Gareth Damian Martin, the developer behind Citizen Sleeper, has revealed their next game: Signet City, a first-person fungalpunk RPG set in a grim industrial city inspired by the culture and architecture of northern England in the 1980s. The hook? You are not the protagonist. You are the thing living inside her head.
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The parasite in the room
The game opens with a woman waking on the shores of a bay with no memory of how she got there. Standard amnesiac RPG setup, except you are not playing her. You are a fungal parasite that has just stirred to life inside her skull, equally confused, equally directionless. The woman goes about her day unaware you exist. You watch from inside, reading her emotions like a second layer of reality.
Damian Martin describes the parasite's perception as a kind of psychic sensorium, where emotions register almost like smells, textures, and colours. Enter a bar, and your host might feel a warm rush of nostalgia for a place that sheltered her once. That feeling surfaces memories you can explore, learning who she is and what drives her. Flip the perspective from host to parasite and the UI inverts from black and white to white and black, revealing things only you can perceive.
Here's the thing: that emotional data is also your fuel. The more intensely your host feels something, the more the parasite can extract and convert into influence, a resource you spend on actions. Damian Martin offers a blunt example: get your host riled up in an argument until she is angry enough to kick down a locked door. The system draws from the cyberpunk tabletop RPG The Veil, but the closest pop culture shorthand is the energy economy in Monsters, Inc, where fear harvested from children powers an entire city.
Hosts, spores, and the city itself
You will not stay in one host. The parasite has a goal (one Damian Martin is keeping quiet for now), and reaching different parts of the city means spreading spores and waking up in entirely new people. Each host has a different social position, different relationships, and a different emotional profile. What makes one furious leaves another cold, and learning those triggers is the core loop.
The city these hosts inhabit is drawn directly from the industrial North of Britain. Smoking factory stacks, brutalist apartment blocks, concrete underpasses. The skyline evokes Newcastle, Manchester, and Glasgow, but the city has one thing none of those places can claim: the Canker, a fungal plate growing over the bay. The Canker has fuelled the city's economy for a century, refined into a potent fuel by algae burners that also drench the population in pollution. More recently, scientists have found new applications in what the game calls fungal computing, with wristwatch devices called signets granting access to a fungal network that powers the city's machines.
Damian Martin cites Dishonored as a key reference point, specifically the whale oil biotechnology of Arkane's immersive sim, but transposed to an '80s industrial setting rather than a baroque fantasy city. The influence of Disco Elysium is also visible in how the parasite's inner perspective works, a layer of commentary and sensation sitting beneath the surface of the world.
Killing the questgiver
What makes Signet City more than a clever gimmick is the design problem it is trying to solve. Damian Martin is direct about their frustration with RPG structure, specifically the way almost every game eventually reduces to an outsider being handed quests by locals. Even Citizen Sleeper, a game widely praised for its writing, could not fully escape it.
By dropping the player into the middle of already fully-formed characters' lives, Signet City sidesteps that entirely. Your hosts have friends, families, and internal conflicts before you arrive. You do not get introduced to them through a quest screen. You wake up inside them and have to figure out who they are from the inside out.
Damian Martin draws a comparison to Mass Effect, arguing that players were never really Commander Shepard so much as the strange presence nudging him in one direction or another. Signet City just makes that relationship literal. The question the game wants players to sit with is whether the parasite is a predator or something more complicated. As Damian Martin puts it: are you symbiotic or are you parasitic?
What this means for RPG fans
Damian Martin has been sitting on the concept behind Signet City since before In Other Waters launched in 2020. The years spent building Citizen Sleeper and its expansions were, in their own words, the training needed to feel competent enough to attempt it.
The result looks like one of the more structurally ambitious RPGs announced in recent memory. Not because of scale or production value, but because it is genuinely trying to do something the form has not done before. Playing as the manipulative force inside a character rather than the character themselves reframes every RPG decision in a way that feels worth paying attention to.
No release date has been set. Signet City is still deep in development. For players who want to stay sharp on story-driven RPGs in the meantime, the gaming guides hub has resources covering some of the genre's best current releases while the wait continues.
