Signet City Is Fungalpunk Body Horror In Slow Motion

A Fungalpunk First Look

Signet City is not interested in letting you be a hero. From Gareth Damian Martin, the creator of Citizen Sleeper and In Other Waters, this first-person “fungalpunk” RPG casts you as a literal parasite, blooming in the heads of strangers as a coastal city slides toward collapse.

Revealed during the PC Gaming Show and published by Fellow Traveller, Signet City immediately stands apart in a Summer Game Fest packed with splashy sci-fi and fantasy RPGs. Where other games hand you swords, spells, or starships, this one hands you a mycelial network and asks a quieter, more unsettling question: what if the only way to change a dying world was to grow inside the people who live in it?

Worldbuilding: Post‑Industrial Rot And Mycelial Rebirth

Signet City itself is the star. The setting is inspired by the 1980s industrial cities of Northern England, all crumbling concrete, looming coastal infrastructure, and the constant grit of economic decline. The twist is the “fungalpunk” layer. Strange bio‑technologies and mushroom‑like growths thread through alleys, hang from railings, and creep across interiors, blurring the line between architecture and organism.

This is not high fantasy or shiny cyberpunk. It is a city caught between eras, where radical ideas and fringe tech are taking root in the cracks left by austerity and neglect. Mysterious devices, improvised social spaces, and improvised survival strategies feel like they are grown rather than designed. The ecological crisis is not distant lore; it is visible as mold on walls and spores drifting in flooded underpasses.

Visually, Signet City carries over Citizen Sleeper’s love for graphic design but pushes it into first person. The look draws from black‑and‑white documentary photography, screentoned manga, and dense pen‑and‑ink illustration. Streets and interiors appear in stark monochrome, with dithered shading that makes the city feel like a zine sketch come to life. That aesthetic choice is not just a style flex. It reinforces a sense of archival observation, like you are leafing through a photo record of a place that already knows it is doomed.

You Are The Parasite

The most immediate hook is the protagonist, or more accurately, the lack of one. You are not a person. You are a parasitic fungal presence that infects multiple hosts across Signet City.

Each host is a fully realized character with their own routines, relationships, and problems. You see the world through their eyes, feel the weight of their existing lives, and then gently (or not so gently) redirect those lives. Choosing who to infect is a mechanical decision and a moral one. You are literally living off people who may already be struggling to survive.

In most immersive sims and RPGs, “inhabiting” a character is a metaphor for player control. Here it is literalized. Player choice becomes parasitic influence. When you advise, nudge, or push a host into action, the game wants you to feel the creeping wrongness of that power at the same time as you chase goals that might genuinely help them or the wider city.

The body‑hopping premise also turns Signet City into a social map. You are not one hero moving through districts. You are a network that spans households, workplaces, and underground spaces, experiencing the city from several socioeconomic angles at once.

RPG Systems: Dice, Moods, And Multi‑Host Progression

Underneath the atmospheric pitch is a surprisingly crunchy tabletop‑inspired ruleset. Jump Over the Age already proved, with Citizen Sleeper, that traditional RPG character sheets could be translated into a clean, dice‑driven interface. Signet City takes that experience and folds it into first‑person exploration.

Each host functions as a character build. They have skills, resources, and a social position that govern what you can do while occupying them. One host might have access to factory floors and union meetings, another to bureaucratic offices or nightlife scenes. Your parasite is the throughline, slowly growing and learning how best to leverage each life.

The standout mechanic is the way emotional state ties into dice‑based resolution. Instead of static stats, the odds of success in key actions shift based on how your current host feels. A character who is exhausted or anxious will have different dice distributions than one who is hopeful or fired up after a small victory. That concept, already hinted at in Signet City’s reveal materials, suggests a loop where managing someone’s wellbeing is not only empathetic roleplay but also a min‑maxing concern.

As you explore interconnected hubs across the city, your parasite effectively levels up by spreading. New hosts open new regions and storylines. You juggle time and attention between them, tending to relationships, feeding on certain opportunities, and weighing when to deepen your grip versus stepping back to preserve what is left of their autonomy.

It is an inversion of the typical skill tree. Instead of one character unlocking new powers, you, as a fungus, unlock new people.

Narrative Themes: Exploitation, Solidarity, And Bodily Autonomy

Citizen Sleeper earned its following by grounding sci‑fi ideas in gig work, precarity, and community. Signet City appears to carry forward those concerns, but in a more aggressive metaphor.

The city itself is facing authoritarian pressure, ecological breakdown, and the influx of strange technologies that promise salvation while often worsening inequality. Within that context, playing as a parasite forces you to think about exploitation at a bodily level. Are you helping these people, or just using them more efficiently than corporations and governments already do?

There is obvious body horror here, but the horror is not framed as simple monstrousness. Fungi are also agents of renewal and interconnection. The game’s fungalpunk lens treats parasitism, symbiosis, and community reliance as part of the same spectrum. Sometimes burrowing deeper into a host’s mind might be the only way to give them the strength to push back against a system that has already taken everything.

Expect Signet City’s stories to live in that ambiguity. Neighbors form informal support networks, activists try to wield dangerous tech for collective ends, and small personal choices ripple across your host network. You are constantly weighing the city’s terminal trajectory against the immediate, intimate damage you might be doing to individuals.

Thematically, it sets Signet City apart from the power fantasies filling much of the current RPG slate. This is a game where “saving” the world might look like accepting that you are part of the problem, then trying to become a different kind of problem.

How It Differs From Other Immersive RPGs

Signet City arrives at a time when “immersive sim” has become a shorthand for games like Arkane’s Dishonored spiritual successors or more systemic RPGs such as Prey, Deus Ex, and upcoming titles chasing that lineage. While it shares some DNA with those games, Signet City diverges in several important ways.

First, its focus is explicitly social rather than combat‑driven. There is no indication of traditional FPS gunplay or stealth takedown loops. Instead, the drama plays out through conversations, dice‑gated decisions, and the slow accrual of social leverage. Where other immersive sims give you power over space, Signet City gives you power over people.

Second, the host‑hopping structure challenges the genre’s usual self‑insert. Modern RPGs often build out elaborate character creators and loadouts that reinforce the fantasy of a singular protagonist. Here, identity is fluid. You inhabit whoever you can infect, then learn to care about them, their connections, and the limits of your control.

Third, the fungalpunk aesthetic is not just a theme slapped on familiar mechanics. The slow, creeping, branching nature of fungus mirrors how you progress and how the story is told. Your influence travels along invisible routes through apartments, workplaces, and back rooms, making the city feel like a living organism whose nervous system you are learning to navigate.

Finally, Signet City’s scale and perspective are intimate. Instead of sprawling open worlds with quest markers on distant horizons, this is a condensed, deeply authored city where every street corner can house a full storyline. It feels closer to walking through a graphic novel or a set of interlocking short stories than pounding through a loot treadmill.

The Shape Of A Terminal Season

There is no release date yet, but Signet City is confirmed for PC via Steam, GOG, and the Humble Store. The reveal trailer already hints at a structure built around a single “terminal season” in the city’s life, a limited window in which to spread, intervene, and leave your mark.

If Citizen Sleeper was about surviving another cycle in a decaying space station, Signet City looks like it will ask what you choose to grow in the cracks when you know time is running out. It is an immersive RPG about inhabiting others instead of embodying yourself, a body‑horror city story that treats parasitism and solidarity as uncomfortable siblings.

In a year crowded with bright, bombastic role‑playing promises, Signet City stands out by shrinking the scale and deepening the infection. It wants to get under your skin, and it is in no rush to leave.