After two games spent keeping a battered android alive one dice roll at a time, Gareth Damian Martin is handing players a very different kind of body to live in — several of them, in fact, and none of them their own.

Their next project, Signet City, is a first-person "fungalpunk" RPG where you play as a sentient spore creeping through an urban sprawl. You spread by quietly infecting people, and once you're lodged in someone's head you become their new inner voice: a passenger that nudges their feelings, steers their choices, and slowly bends the city's events toward whatever future you've decided is the right one. The mechanics are their own beast, but the texture will feel familiar to anyone who's listened to the bickering skills of Disco Elysium or Esoteric Ebb. You're an outside intelligence murmuring at a host, fully convinced you know what's best for them.

A city you infect one person at a time

You don't get to wander Signet City like a tourist. Each day you pick a host to slip into, and that person hands you a limited pool of actions plus their own slice of the map. Martin compares the structure to Dishonored — self-contained pockets of the city rather than one seamless, walkable whole.

The hook is what fuels you: emotion. The spore feeds on it, and the entire skill system runs on it too. Need to reach somewhere your host normally can't? Read the obstacle, then manufacture the mood that cracks it. Martin's go-to example is a locked door you could kick down — far easier if your host is seething — so you steer them into a pub, pick a fight, and ride the resulting fury straight through the wood.

Because this shares DNA with the Citizen Sleeper games, a six-sided die still lurks beneath every attempt, and bad luck can still torch your plans. Flub that kick and you might injure the very host you're piloting, which can send you hunting for someone else entirely to solve the same problem from a new angle. No two people are wired alike, so the path to a solution shifts with each body. One person might spike with adrenaline the moment they spot propaganda for a cause they hate; another might only get there if you drag them to the top of a skyscraper because they're scared of heights.

Moment to moment, Martin says there's a streak of Firewatch in it: you roam a space as your host, the game quietly reveals what's interactive as you look around, and a trigger pull surfaces the UI tied to whatever you've found.

A story told in three persons at once

The most quietly ambitious part is grammatical. Signet City is, on purpose, a game written in first, second, and third person all at the same time. The camera is first-person. The spore is addressed as "you." The hosts are narrated from the outside — Sid does this, Sid feels that. And underneath all of it sits the actual person holding the controller.

That tangle is the entire point. Martin traces it back to tabletop role-playing, where players slide between pronouns constantly: speaking as themselves, then as their character, then as a gleeful narrator wishing disaster on their own creation, then a beat later desperately rooting for a good roll on that same character's behalf. It's a headspace Martin feels games rarely sit in — the nearest comparison they offer is a Dark Urge run in Baldur's Gate 3 — and writing it forces a genuinely interesting problem: how do you narrate "you" and "Sid" in the same breath? A lot of it, they note, grew out of threads Citizen Sleeper started pulling on but couldn't quite hold, so Martin built a stranger shape that could.

Shepherd, or master?

Where all those clashing perspectives grind against each other is where the "punk" lives — friction between the city at large and the intimate tug-of-war between parasite and host. Martin treats the spore as a deliberately double-edged symbol: it can stand for authoritarian control and for revolution at once, and the game wants you to sit in that contradiction rather than resolve it.

If you grow into the single most powerful thing in the city, the questions get pointed. Are you a shepherd or a master? Do you nudge, or do you dictate? Do you nurture the place — or decide humanity already had its turn, trashed the ecology, and has whatever's coming coming?

For now we've only got an announcement trailer, and there's a real wait ahead: Martin pegs development at roughly the halfway mark, which rules out a release this year. But as the follow-up to one of indie gaming's most quietly influential RPGs, "you are the voice inside everyone's head" is a hell of a pitch.