RadCity, an upcoming Steam game from indie developer babadokia, looks like a blend of Disco Elysium and Fallout, in the best possible way. The game, which currently has a demo available on Steam, seeks to expand the isometric adventure space by giving players a moody and atmospheric apocalypse to explore, mixing this with traditional survival gameplay.
Like Disco Elysium, RadCity drops players into a desolate, vaguely European city in an advanced state of decay. Bombs have been dropped, clouds of irradiated dust float through streets and concentrate in deadly pockets, mutated monsters roam aimlessly, and there are precious few friendly faces left. Players have to creep through these treacherous urban environments in order to survive, scavenging, stalking, and climbing around to avoid danger or collect resources. It definitely still has a fair bit to prove, but players can get a little taste of RadCity straight away; it's certainly worth a little detour.
RadCity Distinguishes Itself Through Its Handcrafted World
The most striking aspect of RadCity is its haunting post-apocalyptic world. This is a tough setting to make interesting, mainly due to the fact that it's so overdone: a quick look at any asset library will reveal countless staples of the nuclear fallout premise, such as scattered debris, run-down buildings, and broken-down cars. These familiar visual motifs make sense in the context of an apocalypse, but they are all too often thrown together with little rhyme, reason, or intention. In other words, most games in this genre space feel like they just grabbed a "post-apocalypse starter pack," making them feel generic.
To be fair, a post-apocalypse is, by its nature, defined by desolation and the death of progress, making interesting level design no easy feat. But this is why franchises like Fallout, which find a unique aesthetic despite such limitations, are so effective.
RadCity presents itself as lovingly crafted. The explorable zone in the demo is small, but impressively diverse, with train tracks, floodlit industrial barriers, run-down businesses, wattle-and-daub shelters, and trees with falling leaves, still clinging on to what little life they have left. The game's Euro-industrial aesthetic, coupled with the top-down perspective, is what makes it truly reminiscent of Disco Elysium, despite it having little in common on the gameplay and narrative fronts.
RadCity's Gameplay Is Simple, but Promising
The experience of playing RadCity isn't exactly what one might expect. While the game bears the trappings of a dark survival game, perhaps one where you monitor your vitals and build structures to fend off enemies, this isn't how things unfold in practice. Ultimately, RadCity feels more like an adventure game with survival elements, rather than a traditional survival game with adventure tropes sprinkled in.
A lot of this has to do with the aforementioned environment design (a lot of survival games are procedurally generated, whereas RadCity is hand-crafted), but also the moment-to-moment gameplay. Character movement is fluid and physics-based, lending traversal a surprising platformer-esque quality. For instance, the player-character maintains momentum when jumping, making it possible to control the distance of a jump and, in theory at least, opening the door to risky or emergent gameplay opportunities.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.
All in all, RadCity has a strong understanding of what makes urban exploration so fascinating and tense. You never quite know what's around the next corner, and you have to really think about things like routes and points of ingress and egress when entering unfamiliar buildings. It's not the most complex exploration system in the world, but it's shaping up to be deceptively deep, thoughtful, and puzzle-like, which will hopefully help set RadCity apart from similar games.
We Still Have a Lot to Learn About RadCity
While I definitely think that the RadCity demo is worth checking out, you shouldn't expect anything too substantial. The demo can be cleared in about 20 or 30 minutes, and doesn't offer insight into what will presumably be key features and systems, like the item economy. It doesn't help that RadCity's developer, babadokia, hasn't revealed much about the game through its Steam page, nor through other avenues. This isn't a bad thing, strictly speaking—it adds a bit to the enigmatic allure of RadCity, if anything—but it would be nice to learn a bit more about the project before too long.
In a Steam blog post, babadokia explains that RadCity is modeled after industrial cities in Romania, adding to the game's authenticity.
Specifically, I'm interested in how RadCity will be structured. Its Steam page says that "you have to gather enough supplies — food, for two people — for a 40 days train journey," suggesting that resource management and a day-night cycle will be central to the experience, but it's hard to say what exactly this will look like. RadCity is on track for a late 2026 release, according to babadokia, so we should get more information about this atmospheric, unnerving nuclear nightmare soon.