It’s easy to imagine what a dystopia looks like — heck, you could argue that we’re living in one right now. It’s much harder to picture a utopia. What does a perfect world look like when no one can even seem to agree on basic human decency? What’s ideal for one person might be another’s nightmare; just look at our current era of generative AI and the range of reactions toward the tech. We live in a world where the idea of killer robots rising up seems more realistic than humans living together in harmony.
That tension is at the heart of D-Topia, an upcoming puzzle-adventure game developed by Marumittu Games and published by Annapurna Interactive. Launching on July 14 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, D-Topia is set in a so-called perfect world — or at least someone’s idea of one. AI bots take on the tough work, so humans can live a friction-free life where happiness is optimized. As you can imagine, things aren’t nearly as simple as they sound.
In an email interview with Polygon, programmer Akira Mitsuhashi and artist Hiroco Shiino explained how D-Topia grapples with the impossibility of utopia. For the husband-and-wife development duo, their latest game is a gentle reminder that the line between utopia and dystopia is blurrier than we think.
Marumittu Games was founded in 2017 by Mitsuhashi and Shiino, who previously worked on Level-5’s Professor Layton series. The team has released a handful of games since then, but D-Topia is poised to be a breakthrough moment for the studio, thanks in part to Annapurna’s involvement. (The publisher just scored an indie hit this spring with Mixtape.) Even without its publisher, though, D-Topia already had the advantage of being very timely. The premise for the project simply came from opening the window and taking a look at the current state of the world.
“In today’s information-driven society, we constantly see problems and challenges highlighted through the news and social media, and I think that became the starting point for our ideas,” Shiino told Polygon. “No matter how much technology advances, humans never seem to stop fighting. It made me question whether humanity’s overall happiness is really increasing alongside technological progress.”
As the duo pondered those ideas, they drew inspiration from Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari. The philosophical book discusses the potential future of humanity and, as Shiino explained, “what people may come to worship as ‘gods’ in the age ahead.” Shiino said that the book had a “profound impact” on the team, and it’s not hard to find that inspiration in D-Topia.
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