For this series, I have played a multitude of city builders. Some were deeply complex , requiring management of all the nuances of a city. Others focused on the grand journey from village to civilisation. There is a wide range of what’s in the genre, and a wider range of what’s possible. Each city builder is unique in the choices it makes of where to be set, what story it chooses to tell about the nature of a city, and what decisions it wants the player to make.

And then there’s 20 Minute Metropolis.

So…many…notifications

20 Minute Metropolis is an arcade city builder, and, true to its name, each playthrough takes exactly twenty minutes. Within those twenty minutes, the player’s goal is to score as many points as possible. Points are gained through building parks, and so, in essence, the goal is to accumulate as many resources as possible to build as many parks as possible. The player also has to balance having sufficient work, waste transport, and food for this growing city. In my playthroughs, this translated to spending the first fifteen minutes or so of the run building infrastructure, then spamming parks for the last five minutes.

Results are mixed.

20 Minute Metropolis is technically a city builder, though it is a distant cousin from something like Cities: Skylines. Much like other city builders, the goal is to build the ideal city and watch an untamed field grow and expand into a glorious testament to humanity’s ingenuity. However, in adding a time limit, the game ceases to be able to focus on a careful building and perfecting of layouts or balance. It instead becomes a frantic scramble to keep up with rapidly diminishing finite resources and the unceasing demands of a changing landscape. From start to finish, the city in 20 Minute Metropolis never feels controlled. It always feels as though it’s teetering on the edge, even though the edge is meaningless. There is no failstate in 20 Minute Metropolis. You cannot go bankrupt or see your citizens starve. Indeed, you effectively have no citizens. There are only the goals you set for yourself and the ever-present clock to provide a sense of competition. Yet somehow, that’s enough to keep the adrenaline flowing.

I probably should have planned my resources better.

20 Minute Metropolis is a city builder, yes, but the city that is built is not a real city. It isn’t one in which you can envision life or imagine a brighter tomorrow. It is a dystopian city builder that crafts dystopian cities that are acutely aware of their own imminent demises. The game itself takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, and, much like with Before We Leave , the society is repeating its cycle of destruction. Unlike that game, though, 20 Minute Metropolis is acutely aware of the finiteness of the society you’re building. Resources vanish at an astounding rate, to the point that I would sometimes find myself stuck because I hadn’t planned out my mines well enough. This is a world that is dying and knows it’s dying, and yet plunges headlong into its own abyss.

It is not a game about growth without cost or consequence. The costs and consequences are abundantly and manifestly clear. Your resources are finite, and there is no way to get more.

What this game becomes, then, is not a city builder, per se. It is instead an optimisation engine. Every game loads the exact same map with the exact same resources and exact same layout. If you are more patient than me, you could get your placements down to an art, or even set up a click macro to automate the entire game for you. Indeed, at times, this game feels like the demo for a larger game and not something that was ever meant to be released on its own.

Yet, each time I play, it’s the same Sisyphean boulder I find myself facing. There is a solution that sees me getting the highest score, but no amount of optimisation changes this city’s fate. This city and its unseen inhabitants are doomed, and always have been. They emerge into a broken world to break it anew, and there is nothing I can do to stop them except to step away and not play.

I described most city builders as being neo-liberal fantasies, and I still believe that to be true. 20 Minute Metropolis is the exception. It is a nihilistic city builder, one that sees the entire exercise as fundamentally pointless. At the end of this, there is only destruction, but yet the drums of productivity continue to sound. 20 Minute Metropolis is not neo-liberal. It is communist, per Slavoj Zizek’s definition. It is an exercise of waking up from the neo-liberal fever dream to recognise the nightmare it has become. This is a game whose philosophy reflects the experience of millennials and Gen Z, where there is nothing and no reason to engage, where we know from the outset there is nothing but doom, but still, we find we must. It is an exercise in nihilism, and it is the most perfect reflection of reality I’ve found in a city builder.

To be clear, as a game, 20 Minute Metropolis is not great. It is, as I said, a game that feels like a demo for something else. However, within that demo lies a sense of the profound, however unintentional. Over the span of twenty minutes, you can watch a world’s dreams emerge, grow, and crawl screaming into that cold abyss.

It’s pretty decent.

Developer: Dejobaan Games

Genre: City Builder, Arcade

Year: 2020

Country: United States

Language: English

Play Time: 20 Minutes

Youtube: https://youtu.be/N6RYH2W4hdI