Citizen Sleeper dev's next game Signet City lets you play as a fungal parasite controlling people's minds

Gareth Damian Martin, lead developer on both Citizen Sleeper games, has announced his next project. Signet City is a first-person fungalpunk RPG where you play as a sentient spore that spreads through a city by secretly infecting its inhabitants and becoming their inner voice.

Each day you pick a host to inhabit and get a limited number of actions. Every host comes with their own slice of the city — Martin compares the structure to Dishonored's hub-based levels rather than an open world you freely roam. The core RPG mechanic ties directly into the parasite fantasy: your spore feeds on emotion, so the skill system is built entirely around emotional states. To kick down a locked door, for example, you first need your host to be angry — so you drag them to a pub, engineer an argument, and use that rage as a stat modifier. Different hosts respond to different triggers; one might need to see a political poster they hate, another might need to stand on a skyscraper rooftop if they have a fear of heights. Like both Citizen Sleeper games, a six-sided die still governs outcomes, so any plan can fall apart. Injure a host trying to force through a door and you might have to abandon them and approach the same problem through a completely different person.

Narratively, Martin's setup echoes the disembodied skill voices in Disco Elysium or Esoteric Ebb — an outside perspective nudging a host toward outcomes you've decided are best, for better or worse. The exploration loop has a Firewatch quality to it too, Martin says: you walk through a space, discover things your host can react to, then hold a trigger to pull up the contextual UI. It's a dramatic departure from Citizen Sleeper's android-survival formula, but the dice, the resource pressure, and the intimate character writing look like they're carrying over.