Fantasy Cities Follow the Spirit of One of the Great City Builders of the Early 2000s.
If you’re a PC gamer of a certain age, you may remember Emergent Games. Over two years between 1998 and 2000, the studio released three games that would go on to become classics in the city-building genre: Caesar III, Pharaoh again Zeus: King of Olympus. SimCity it may have established the formula that all city builders have followed since, but if you ask me, those three games made that formula their own in a way that few others have since.
More than twenty years later, people are still playing those games, with fan projects like Augustus helping to smooth out some of the bugs and rough edges that Evolution never had a chance to fix. 2025, one of my favorite games of the year, The Wandering Villagetook the Impressions formula and worked it into a Studio Ghibli inspired setting. Now, another studio is tapping into that same source of inspiration, with a project titled Theos: Cities of Myth.
The new game is the latest effort from Triskell Interactive, a developer best known for its work in 2023. Pharaoh: A New Agewhich was an HD remake of the original Pharaoh and the 2000 expansion Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile. In a press conference held by French publisher Dotemu, the Triskell team said they wanted to create a spiritual successor. Pharaoh’s sequence, Zeus: King of Olympusinstead of direct rework. I didn’t get a chance to ask Dotemu if he had a problem getting the license rights Zeus name or if those rights are too expensive for a small project like Theos. What I can say is that the new game is meant to emulate its predecessor and feel familiar to anyone who played the old Impressions catalog.
Love Zeus before you, Theos is an isometric city builder where Greek mythology and a host of gods inform both how you design your cities and the objectives you need to complete to advance the scene. In the earliest build I played, only the Athens campaign was ready for playtesting, and even then most of the game’s tools and equipment were filled with placeholders.
I began my campaign by laying the foundation for what would later become the city sanctuary of Athena. But before I could do that job, I had to first build houses for the immigrants to move to my emerging city, then provide them with food and water, so that those people could then build better houses for themselves that would attract more people to my version of Athens. All of this will sound familiar if you’ve played a puzzle game before. Gameplay is built around designing efficient supply chains that provide your city’s residents with all the materials they need to build rich homes. Each building you put down – be it a fountain, an agora or a gymnasium – sends an NPC known as a traveler who delivers goods or services associated with its building. Your settlement will remain a shantytown if you cannot ensure that your citizens have uninterrupted access to all the benefits of civilization.
In the Impressions games, the biggest city building challenge came from the fact that you couldn’t directly control the pedestrian routes. You had to design the streets of your city to suit their AI which is often filled with carts. This meant that the cities you built never felt like real places. Theos tries to solve that frustration by giving the player full control over the pedestrians, allowing you to draw the route you want them to take in your city. The Triskell team said this will allow players to design their cities almost any way they want. At least that’s the idea.
In the build I played, the walker painting paths felt like they added a little control to the experience. When I went to place my first set of buildings, the game took care of the route for me, but as I expanded my city and added new housing blocks, it didn’t fix those routes automatically. Each time, I had to go back to the structures I built to tell the game to draw a new delivery route or draw them myself. Here’s the thing, the concept used by the game often leaves parts of my city uncut, and doing the work myself I felt a little happy, with an interface that didn’t do a good job of communicating how far I could send each adventurer. Also, I played a very early version of the game, so a lack of polish is to be expected.
It was hard to judge the art style of this game. Zeus: King of Olympus it had simple but colorful isometric graphics that did a great job of communicating the warmth and vibe of its setting. Another criticism of Triskell Pharaoh the reminder is that the studio tampered with the original game’s art design. There were inconsistencies between different elements. The buildings and scenery look faithful to their original inspiration, while the NPCs all look like they were plucked from a completely different game. It was one of the reasons I never ended up buying a remake, even if I liked the source material. As far as I can tell, the studio doesn’t seem to be listening to that criticism. The NPCs still feel out of step with the rest of the game’s art design.
Even with those hang ups, I still had fun playing Theos. Triskell is not reinventing the genre here as such Manor Lords or Frostpunkbut it’s okay. There’s something comforting about revisiting a formula you’ve enjoyed in the past and seeing it put to good, meaningful use. Theos: Cities of Myth it will be coming to PC sometime later this year.
