Should you’re a PC gamer of a sure age, you might fondly bear in mind Impressions Video games. Over two years between 1998 and 2000, the studio launched three video games that may go on to change into classics within the city-building style: Caesar III, Pharaoh and Zeus: Grasp of Olympus. SimCity may need established the formulation that every one metropolis builders have adopted since, however when you ask me, these three video games made that formulation their very own in a manner few others have completed since.
Greater than twenty years later, individuals are nonetheless enjoying these video games, with fan tasks like Augustus serving to easy out among the bugs and tough edges that Impressions by no means obtained an opportunity to repair. In 2025, certainly one of my favourite video games of the 12 months, The Wandering Village, took the Impressions formulation and utilized to a Studio Ghibli-inspired setting. Now, one other studio is dipping into that very same nicely of inspiration, with a venture titled Theos: Cities of Fable.
The brand new recreation is the most recent effort from Triskell Interactive, a developer finest identified for its work on 2023’s Pharaoh: A New Era, which was a HD remake of the unique Pharaoh and 2000 enlargement Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile. In a press briefing held by French writer Dotemu, the workforce at Triskell stated they wished to make a non secular successor to Pharaoh’s sequel, Zeus: Grasp of Olympus, quite than a direct remake. I did not get an opportunity to ask Dotemu if it had bother securing the licensing rights for the Zeus identify or if these rights have been just too costly for a small venture like Theos. What I can say is the brand new recreation is clearly meant to invoke its predecessor and really feel acquainted to anybody has performed the previous Impressions catalog.
Like Zeus earlier than it, Theos is a isometric city-builder the place Greek mythology and its pantheon of gods inform each the way you design your cities and the goals it’s good to full to maneuver a state of affairs ahead. Within the very early construct I performed, solely the Athens marketing campaign was prepared for playtesting, and even then a lot of the recreation’s tooltips and belongings have been populated by placeholders.
I started my marketing campaign by putting the inspiration for what would later change into town’s sanctuary to Athena. However earlier than I might undertake that venture, I needed to first construct housing in order that migrants would transfer into my fledgling city, after which present them with meals and water, in order that these individuals would then construct higher houses that may in flip entice much more individuals to my model of Athens. All of this might be acquainted when you’ve ever performed an Impressions recreation earlier than. Gameplay is constructed round designing environment friendly provide chains that present your metropolis’s inhabitants with all of the issues they should construct well-stocked houses. Every constructing you place down — be it a water nicely, agora or gymnasium — sends outs an NPC referred to as a walker that delivers the products or providers related to their construction. Your settlement will stay a metropolis of huts if you cannot guarantee your residents have uninterrupted entry to all of the perks of civilization.
Within the Impressions video games, the problem of constructing of an ever bigger metropolis got here from the truth that you could not immediately management the routes of walkers. You needed to design your metropolis’s roads to accommodate their typically buggy pathing AI. This meant that the cities you constructed by no means fairly felt like an actual place. Theos tries to unravel that frustration by giving the participant full management of walkers, permitting you to attract the route you need them to take via your metropolis. The Triskell workforce stated this may enable gamers to design their cities in almost any manner they need. At the least that is the concept.
Within the construct I performed, drawing walker routes felt prefer it added quite a lot of micromanaging to the expertise. After I went to position my first set of buildings, the sport took care of the routing for me, however as I grew my metropolis and added new housing blocks, it did not modify these routes routinely. Every time, I had to return to the constructions I constructed to both inform the sport to attract a brand new supply route or sketch it out myself. This is the factor, the logic the sport used typically left components of my metropolis underserved, and doing the work myself felt a bit janky, with an interface that did not do job of speaking how far out I might ship every walker. Once more, I performed a really early model of the sport, so an absence of polish is to be anticipated.
It was additionally laborious to guage the sport’s artwork model. Zeus: Grasp of Olympus had easy however colourful isometric graphics that did an important job of speaking the heat and vibrance of its setting. One of many criticisms of Triskell’s Pharaoh remaster is that the studio botched the artwork design of the unique recreation. There was an incongruity between totally different components. The buildings and panorama regarded trustworthy to their unique inspiration, whereas the NPCs all regarded like they have been pulled from a totally totally different recreation. It was one of many causes I by no means ended up shopping for the remake, though I like the supply materials. As far I can inform, the studio would not appear to have listened to that criticism. The NPCs nonetheless really feel out of step with the remainder of the sport’s artwork design.
Even with these dangle ups, I nonetheless had enjoyable enjoying Theos. Triskell is not reinventing the style right here like say Manor Lords or Frostpunk, however that is okay. There’s one thing comforting about revisiting a formulation you loved up to now and seeing it executed moderately nicely. Theos: Cities of Fable will arrive on PC someday later this 12 months.
