It's clear from Signet City's reveal trailer that it's going to be an unusual game. After all, you'll be playing a fungal brain parasite that influences multiple hosts across an algae-powered city.

But, when creator Gareth Damian Martin and I spoke, they didn't just want to talk about how their game worked – if anything, they seemed happy to leave that discussion until players could play it to find out for themselves. Instead, they wanted to say why they were making this game, and why they were doing it now.

After all, in an industry where game developers are closing up shop daily, making a first-person fungalpunk RPG isn't the safe bet.

In Damian Martin's 2020 debut, In Other Waters, had you playing as the onboard AI in a scientist's diving suit as they explored the seas of an alien planet. Your only means of communicating with the pilot was in yes/no responses to their questions. "I could have easily put dialogue trees in that game or whatever, but I intentionally didn't," Damian Martin says. "I had this feeling that this idea of riding along in this biologist's suit and then only being able to bleep one sound or bleep another sound would create this longing and desire in the player to actually reach this person, that I'd frustrate them and remind them that they're sat behind the computer and make them feel like they're in a different position."

Then, two years later, in Citizen Sleeper, they challenged the traditional RPG protagonist of rolling into town like a kind of 'super cop', solving people's problems and meting out justice as you see fit. Instead, you play an escaped android with a desperate need for medicine in a society where sleepers are overlooked or worse. "Rather than being a super cop, [you're] a deeply marginalised member of society," Damian Martin says. "That's the difference between you and these NPCs. And you are experiencing this kind of questionable subjective reality where you don't even know if this is what it feels like to be a human."

Yes, despite this work behind them, Damian Martin still sees Signet City as a leap.

The ideas for the Signet City setting have been growing within Damian Martin since 2017, before they started work on In Other Waters. They considered making it as their first game but "decided it was too complicated" for their debut. And, they almost pitched it instead of Citizen Sleeper, but they decided they weren't ready. When they finished that, again, there was the chance to make Signet City, but they realised they weren't finished with the sci-fi setting and made a sequel, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector.

However, after completing Citizen Sleeper 2 last January, Damian Martin realised they'd reached the point where they "had to make this game or never make it." Despite sketching out the world of Signet City for years, the game they're making today is very different from what they would have made back in 2017. "My skills have changed so much over that period," Damian Martin explains.

More than developing the skills that allow them to tackle a first-person RPG, though, Damian Martin now has games of their own they can respond to. "I hit on a way of taking this setting that I had in my mind and combining it with ideas around where I was taking the RPG with Citizen Sleeper, but where Citizen Sleeper wouldn't let me take it," Damian Martin explains.

That direction is all to do with structure.

Lifting mechanics from tabletop RPG Blades in the Dark, many of your actions in Citizen Sleeper are paid for with a bank of dice rolls. At the start of each week, you roll a set of dice and commit those dice rolls to different events. High rolls increase your chance of success, so how you spend them is always a difficult choice. If, for instance, you're playing as a character who isn't particularly technically minded and there is a task to hack through a locked door, you may choose to use one of your high dice rolls to give you the best chance of successfully opening the door. However, as in Blades in the Dark, events rarely simply pass or fail. You might have only mixed success, opening the door, but triggering an alarm in the process, for example. While not unique to Citizen Sleeper, using a pool of dice rolls as an action resource for most in-game events created a particular tone for the RPG. It emphasised a sense of scarcity.

"One thing I learned from Citizen Sleeper is you can build a structure that will allow you to tell stories that other people can't tell," Damian Martin says. "If you make a structure where you have to kill goblins, then every quest becomes about killing goblins." They stress that their sci-fi RPG "isn't inherently anti-combat", and the dice system allows for fights, but because they use the same system for every action it allows the story to be broader – "because," they explain, "they aren't the most interesting thing in a story."

With Signet City, Damian Martin wants to see what stories a new structure would encourage. "Citizen Sleeper is a very established form now and I did everything I could do within that," they tell me. "Signet City became this [...] opportunity to propose something really different and really new with an RPG structure." They explain how they want to play around with the expectations players – and they emphasise console players here – have for first-person RPGs. "I love to be a bit of a trickster," they add. "I want people to know [I'm] trying to take everything I've learned about RPGs and propose something original and take a real risk."

SIGNET CITY - Reveal Trailer

Watch on YouTube

The trailer, Damian Martin says, was a statement of intent: "I'm trying to say to people like, 'Hey, I want to do something different here. I want you to play a game that you haven't played before. It might remind you of Dishonored, it might remind you of Disco Elysium, it might remind you of something else, but this is fresh and feels interesting and has a world that's deep and broad.'"

Set in an industrial city inspired by the cities of northern Britain in '80s – Newcastle, Glasgow, Manchester – Signet City is a place we don't often see in games, but it's also got a unique life of its own. Out in the bay of the city grows a fungal shelf, The Canker, that for a hundred years has been harvested and refined into a fuel source. That history is woven into the culture of the town and the people you will infect. As you hop between hosts, you will see them engage with the culture and societal stresses that that industry has placed on the city.

"So often games come almost without worlds or they come with a world that's a given, a fantasy world that we've seen so many times that we're not even curious," Damian Martin adds, describing how they're aiming for something different. “That's the energy I'm trying to put into the world and say, 'Hey, this is me taking a swing at something on purpose. I'm trying to be different.'"

While our conversation is pleasant and enthusiastic throughout, there is a steel to this thread of the interview. A gauntlet as much thrown at other developers as a challenge Damian Martin is setting themselves. "It feels like risk-taking's at an all-time low," they say, adding "It would be very hypocritical of me to say that and then not actually do it. If anyone can take a risk, it's me."

This new structure and this world, where you sit as a parasitic fungus within a host, listening to their thoughts, feeding off their emotions, and influencing their actions from the background, Damian Martin says, will allow them to tell new stories. As you move between the city, moving from one host to another, you arrive in their lives in media res. They have friends, family, personal struggles, and their perception of Signet City's world is therefore unique, forged by the lives they've led. To successfully achieve your objective, you need to learn what makes each host tick and exploit what you learn to effectively direct them.

While this structure is new, Damian Martin can see the throughline to their other work. "I want to continue down that path of narrativising the player's difference," Damian Martin says. "A lot of it comes from tabletop RPGs and the way you drift in and out of saying the character's name or saying your name. Sometimes you're speaking as the character and sometimes you're speaking for them. Sometimes you're saying, 'Oh, wouldn't it be really fun if this really horrible thing happens to my character?' And at other times you're like, 'I don't want this terrible thing to happen to them.' There's so much potential for me to pick at as a designer and as a writer. I'm excited to dig into it because it feels like I'm pulling on something that the players will feel already – which is sitting down to pretend to be another person for a little while."

This more nebulous aim of coaxing players into a play space they've never been before is what's behind Signet City is another risk. But, as Damian Martin admits, "That stuff is always really hard to express to people and so in the end it's easier to express to people like, "This is going to be a really cool weird city." If you like Jeff VanderMeer's Ambergris, or Tetsuo, or weird, fucked up, monochrome cities then come on in."