Plato famously said that the most important part of any work is the beginning. And so, while what I played of Theos: City of Myth was clearly in a very early and unpolished state, I can at least appreciate where it’s headed. This charming indie city builder had me laying out roads, providing housing, taking advantage of godly boons, and managing resources as concrete as food and as abstract as philosophy. I wasn’t able to build a polis to rival the height of Athens just yet due to demo restrictions and some odd pathing bugs, however.
Mechanically, Theos is similar to games like Anno, in that the main loop is levelling up residential dwellings by fulfilling increasingly complex needs of their citizens. This begins with food and water, which must be manually carried to each dwelling rather than simply granting access in a radius around the building. Water comes from a fountain, while food distribution early on is a three-step process.
To feed the people, you first have to build a farm, which introduces a tricky little land management minigame. Fertile land often comes in odd shapes, and each farm requires you to place three farm plots shaped like the classic Tetris tiles in a coherent block. The catch is that you can only have one of each block, so you really have to puzzle out how to get the most coverage on the land available to you. This is one of the more unique and enjoyable quirks in Theos.
From there, grain goes to a granary, and finally to a grocer, which takes up one of four slots on your central agora, before being distributed to each house. This is where I frequently ran into trouble, though. Buildings in the demo would often forget about road connections unless I demolished and rebuilt the paths, and the tool to auto-generate delivery routes wasn’t working particularly well. You can manually set delivery routes using flags yourself, which is a nice option for fine-grain micromanagement, but it’s a bit tedious when it’s the only way to get your deliveries for each building working.
Deep Thinking
There are some resources that don’t need to be physically transported, thankfully. Beyond basic needs, affluent Hellenes will eventually start demanding less tangible goods like philosophy, which is produced at a philosophy school and then more or less broadcasted from podiums linked to it. Buildings also need to be provided with maintenance and fire brigade coverage from dedicated public safety buildings, aesthetic embellishments like parks and gardens, and later culture in the form of theaters. Military and science are also visible in the UI, but were outside the scope of the brief demo I played. Likewise, this urban machinery has to be connected to a system of tax collecting that I didn’t have to interact with, as the demo provided me with almost unlimited money to mess around with.
Of course, I wasn’t totally alone in managing my growing settlement. Theos features several Greek deities to pick from who provide different bonuses that can have significant playstyle impacts. Other than the tutorial, the one map available in the demo is based on ancient Athens and locks you to the patronage of Athena, goddess of wisdom.
Athena’s boons focus heavily around being a city of philosophers: philosophy schools produce culture in addition to philosophy, and podiums also act as guard posts. Who needs drama when you can entertain yourself with rousing debate? And who needs guards when you can simply explain to criminals why they shouldn’t do crime using logic and rhetoric? Joking aside, it gives a strong theming to Athenian cities and feels more meaningful than a simple percentage bonus to this or that, since it also saves a lot of space and changes how I think about laying out new districts.
Hellenic Beauty
One of Theos’ strongest aspects is the art style, with 3D buildings populated by expressive, cheerful 2D sprites of various townsfolk in colorful, Mediterranean garb. Chalky white cliffs rise from pastel blue seas. Vibrant public buildings glow with detail while idle citizens strum a harp or play with cats, bringing an animated liveliness to points of interest. There was still some placeholder art for a couple buildings in the demo, and it can look a little awkward when the desirability of an area is shown by gradually sprinkling marble bricks across a dirt road until it eventually becomes solid white. But it is a useful visual shorthand for which areas are considered the most affluent.
Without being able to fully explore systems like trade and warfare, it’s hard to get a firm idea of what kind of game Theos will be when it’s fully chiseled from the surrounding stone. But there’s enough charm to it that, if it can work out a few quirks, I’d certainly return to its pleasant shores again. To quote our boy Plato one more time, “Nothing beautiful without struggle.”
Leana Hafer is a contributing freelancer for IGN with a specialty in RPGs, strategy, horror, and survival games. She has been reviewing video games professionally since 2010 and is one of IGN’s most prolific contributors, with more than 100 reviews published. You can also find her work on sites like PC Gamer and PCGamesN.
