricanes and ruinous monopolies.

Post-1.0-version aspirations include a zombie apocalypse button, visible crime, and a Sims-like mode that lets you live in the dysfunctional suburban excrescence you’ve hacked together from mismatching wallpaper patterns. Perhaps that should be every town architect’s final punishment, as in certain Dwarf Fortress Let’s Plays. If there’s any justice in the universe, I’ll be taking up residence in Edwitherington soon. Metropolis 1998 has been in development since November 2021, and there’s no final release date yet.