D-topia review – cosy sci-fi mystery takes aim at AI | Games

In the far future, on a planet that is not Earth, AI is in charge. This entity is no Skynet-esque killer robot but a machine that cares for humanity. Manifesting most visibly as cute droids, the technology is pervasive – embedded in everything from the design of the sleek architecture to the gorgeous, mostly sunny artificial weather. The so-called Optimization System has but one responsibility: ensuring the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

In less skilled hands this game might have felt like an undergraduate seminar on the limits of utilitarianism. But Japanese studio Marumittu Games elegantly marries its philosophical concerns with smart design choices. You play as a young, unnamed Facilitator tasked with tending to both the city’s bots and its human residents. Each morning you wake up, sleepily loping off to the bathroom before sitting down for an exquisitely rendered breakfast, and then embark on your day’s work. Like everything else in this near-future scenario, labour is designed to cause as little frustration as possible, amounting to simple maths brain teasers on a grid – nothing too taxing, but enough to keep you engaged.

That is D-topia in a nutshell: its daisy chain-style design, ushering you smoothly from one calming slate-blue interior to another (and one easy task to the next), satirises the future of convenience. In moments of downtime between work and sleep, you’re able to chat with more eccentric inhabitants for whom this is not paradise but something more stultifying. Gentle giant Tot has a computer chip attached to his brain to help regulate his emotions and hunger; Eebie longs to express herself through zany fashion, a pariah in a world where everyone else dresses in anonymous yet oh-so-chic Arket-style attire.

You improve your relationships with these people through straightforward conversation and, on occasion, deciding how to help when presented with alternative courses of action. At one point, in a bid to alleviate Tot’s mood that had been darkened by the fake rain, I tampered with the weather system (another easy puzzle) to bring back the bright, fake sunshine.

This is a deceptively simple game artfully told, whose bite lingers on the periphery of its narrative (as with the subplot that recalls Kazuo Ishiguro’s chilling organ-harvesting dystopia, Never Let Me Go). It arrives at a moment when AI has never been more contentious, lauded by AI company execs as the saviour of the world’s thorniest problems, and lampooned by those of a more sober disposition as a driver of further misery. But Marumittu Games is never alarmist: it is smarter than that, subverting cosy trappings to insidious effect, letting its existential questions hang in the unnervingly scentless D-topia air.

The effect is somewhat eerie if, in the actual playing, soporific: AI doesn’t just flatten D-topia’s culture but tamps down its places and people. With…