Phonopolis Review: Sharp Surveillance State Satire, With Added Slapstick

It’s annoying being told what to do, isn’t it? Well, what if you were told so many things that you lost your ability to parse that didactic dynamic? You can’t be angry about it forever. Especially when most of the population, including the most powerful people, seem to be doing what they’re told and believing certain things, and benefiting from it. You might bristle against this way of life at first, but maybe they have a point? What if this wasn’t indicative of a stark individual helplessness, but actually, a small consequence for the good of society? Surely, at this point, obedience must be the only way forward. This is the world in which the protagonist of Phonopolis finds himself.

There’s this David Foster Wallace interview that gets clipped and shared on social media now and again, about how we seem to have moved towards a world that is never quiet. I’m sure the irony of its SNS recurrence would not be lost on him if he were still with us. In it, he talks about piping music through shopping malls and how, even though it typically sounds terrible, we have come to accept it as background stimulation. He also talks about the difficulty of reading books, not because of any given person’s lack of will or desire, but because the silence and quiet of reading create a unique, contemporary sense of dread, even for veteran page-turners.

If our sensory receptors are getting shotgun-blasted with input at all times, it’s attractive, and even a matter of survival, sometimes, to continue gorging from that quick and easy trough of junk food stimulus. We can’t just yank out the catheter and exit the hospital; we’d just be walking into another ward. Phonopolis captures the unease of this idea very carefully through a series of handcrafted, politically charged cardboard dioramas — and in an era dominated by an abundance of lazy slop, projects like this feel more necessary than ever.

To begin, Felix is operating a machine that crushes the artefacts of the Old World. A few of his fellow citizens are picking through the remains of an opera house outside the walls of a cardboard metropolis. They’re chucking the greebly bits, anything representative or needlessly complicated, into a big heap, and when it fills up, all Felix has to do is press a button to grind it all into dust.

If Felix tries to walk away from his station, a speaker blares — on instinct, he shuffles back. There’s no room for doubt in this reality, just a great and united vision, declared by The Leader, whose body makes up about 75% of Phonopolis, a city flecked with shouty megaphones and shaped like an award statue, with the citizens living in tight rungs underneath His monumentous abode.

It wasn’t always like this. A workplace accident leads Felix into the ruins of the aforementioned opera, where he’s observed in silence by three bickering, supposedly exiled intellectuals. Here, he finds a pair of headphones which render the megaphones of Phonopolis obsolete. What follows is a thoughtful skyward adventure to undo this tragically familiar development towards totalitarianism. At first, Felix isn’t entirely on board with what he’s doing. Won’t this just get him in trouble? And who are these three wee guys to take over once the power has been vacuumed away? A whimsical, childlike inner monologue from Joe Acheson focalises Felix’s naivete without feeling patronising.

Phonopolis is the work of Prague-based studio Amanita Design, responsible for singular point-and-click games that don’t necessarily garner huge audiences but are well respected for their visual style, spirited soundtracks, surreal worldbuilding and wordless stories. As a fan of their stuff — I have a plush of Josef from Machinarium in my peripheral vision right now — I’d say Phonopolis is the best game the studio has put out. I like the story a lot, but the handcrafted dioramas and propagandistic art style work their way into your memory very quickly, too. I can already tell it’s a game I’m going to be thinking about for a very long time, and an easy shorthand when I want to espouse the industry’s creative side.

More so than some of Amanita’s other games, Phonopolis also feels wonderfully cohesive from start to finish. The art ties so neatly into the gameplay as you pull apart the world’s raw seams, unscrewing bits of faulty machinery and flipping through the walls of the inhabitants’ modular homes. The indie space is inundated with eye-opening art styles, but the one that dominates Phonopolis is similar to Bungie’s Marathon — completely unique thanks to its level of refinement and well of far-reaching inspirations. We take for granted that some developers will indeed spend a good chunk of time ideating on how a game should look these days, instead of spinning a rickety wheel with spokes labelled ‘medieval’, ‘cyberpunk’, and ‘retrofuture’.

The soundtrack is the best I’ve heard in a while, too, and an easy shoo-in for end-of-year awards. Primarily wordless, to my ears it feels like a delectable mix of sonics that evokes New Order, brakence, LCD Soundsystem and Yellow Magic Orchestra. Floex’s score is computer-coded, industrial, at times adorable and wistful — but never fails to ground you in the unique dystopian atmosphere of Phonopolis. A matter helped by Amanita’s affinity for eclectic foley art.

Pacing-wise, the narrative is on an amazing tilt for the first couple of hours, with thinky puzzles that are challenging but not too brutish and well-surrounded by wonderfully animated, scripted sequences and story events. All of the puzzles are actively happening to Felix, which charges them with a brilliant sense of urgency, and leads to all manner of spills, trips and bonked heads. Phonopolis holds the silliness of slapstick alongside its clever political commentary, which is key to its beaming charm.

Unfortunately, the game begins to rip up the pacing carpet in the second half, and especially towards the end, by throwing an onslaught of puzzles at the player that can feel never-ending at times, with very little story progression in between. It’s not that these puzzles aren’t fun to figure out in a vacuum, but some of the formats begin to repeat, and the story slows to a halt — it reminded me that you can always have too much of a good thing.

After what felt like a few false crescendos, I kept being rerouted back towards more of the same in Phonopolis, and it drew me out of what had been, so far, an immensely propulsive story. This is anathema to the value-for-money crowd, I’m sure, but I feel it could have been shorter and packed more of a punch. I’d have easily paid for an expansion with the rest of the puzzles held back that I could pick through later down the line. Either way, I really wanted to revisit this world as I rolled credits. The most vivid puzzles had me thinking about how things are built to fit together in a world of calculated neatness, but in reality, we cannot escape our human capacity for ramshackle construction and error. Even if it feels impossible, there is always a way through the fog.

The Verdict

Phonopolis is a visually resplendent adventure that is easy to recommend for those into quirky indie odysseys, but one that you kind of have to push through in the late game to see out its bombastic, beautiful ending. Either way, it’s a magnificent game, and I particularly enjoyed how, through the story of Felix’s clash with The Leader, Phonopolis prodded me to think about the lackadaisical, subconscious ways I play into my own obedience within the broader capitalist apparatus. Phonopolis does this without feeling heavy-handed or overserious, which is an incredibly tricky balancing act to pull off. There are more than enough wry gags in here that you aren’t dwelling on the difficult subject matter for too long, anyway — as Marge Simpson so famously said, “At times like this, I guess all you can do is laugh.”