Phonopolis is a playful dystopian adventure from Amanita Design

rockpapershotgun.com:

Czech indie collective Amanita Design have revealed their next adventure game, the dystopian Phonopolis. In a handful of firsts for the collective, Phonopolis will not only be their first game with 3D graphics, but it's also going to be the first that has actual narration rather than fun, nonsense noises. There's no release date just yet, but have a watch of the teaser trailer below. It looks a real treat.

Phonopolis stars a young lad called Felix who actually has some thoughts of his own while existing in an authoritarian regime. Amanita say the game’s themes are individualism and manipulation, but that it’ll still somehow be “playful and light-hearted” in their traditional style. Exploration will also be as important to Phonopolis as the rest of Amanita’s back catalogue, they add.

The announcement goes on to say that Felix's main goal in Phonopolis will be stopping the city’s capital-L Leader from playing the “Absolute Tone” and scuppering everyone’s lives. It's not entirely clear what said tone will do to Felix and his fellow citizens, but it's no doubt something sinister. I’m not musical in the slightest myself – I lost my only instrument, a golden kazoo, in a forest while on a school trip years ago – but my understanding of absolute tone is that it’s an ability some people have to recreate a noise without a reference note.

Whatever the Absolute Tone ends up being, it's clear that both sound and music will be key to solving Phonopolis' mysteries, as you’d expect given the game's title. The Leader has used a system of loudspeakers and subliminal messaging to create an orderly and happy city, but ended up turning everyone into “mindless servants, mere cogs in an artificially shaped society," Amanita say. Amanita’s