Phonopolis: New adventure from Machinarium makers announced – News

It’s been almost twenty years since the Czech indie game developers from Amanita Design Samorost (to the news) published their first work. Other indie gems followed, such as machinarium (in the test, grade: 8.0), Botanicals (to the news) or Chuchel (to the news). Now the studio has founders Jakub Dvorsky announced a new adventure, you can find the trailer for it at the end of this news.

In phonopolis you control the young man Felix through a dystopian city controlled by an authoritarian leader. By a fluke, you become the only human aware of the ensuing threat, and the only hope of doing anything about it. game director Petr Filipovic elaborates this further:

The leader, now the de facto dictator of the city of Phonopolis, may have had good intentions in the past. In an effort to create a perfectly happy society, he invented a system of loudspeakers and subliminal commands designed to push people to perfection. But in the end, people have turned into mindless servants, mere cogs in an artificially formed society.

Visually, Amanita Design relies on a slightly different style than before. Concept artist Eva Markova explained:

We try to use avant-garde art in a playful and fun way, not unlike children’s toys or paper models. One of our goals is to cheer up the player with a little honest childish glee.

Technical artist Oto Dostal added:

Although the game is developed in a 3D engine, we handcraft as many elements as possible. All textures are painted on cardboard, cut out, digitized and placed on the respective 3D model. We want our game to feel less like a piece of software and more like a handcrafted little universe.

Also new is the use of a narrator’s voice; in previous works by Amanita Design, “understandable” language was not used. The game is being developed for multiple platforms, with PC and MacOS confirmed so far. However, the release date is still a long way off, it will probably not appear until 2024.