Gareth Damian Martin, the creator behind Citizen Sleeper and its sequel, is venturing into unsettling new territory with Signet City. The upcoming first-person fungalpunk RPG flips the script on player agency by casting you as a sentient spore spreading through a city by infecting inhabitants.
Your role becomes their intrusive thoughts. Once you infect someone, you inhabit their consciousness as a guiding psyche, whispering influence over their emotions and decisions. You shape how they feel, which determines how they act, which ultimately lets you engineer events across the city. It's a narrative structure reminiscent of Disco Elysium's skill system, where you embody an external consciousness pushing the protagonist in specific directions, except here you're doing it to multiple hosts.
This marks a radical departure from Martin's previous work. Citizen Sleeper centered on resource management and relationship building as a vulnerable android trying to carve out survival. Signet City abandons that vulnerability and trades it for parasitic control. The fungalpunk setting adds body-horror undertones to the premise, suggesting infection and colonization as core themes rather than just mechanical flavor.
The concept raises interesting questions about player morality and agency. Unlike typical RPGs where your choices feel heroic or neutral, Signet City forces you to inhabit the role of an invasive entity. You're not saving the city. You're hijacking its citizens. The game appears designed to make players uncomfortable with their own control, mirroring how intrusive thoughts work in reality.
Martin's track record with Citizen Sleeper suggests he'll execute this premise with narrative sophistication. That game earned praise for its lean storytelling and atmospheric world-building. Signet City will need to balance its provocative central mechanic with meaningful roleplay choices that justify why we're playing as this parasitic consciousness