jumped

Despite my love for management sims and all my best intentions when playing them, something always ends up going wrong. The real game isn’t to see how long I can keep the charade up, but how much I can manage to get done within the relatively short window of peace before everything goes to Hell.

The fact that Sintopia takes place in Hell half the time probably should have warned me about how well my antics would go, but I didn’t take the hint. Instead, I started my new job as manager of Hell and overlord of the humus, a sentient population of chickpeas.

(Image credit: Team 17)

Sintopia is kind of like two games in one. The overworld plays like a god game that has you casting spells to influence the humus. They go about their daily business with pretty limited intervention from you, farming crops, cutting down trees, electing a monarch to rule over them, and exploring the map to find new treasures and expand their village.

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I did spend a little bit of time helping them, like using a wind spell to blow away vicious animals that would attack hunting parties or ringing bells outside their homes at night to stop them from overpopulating the map. But if you asked the jumus, they probably would have a different, more violent story to tell, as to make money in Sintopia, you need to process souls, and to get souls to process, you need to kill humus.

The flipside of Sintopia is a management game located down in the belly of Hell. Here, you process the dead humus’ souls, squeeze all the sins that they’ve built up in the overworld out of them for cash and then send them on their way to be reincarnated in the overworld.

(Image credit: Team 17)

Your sin processing plant, like most management games, starts simple: Just build a couple of roads and buildings to help you extract all the humus’ sins. There are also basic buildings which drain the humus of their sins, earning you cash as it does so.

But these functions extract minimal profit out of the process. If you want to maximise your cash, you’ll need to start researching and investing in Sin Punishment Specialists. You can unlock rooms dedicated to each of the seven deadly sins: lust, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride, and gluttony.

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I lacked the one thing they really wanted: a good wage and a nice work environment.

These will unlock buildings that you can place and send humus to if they have a particularly high meter for a specific sin. It’ll completely deplete their sins and give you more cash so you can build more infrastructure, like breakrooms for your demon workers, and give your employees raises or just pay them a fair wage. Something I may have forgotten to do:In my haste and greed, I got carried away with killing humus to fuel Hell’s production lines and exploiting the environment to build more money-making rooms, and forgot about looking after my employees.

I built them a breakroom, put up a few inspirational posters, and even set up a happy balloon demon to motivate them, but I lacked the one thing they really wanted: a good wage and a nice work environment.

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(Image credit: Team 17)(Image credit: Team 17)(Image credit: Team 17)(Image credit: Team 17)(Image credit: Team 17)

Lewis was the first demon worker to go on strike. I pushed him aside, kicking the ungrateful worker into some lava and opting to hire someone else for less money. But the peace didn’t last long, as after a while every single demon worker went on strike, seizing the means of production and stopping the cash flow.

Armed with the knowledge that my actions actually have consequences, I started a new save, with an eagle eye at all times on my employees’ wages and happiness. Luckily, this time things turned out better as I slowly built up production alongside my valued staff in Hell and the chosen monarch of the humus, Tiberius Snakenelly, who inspired his people to work hard and increase productivity in the overworld.

Even after all of these antics, I feel as if I’ve only scratched the surface of Sintopia. There’s so much room to perfect Hell’s production lines with intricate layouts, like using sorting gates that section particular humus into specific roads, so you can create the most efficient layout possible.

Then there’s everything that can play out in the overworld, like killing kings who don’t inspire their subordinates, fighting off rogue groups, and having to deal with an end-of-the-world type scenario. If you fail to squeeze all the sins out of a humus, their sin meter will reach 100% and this will turn them into a demon who will set up shop in the overworld and periodically launch attacks on your humus population. I haven’t got to this point yet, but it’s probably just a matter of time before it happens.

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