In an age when so-called AAA games are invariably made by vast armies comprising hundreds of people, it’s hugely heartening to find a surprisingly steady flow of games made by indie developers operating either solo or as part of a two-person team. Doubly so when many of those solo-developed games demonstrate vastly more character and originality than expensively produced blockbusters. Just three games into their career, Gareth Damian Martin is one of the standard-bearers of the modern rise of the solo-deva auteurs, thanks to 2020’s In Other Waters, 2022’s Citizen Sleeper and 2025’s Citizen Sleeper 2.
If you played any or all of those games, you’ll know that Martin is the master of creating atmospheric, thought-provoking, sci-fi-influenced worlds with the minimum of ingredients, and RPG gameplay mechanics that pay heavy homage to tabletop gaming. His narrative-heavy games – all previously taking a zoomed-out, near-top-down view – may look minimal, but the sheer richness of their worlds and the characters that inhabit them take root in your imagination, somehow acquiring detail in the process.
In a break from their previous modus operandi, Martin has just announced their next game, Signet City, with a mooted launch in 2027. There’s a reason for that: it will be markedly different from Martin’s previous efforts: “Yes, it is a bit of a departure. That is why I wanted to start with this cinematic trailer and do things a bit differently than maybe a lot of indies do. I wanted to introduce the world, and get people used to the idea of the art style, and the feel of it, being quite different to Citizen Sleeper.”
Most strikingly, Signet City will be the first game Martin has made that adopts a first-person viewpoint: “In Signet City, you play as a parasite, and it felt natural that it should be a game where you see the world through the eyes of your hosts, very literally. And I guess over making three games now, I’ve learned enough to understand a lot more about how to build them, and it felt like it was possible to take on the challenge of doing first-person environments. And it was exciting to get to do level design and spaces, and especially urban environments, which are a big fascination of mine.”
Visual and architectural design should feature heavily in Signet City, and Martin has serious pedigree in both: “I ran Heterotopias, a magazine about art, games and architecture, and I taught a bit of games and architecture at The Bartlett School of Architecture as well, so it’s nice to finally do a videogame where you can actually walk around the architecture in it. Signet City is tying up a lot of things I’ve been thinking about and working on for a while now – the environment, based on black and white photography, especially of the 80s in the north of the UK, and really rich urban environments.”
Martin gives an overall description of what Signet City will be like to play, neatly explaining how he is managing to convert his obsessions into what should be a unique and distinctive game: “You start off as a parasite – the trailer actually depicts the very early events in the game, where you wake in the mind of a character called Sid, and she’s waking up in the river of this city. You’re coming to understand what you are, why you’re in the mind of this person who doesn’t know you’re there, what your capabilities are, and what the world is, through Sid, as she lives in the city.
“Then as you start to understand what your bigger objective is, at the same time, it’s very much a story of a city that’s in the middle of multiple overlapping crises, and all of the characters are flashpoints for that. A lot of it was inspired by novels that do multi-perspective stories about cities, like Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, for example. Or maybe even Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris books.”
Martin’s architectural interest extends beyond the merely aesthetic: “I guess I’m always interested in cities as these big mega-interconnected ecologies, and that’s a big theme. I’m trying to dig into this idea of a city as a living structure – not just a city as a space that contains people, but also contains ecology, and different animals, and different layers of systems that all overlap with each other. But then also I really wanted to make something that I felt drew more on British history and culture, and what I was born into, and the 80s cast a long shadow over the contemporary day. You’ve got fascinating events like the Winter of Discontent.
“The font for the game’s title is a font called Liaison that was designed by a designer from Manchester for a book called In Loving Memory of Work, which is about the miners’ strike. I’m not trying to necessarily make a game directly about that, but always, I guess, my style or my approach is to take the real world and feed it through a weird refracting mirror and see what comes out the other side.”
Visually, Signet City’s distinctive monochrome look was inspired by black and white photography – Martin reveals that their father was a black and white photographer who instilled a love of black and white photography in them since their teenage years. Martin describes their visual aims with Signet City: “I had this very particular vision of wanting to have hand-drawn characters that are in this art-style that’s my natural art-style – I do a lot of ink-drawing, and working with quite a rough approach to illustration. But then also to balance that with a kind of photographic environment. One of the big things I love is the way, in photography – especially black-and-white photography – you get imaginary detail created by grain. So in the in-game visual, we have quite a complex post-processing effect. It’s not exactly grain; it’s a combination of different dither effects. Which means it gives everything this gritty overlay of grain and detail.
“The game is very much inspired by '80s social photography, especially that of Tish Murtha – I absolutely love her photographs. And I think there’s a humanity. I’ve always loved, ever since I very first started taking black-and-white photos, the way it seems to cut through and get at something underneath or behind things. It removes distractions and really focuses on producing things: sometimes it’s atmosphere, sometimes it’s literal, physical architectural form, and sometimes it’s emotion. I’ve got a huge stack of Cafe Royal books. It’s amazing having that resource when you’re building a city, and you’re trying to capture the spirit of that time.”
While Signet City will clearly play differently to the Citizen Sleeper games, it will still be a full-blown RPG, and Martin reveals that there will be gameplay elements that Citizen Sleeper fans find familiar: “The key thing is that you have these explorable spaces with each host. So each time you drop into the mind of a host – and you have multiple hosts that you’re moving between, depending on what you’re trying to do – what comes with them is their part of the city. If that person is working in, let’s say, the algae burners, then that’s what you’ll be exploring and finding characters around and in.
“You have a limited amount of actions a day. So you wake up as the character, and you decide what it is you’re going to do with that day to get you closer to what your objectives are. Now, you have objectives as a parasite – bigger objectives about growing and becoming more powerful and how you want to influence the city, but each of the hosts will also have things that they are supposed to be doing, and their own emotional storyline.
“There’s a dice-based tabletop element to it, governing the actions you can find in the world – like kicking down a door or climbing a wall, or convincing somebody of something – and those are affected by the emotions of the host. So you might get them into an argument in a pub which will make them angry, enabling them to go back and kick down a door to get into a new area. So there’s a kind of lock-and-key element, but also a skill-based system that’s all about you adjusting modifiers, basically, by making narrative decisions.”
With its element of sci-fi in the form of a decaying city infested by a parasite, its visual component and general ambience designed to evoke neglected northern British cities at their lowest ebb in the 1980s, and its unusual character-possession RPG gameplay, one thing is for sure: you won’t mistake Signet City for any other game when it arrives at some as-yet unspecified point in 2027. Make sure you look out for it.
The game is 'coming soon' – visit Jump Over The Age for more details.
