D-Topia ponders our prickliest existential problems through puzzles

The timely D-Topia asks if a perfect utopia could ever exist

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.

You play the role of a residential facilitator in the fictional city of D-Topia who is tasked with doing maintenance on the city’s bots by completing soothing puzzles. While those machines exist to keep the city’s residents happy at all times, you begin to discover their limitations as you meet residents whose problems can’t be easily solved by AI. There’s a choice-driven gameplay system underneath all of that; players have the option to break D-Topia’s strict rules to better help people. That tension creates the philosophical foundation for the team at Marumittu Games to explore.

“A choice that brings happiness to one person may lead to negative consequences for someone else or even for the facility as a whole,” Mitsuhashi said. “That’s exactly why we believe the player’s choices carry meaning. To care about someone, struggle with difficult decisions, make a choice, accept the outcome, and take responsibility for it, we believe that is where true humanity and something deeply important about being human can be found.”

All of this is in service of a story about the fallacy of utopias as a concept. On paper, it sounds nice. What if you didn’t have to work and could just live out your happy life in comfort? That’s the future that Big Tech is trying to sell in our modern age, as it encourages people to use tools like AI to do everything for them. Mitsuhashi isn’t entirely against the idea of tech making our lives a little more convenient, but there’s a line that can’t be crossed.

“We don’t necessarily believe that eliminating friction is inherently a bad thing,” Mitsuhashi said. “From the perspective of people in the past, modern life today would probably already look like a kind of utopia. Of course, our society still has many problems, but even so, a great number of people are able to live safely and benefit from advances in science and technology. However, no matter how convenient or seemingly perfect society becomes, we believe there is a danger if people stop thinking and making choices for themselves.”

D-Topia isn’t out to solve that problem in hopes of finding a true utopia. In fact, neither developer believes it’s even possible to create a utopia at all. “We don’t know what a true utopia would really look like,” Shiino said. “The game touches on this idea to some extent, but honestly, as long as human beings remain imperfect, we believe achieving a perfect utopia may be impossible. After all, what is a utopia for one person may be a dystopia for someone else.”

Perfection is a concept both developers kept circling back to in their email responses. It’s the sticking point of any version of a utopia, and something D-Topia is interested in exploring. The studio posits that imperfection isn’t something that’s meant to be scrubbed out of our lives or optimized by machines; it’s the very thing that makes us human. After all, what fun would a choice-driven game be if you couldn’t make some mistakes along the way?

“Rather than striving for 'human perfection,' we believe what truly matters is that imperfect people still choose to think and make decisions for the sake of others,” Mitsuhashi said.