D-topia Review (Switch 2)

In a society optimised for the happiness of the many, what becomes of those who disrupt the balance? As the newest residential Facilitator at D-topia, a meticulously managed AI-run settlement, your job isn't just to resolve mechanical issues and keep the facilities running smoothly; it's to be a moral cog in the algorithm, helping residents solve their problems.

Developed by Marumittu Games and published by Annapurna Interactive, D-topia pairs an intriguing premise and stylish presentation with a ‘choices matter’ narrative, one grounded in thorny futurist ethics, such as whether clones should be afforded human rights or whether society should include only those genetically best suited to coexist and maximise harmony.

Between conversations with a roster of NPCs, each with distinct backstories and personality quirks, encounters that give this otherwise sterile utopia a welcome emotional texture, your job is to solve clever minimalist logic puzzles that task you with altering weather systems, restocking facilities, or troubleshooting the colony's hidden infrastructure.

D-topia spends its six-hour runtime asking intriguing questions and invites you to believe it's building toward a grander message. Its avoidance of binary tropes – ‘AI bad, humans good’ – is refreshing. Yet by the time the credits roll, its ideas almost invariably arrive at predictable conclusions, and the puzzle sections failed to leave a lasting impression.

Your first day in D-topia begins much like every day thereafter. You awaken in your swish AI-managed apartment to find your breakfast prepared and your uniform freshly pressed. It's hard not to feel a pang of lifestyle envy, particularly with all the beautifully illustrated meals you’ll see. The game's minimalist art direction is a perfect fit for its vision of post-scarcity comfort.

Then it’s off to the factory, where you'll tackle a short burst of aesthetically pleasing logic puzzles and earn U-Points to spend on neat but purely cosmetic décor to fill your apartment. These puzzling interludes only take a few minutes, and while your performance during these sections is timed and graded, the rankings appear to have little bearing on the story.

Just when you begin to question the practical utility of your job, you learn that although human labour is no longer economically necessary, and work at the Factory still exists for its psychological value because the AI believes people still need routine, purpose and structure to realise the settlement’s goal of ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people’.

Once your shift ends, you explore the neighbourhood and meet a cast of residents who share their personal struggles. Every day ultimately culminates in a new ethical dilemma, resolved through a recurring ‘Brain Meeting’ in which a series of branching choices determine whether you uphold D-topia's technocratic rules or exercise your own moral judgement.

One early example involves an abandoned pet cat. With no registered caretaker, the AI concludes that euthanasia is the most logical solution. Choosing instead to adopt the animal saves the day and establishes how the game’s AI overlords guarantee abundance and material wellbeing but struggle with the messier realities of individual circumstance.

My biggest gripe with D-topia's moral dilemmas is that they're often too predictable, with the ‘humane’ option usually being the obvious one. These aren't presented in-game as necessarily good-or-evil choices, but more so as moments where quietly bending the rules to help out an NPC is preferable to reducing the problem to a callous optimisation exercise.

Puzzling also comes into play outside the Factory as computational fixes carried out by the Facilitator to override glitches in the system. Most require deduction and sequencing as you guide numbered tiles through a grid to a target, with new twists gradually layered on that add barriers, warp tiles, mirrored movement, and other modifiers.

While satisfying to solve, D-topia’s puzzles act as bite-sized brain teasers that fit neatly into the game's science-fiction but rarely develop into anything too challenging. I was able to solve the bulk of them within a few seconds on my first attempt. There are optional puzzles designed to be more difficult, but none of them took me more than two or three minutes to figure out.

The game spans seven days, each a self-contained chapter built around a distinct ethical quandary. Though D-topia posits some interesting questions, by the end, it falls short of any particularly insightful answers. It sets the player up for a philosophical payoff that amounts to little more than ‘People should consider the happiness of others’. Okay.

It struck me as tone deaf how D-topia never thoughtfully interrogates the assumptions of its own world. Its genetics-based social hierarchy and algorithmic governance are taken as a given fact and are not subjects of any serious critique. It’s squarely concerned with how such a system should operate rather than whether it ought to exist at all.

Its narratives either tiptoe around or sheepishly opt out of issues central to today’s AI conversations in favour of pure science fiction, which is a valid creative choice but one that left me feeling that too many topical themes like labour displacement, mass surveillance and the concentration of technocratic power were left curiously underexamined.

D-topia instead deliberately opts for a gently-paced gameplay loop built around speculative dilemmas. The AI proposes an emotionally detached solution, while the NPCs float a more compassionate fix. It’s up to the player to choose, so there’s second-run replayability. But that framework effectively repeats itself with some puzzling thrown in until the credits roll.

The game runs well on Switch 2 and looks vibrant, though with too little visual variation, especially given that you’ll see the same few environments over and over during your playthrough. The sound design is minimalist with a few looping ambient themes. It’s a competently executed and visually polished title that is a good fit and age-appropriate for kids and young teens.