Mycelium, yourcelium, ourcelium
I'm afraid to tell you, dear reader, that you're a parasite. Living on the lifeblood of others, that's you. Or, you will be if you choose to play Signet City, the new game from Jump Over The Age, creators of In Other Waters and Citizen Sleeper. That's because it's a first-person fungalpunk RPG in which you're a spore-born parasite taking root in the brains of the inhabitants of a British coastal town.
Inspired by the UK's northern cities and the industrial collapse they suffered and struggled through in the 1980s, Signet City sees you hopping between the heads of the people living there, informing the decisions they make each day and changing the course their lives take.
Do take a look at the trailer because it's a properly stylish looking game. All punk hair styles, brutalist blocks of flats, and the underside of train tracks that takes me back to growing up in Birmingham and Leeds (not that the North will ever truly embrace Brum as one of their own):
As a first-person game, Signet City marks a departure from Jump Over The Age's previous games, In Other Waters and the Citizen Sleeper RPGs. Though, the press release says you will "Grow into and through its inhabitants, uncover and change their stories, and witness the terminal season of the signet city." Which, despite the change in perspective, does sound familiar to what I played in Citizen Sleeper, where you make choices that shape the life paths of the space station and solar system you called home.
Now, I will admit that Signet City's announcement was part of PC Gamer's glitzy (dare I say gauche?) PC Gaming Show, so you might say that the cheery RPS fanzine got the exclusive on this one. But I dug through my old folder of interviews and realised Signet City's creator Gareth Damian Martin talked to me about fungus way back in 2023. At the time, they were telling me about Citizen Sleeper 2 for a preview in The Guardian and, due to a tiny word count, there was tonnes I wasn't able to use in the final piece. So, here, I give you words never before seen in this order.
"I'm interested in humans as part of ecology," Gareth Damian Martin told me with a look that said 'PC Gamer are nothing to me'. "One of the core inspirations [for Citizen Sleeper's world] was this book called The Mushroom At The End Of The World by Anna Tsing, and in that she talks about assemblages. For her an assemblage is a collection of ecologies and systems and societies and cultures, both human and non-human, and both transient and fixed. And that's what I'm always thinking about when I'm thinking about ecology… as this idea of an assemblage, like 'what are all of the parts of this structure?'"
In the Citizen Sleeper games, those elements of human and non-human, transient and fixed, to its world could take the form of abandoned corporation mining structures overtaken and repurposed by the people left in the company's wake. A piece of potato propagating machinery turning a part of the Starward Belt into the one place in the galaxy where you can get a decent chip butty, and so the culture and economy that stems from that slice of discarded corporate apparatus.
Now, technically, Damian Martin talked to PC Gamer about the influence of Tsing's work on the original Citizen Sleeper back in 2021. I would almost forgive you for pointing at me like I'm carrying a bowl of barely reheated quotes, except you best prepare to curl your finger up and stuff it right back into your pocket, because they didn't stop talking there.
"A biologist I was talking to the other day told me we often draw food webs in school and little dots between them," Damian Martin continued, an expression crossing their face that said 'PC Gamer would love this, but they can't have it'. "And they said 'this is what a food web is actually like in real life.' And they took a piece of paper, they wrote down a series of species on the piece of paper, and then they just crumpled the piece of paper up into a ball, which I thought was kind of a good descriptive tool."
I'm having a fresh conversation with Damian Martin later this week, so I'll be able to return to this idea of ecologies and the interconnectedness of their participants becoming messier and tighter than a neatly drawn food web then.
You'll have to be quicker than that to get one over on ol' Julian, PC Gamer. (Though, also, thank you for all the freelance work you gave me over the years, and for giving me my start in games journalism by publishing my reader review of Bastion back in 2011. Hugs and kisses.)