Inside Signet City’s Fungalpunk World of Parasites and Politics

Signet City is an upcoming RPG that flips usual game roles on their head. Players don’t control heroes or villains. Instead, they play as a parasite living inside a decayed city swallowed by fungi. The city blends post-punk Britain with eerie biological horror. It’s a strange mix that sets the stage for a unique story.

The parasite isn’t just a background detail. It’s the player’s character. You slip into different hosts every day. Each host lives in a distinct part of the city. Your job is to influence their emotions and actions. You don’t just watch the city — you shape it from within.

Gareth Damian Martin, known for Citizen Sleeper and In Other Waters, is the developer behind Signet City. He calls it a big step forward from his earlier work. While Citizen Sleeper focused on themes like identity and belonging, Signet City dives into politics and social unrest. It uses the parasite-host relationship to explore ideas about authoritarianism, revolution, and radical change.

“As a parasite, each day you choose which host to drop into and then you have a limited number of actions that day,” Martin explains. The parasite feeds on emotion, and the game’s RPG skills revolve around managing these feelings. You roll a six-sided die for each action, so chance plays a big role. Sometimes your plans will fail, which keeps the experience tense and unpredictable.

A City Alive with Conflict and Mystery

The city itself is a character. It’s a broken place, overgrown with fungi that creep through every corner. The fungus isn’t just decoration. It adds to the world’s biological horror and reflects the city’s decay. Walking through the city feels like exploring a living organism, where every corner hides secrets.

Martin compares the feel to Firewatch in some ways. “When you’re one of these characters, you’re walking around the space and you’re kind of discovering it,” he says. But instead of a single character, you inhabit multiple hosts with different perspectives. The game plays with storytelling by calling the parasite “you” and referring to hosts in the third person. This shifting viewpoint deepens the narrative and challenges how players see the city and its people.

Politics, Power, and Perspective

The parasite is more than a creepy organism. It symbolizes political ideas. Martin says a parasite can represent both authoritarianism and revolution. It can embody radical ideas and conflicts within the city. This lets the game explore social and political volatility in a fresh way. Players influence not just individual hosts but the broader struggles simmering in the city’s streets.

Players have a limited number of actions each day, tied to both emotion and chance. This system forces careful choices. Do you push a host toward rebellion or submission? Do you feed on fear or hope? Every decision matters, and every roll of the dice can change the outcome.

Signet City is still in development for PC and is about halfway done. There’s no release date yet, and it won’t arrive in 2026. Fellow Traveller is publishing the game, and it was revealed during the recent PC Gaming Show at Summer Game Fest with help from Jump Over The Age. Fans of Martin’s previous work can expect something darker and more politically charged this time.

Signet City invites players to live inside a strange, fungal world where every choice ripples through a city on the edge. It’s a game about power, survival, and seeing the world from a new, unsettling angle. And it’s already shaping up to be one of the more daring narrative RPGs to come.