Build your own Blade Runner city-builder Dystopika nears full release and its latest demo is just beautiful

We last talked about Dystopika from one-man dev Voids Within in January. Time flies and yet it still remains one of my most eagerly anticipated downloads of 2024.

Harking back to the start of the year I reminisced over how the opening credits to Blade Runner a small kid remains one of my first memories and probably played no small part in my ultimate interest in all things tech and gaming.

I would happily spend my remaining days in a rainy, smoggy, dirty neon-lit future city than anywhere lovely like the Maldives. That’s why I love Tokyo and that’s why I (still) love Dystopika.

A new demo – version 0.8 has been released and loads has changed, including the abilutyt to add props to your city as well as save your creations, which is cool after you have spent hours tweaking the futuristic cityscape of your dreams.

There is no game as we know it here. There is no management, no finances, and not a water pipe to connect can be found anywhere. What you do is create districts of your neon cyber-city, pop down lighting, and add huge screens to the sides of buildings, and you do it all to futuristic ambient drone music that would make Vangelis proud.

Dystopika is a time-sink. You load it up intending to pop a few skyscrapers down before you have to go out and then you find yourself still there far longer than you thought.

New tooltips have been added and you can right-click your mouse to flick through the kinds of buildings you can place in your zone. Then you can go to the props and add screens, neon, and more neon to buildings. Add helipads for landers but that is still not it.

Delve into settings and you can change the time of day, the weather, and the pollution. You can take beautiful screenshots of your cities as you zoom around. You can even set points to fly the camera between making video cutscenes. It’s just great and not like anything else you have on your hard drive.

You simply must download the demo immediately.