Upcoming game Canvas City is a dystopian role playing game with clever ideas about what our potential future might be. When games use dystopian realms as parables for our actual reality, they too often deliver narratives and gameplay focused on para-military or post-apocalyptic futures, with dour notes, little hope and lots of guns.
Canvas City offers a more colourful and infinitely more realistic approach, exploring deep questions about where current politics might lead us, but through the lens of a skater crew.
Add in novel, turn-based gameplay and a cast of peppy, endearing characters, and this debut game from New Zealand studio Disc 2 Games brims with bright potential.
Canvas City game preview – quick links
The refreshing dystopia of Canvas City
Canvas City takes place in a world driven to sterility by severe public policy.
As shared in the game’s description, ‘Once a vibrant hub of music, movement, and creative energy, Canvas City is now a sterilised sprawl of luxury apartments, corporate towers and silent streets. Public art is outlawed. Music permits are impossible to obtain. Citizens drift through life, silent and uninspired. But from the cracks in the pavement, a new wave is rising.’
In this world, government overreach has created a society where any form of visual rebellion – colours, graffiti and skating – is outlawed, and citizens are expected to live and behave blandly.
It’s not a future that feels outside the realm of possibility, unfortunately. It’s over-the-top and taken to the extreme, but the idea of a government attempting to crack down on creative expression is a reoccurring theme in media for a reason. There’s ample precedent in the real world.
The heroes of Canvas City therefore have an understandable and relatable goal: to push back against the tyranny of boredom and blandness by reclaiming the streets of their city. To that end, they take to their roller skates and push back against roving enemy forces (other crews with nefarious agendas) while also repainting the skyline with cool, edgy graffiti murals.
The game is clearly inspired by the skate culture of the 1990s and early 2000s, with character styles and intentions fashioned after the era. Developer Disc 2 Games has done well to imbue the spirit of this era into the gameplay and narrative, adding edgy, rebellious flavour and personality to dialogue and individual battles.
Staking your claim in the world of roller-skating
From a hub world in Canvas City, you and your stylish crew – complete with highlighter hair stripes, tartan dresses and floppy beanies – will venture into various areas to save the world from creative tyranny.
Each area is set up like a puzzle box. You enter with your crew of five ‘fighters’, who can all perform various specialist moves, including spraying graffiti on posters or goons, or unleashing sonic blasts. These skills must be used to clear each area of enemy forces and to take back the art of the space found on posters and other installations.
This is turn-based warfare, so it’s all about using your action points to strike out with maximum impact. That includes making sure you’re positioning your crew well so they can glide around performing skating tricks while also claiming or reclaiming surfaces for their own artistic poster designs.
The entire experience of combat is very fluid. You spend your turns figuring out how best to play to your skater’s strengths, and once you’ve decided your direction, you can sit back and watch your beautiful execution play out. Your skaters will stride forth, perform their tricks, and you’ll see just how well they can put away enemy forces, all with a smile and a flourish.
Harnessing the ‘inner cool’
Canvas City does take some time to show you its brightest ideas. In our preview, comprising a soon-to-be-available public demo, you learn the basics of combat slowly and are introduced to your crew in short, basic cutscenes. To judge it on first appearances, the style of characters appears a bit rough and ready. The art style is quite reminiscent of cel-shaded PlayStation 2 classics.
But when you get into the nitty-gritty of gameplay, Canvas City really shines.
It’s got an entirely novel gameplay system, with movements and attacks that really sing. Stringing together each move as you rove across a battlefield feels natural and logical, with plenty of room for creativity in how you tackle the next challenge.
Having each hero on roller skates and adapting combat to suit this style is a very clever choice. It’s one that makes Canvas City feel entirely unique, even with some of the basics of its turn-based gameplay feeling familiar. You could relate its style to Jet Set Radio. You could sort of make a connection to XCOM in how its battles play out.
But in mixing elements from these games and others in similar genres, Canvas City has its own identity and sensibility, and it’s all the better for it.
Canvas City by Disc 2 Games is currently in development. A freely-available demo for PC arrives on Steam on 25 August.
An early code for the Canvas City demo was provided by the publisher for the purposes of this preview.
