A Unique Puzzle-Narrative Hybrid That Suffers When it Starts Talking
The world of D-topia is, by most definitions, a utopia. The people are happy, healthy and safe, and everyone has their place in society. Troids (robots) do the manual labour, and humans can mostly chill, subsisting on a basic income that is determined by their social ranking. Talk to anyone – and, by golly, you can talk to every last Tom, Dick and Harry – and their problems feel almost comically small compared to the ones we have today.
But D-topia’s world immediately waves red flags. Perhaps it’s the cynical Brit in me, or the media I’ve consumed, but I was waiting for the utopia to topple over. I was convinced that Wesley Snipes was going to turn up and burn everything down. In fiction, if there’s ever a utopia, it’s there to be destroyed.
He Doesn’t Know How to Use the Three Seashells!
But no. Instead, we are told that D-topia has kinks that need to be ironed out – and as the ‘Facilitator’, a kind of cyber-janitor, you are the one who does the ironing. But, generally, any issues are microscopic and reserved to the characters. These problems aren’t solved by changing society (one sequence half-heartedly wonders whether something bigger should happen, and then walks that thought back); you’re just finding a place for unique people within that society. It’s not society that’s broken, it’s the people. They just need to fit better.
It’s a sentiment that kind of broke me! Because D-topia is not perfect. In fact, there are elements to D-topia’s ecosystem that are distasteful. Clones grown to provide organs for others? A caste system that denies lower castes access to certain areas? Synthetic food with barely any flavour? These are all ideas raised in D-topia, but you can’t condemn them. In D-topia, these things are mentioned and glimpsed – and you might help a citizen negotiate them – but you don’t tend to confront these problems as something endemic that must be resolved. You just nod along and find loopholes that allow people to exist within the system.
Worldbuilding That’s Deep, but Topics That are Shallow
I appreciate that it’s an odd place to start a review, but the story and world is so central to D-topia (you’re going to spend 70% of your time dealing with it and its characters), and I never overcame my unease with it. I kept coming across mini Black Mirror episodes, but they were written by someone who saw them as funny quirks of a functioning system. Yet my inner Charlie Brooker was saying “No! People falling in love with robots, and creating genetically perfect children isn’t cute and lovable”. I honestly wondered if it was a cultural divide: D-topia is a Japanese-developed game under the Annapurna umbrella, and the ideas might resonate more in Japan.
There’s also an odd effect that comes from building a narrative game within a utopia (I will get to the game itself soon, I promise!). D-topia is astonishingly low-stakes. I wanted to get wrapped up in the story, but I found myself slipping off because everyone is either happy or dumping exposition on me. There is so much detail that you can uncover about this paradise (it’s almost Tolkien-like in its meticulous world-building), but there are remarkably few reasons to be interested in it.
You might be forgiven for thinking that I was allergic to D-topia, that it deserves a poor score, but I’m more fascinated by it. This is a narrative game, speckled with puzzles, that shows why utopias don’t make great backdrops. There are so many ideas, bubbling away, but they don’t get interrogated in a way that I am used to. Any sci-fi writer worth their salt would be creating dystopian events within them.
Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat
So, what do you actually do in D-topia? The span of the game is a single week, and each day you wake up and perform your Facilitator routine. You wake up in your house, do some light chores and then perform a wellness check. This is a kind of half-maze, a bit of Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training, that shows you are mentally capable for the day. It’s not difficult: it’s more light spatial awareness.
Then it’s off to work. The factory is a short distance away, so you get to chat to other D-topia residents on the way, building your understanding of how the city (and its sister cities) work.
Work takes the form of a series of puzzles. There are three of them, individually unlocked, until they all get shuffled together on the later days. They’re beautifully presented and could be puzzle games in their own right. One is a kind of keys-and-locks puzzle, where you are trying to slot blocks with numerics on the top onto pressure pads that also have numerics on the top. They need to match, and there are often gates that nudge the integers up by one. These puzzles are pretty simple.
Then there are node maps where you need to reach a numerical value at the end of the node map, but some nodes are teleport gates, number multipliers and more. You can’t travel through the same node twice, so it’s half-maze, half-sums. And the final puzzle is Minesweeper, but with a difference. Imagine that some of the numbers in a Minesweeper are on a merry-go-round, pivoted by you, the player, and you’re halfway there. These puzzles are the easiest of the bunch.
Giving in to Overtime Culture
There’s a timer ticking down, handing you a grading at the end, and that grading determines how much cash you’re given. In a neat twist (and, again, something that could be distasteful in certain quarters) you can do overtime for extra merit and cash. Cash is important, after all, as you can buy furniture and stuff for your room, as well as food for your growling stomach.
Then it’s the evening, where free time starts. This is where you get to make friends and build a relationship bar with them. They might have fetch quests for you, trivia questions to answer, or – more significantly – each day tends to have a focused character. You get to complete a lengthy narrative mission for them, boosting their affection for you greatly. Push that bar high enough and you might be able to take them to a virtual tearoom in the evening for a longer chinwag.
The puzzles are great (and often echo around D-topia, as you can stop and complete incidental puzzles for malfunctioning troids). If anything, I wanted more of them, hoping that D-topia would turn into a sprawling version of The Witness. I was always compelled to do overtime, simply because I wanted to play more of them.
The missions, outside of giving me the utopian heeby-jeebies, are also well written and composed. They’re never onerous, and it’s almost impossible to fail them. They tend to finish with something that is oddly called a ‘Brain Meeting’, where you follow a flowchart where you determine their fate. If there’s a criticism, these Brain Meetings give the impression of divergent choice, but really there are only a couple of potential outcomes and I am willing to bet that only one of those outcomes is acceptable.
Like a Twilight Zone Episode Where Everyone Lives Happily Ever After
Which is a long way of saying that I internalised two very different reactions to D-topia. As a hybrid narrative and puzzle game, I found D-topia to be hugely refreshing. It turns puzzle-playing into an actual paid-job, and then leaves you to use your free time as you wish. That separation of the two sides of its gameplay was superb. I’ve not played a game that’s done that before.
The other reaction came from my cynical side. D-topia introduces complex, mature themes, and then barely engages with them. Imagine having a conversation where someone keeps saying that war and poverty sucks, but they can’t expand on it beyond that. That’s the experience of D-topia.
To say I was conflicted with D-topia is an understatement. On an intellectual level I think it fails, but as a mood, a relaxed adherence to a daily routine, I find it fascinating. Who knows how you might react. If you’ve got any love for puzzles and narrative games, you might just have to play it and make up your own mind.
Important Links
AI Knows Best… Or Does It? D-topia Invites You Into A Curious Puzzle Adventure – https://www.thexboxhub.com/ai-knows-best-or-does-it-d-topia-invites-you-into-a-curious-puzzle-adventure/
Best New Xbox And Game Pass Games For July 2026 – https://www.thexboxhub.com/best-new-xbox-and-game-pass-games-for-july-2026/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/d-topia/9mzfqbnkln51
