Microlandia, the independent video game with a brutally honest simulation, arrives on Steam in its 1.0 version.

Living in the city presents challenges for citizens, but also for those who manage it. If you want to experience being at the helm of a city, this game is for you.

City builders are a simulation genre in video games that puts its users in the mayor’s chair, making public policy decisions to direct the fate of a city. It is the favorite genre of those who want to experiment with urban management and strategy.

Microlandia is the latest release to join the category, but with one radical difference: its brutally honest social and economic simulation, which does not sweep the challenges of city life under the rug, such as how to support homeless people, what impact crises in health and education systems have on citizens, or how taxes can encourage prosperity or stifle private enterprise.

This game was born from a question posed by Cristian, its director. He says:

“When I was a kid, I could spend the whole day playing SimCity, but when I went outside, I saw graffiti, people living on the streets, and a lot of other things that the game left out, which, in my opinion, was giving me a false understanding of how a city works.”

The logic behind Microlandia considers the good, the bad, and the sometimes uncomfortable aspects of living in the city through an elaborate socioeconomic simulation that draws on real-world data obtained from open sources such as World Bank Open Data, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and data published by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).

Its simulation is based on mathematical models generally used for socioeconomic research, with a depth rarely seen in a video game, allowing for levels of realism capable of explaining to players the impact of their decisions.

However, the seriousness of the simulation is highly contrasted by a narrative full of humor and a city fraught with fortuitous incidents that can lead the mayor’s office to bankruptcy. Players must be attentive to elements within the game that can help them diagnose what is happening in their locality, for example, through the census, or by reading the comments of a sensationalist press that critically follows every step of the highest authority.

Microlandia is available on Steam for Windows, Mac and Linux as of December 3, 2025, and can be purchased for just $6.99 USD. It is also available on Itch.io for the same price, with the option to receive a Steam key.

Features

Budgets with bite: Roads cost real money, pensions and services hit the general ledger, and the press tracks every deficit.
Housing with teeth: Scarcity pushes rents, landlords get opportunistic, and rehousing the unhoused becomes a visible job.
Labor that churns: Firms hire carefully, fire when margins thin, and shutter after a year in the red. You can only tax profit that exists.
Healthcare as policy: Hospital beds and ambulance coverage shape mortality, migration, and voter sentiment.
Transit as constraint: Buses earn fares but need coverage; limited curb space and garages decide who can reach work or services.
Incidents with receipts: Ransomware, recessions, heatwaves, pandemics—each surfaced by a noisy newsroom that praises or shames your calls.

Screenshots

Other assets

Fact sheet

Release date: December 3, 2025 at 10:00 AM PST
Genre: Simulation
Price: $6.99 USD
Platforms: Steam (Mac, Windows) and itch.io (Mac, Windows, Linux)
Studio: Information Superhighway Games (2-person team in Berlin, Germany)
Languages: English (German and Spanish coming soon)

Credits

Cristián: Director, programmer, writer
Karen: Art, design
Original game soundtrack by Pablo Rubio
Some music tracks are derivative works of the OpenMSX (OpenTTD Music Replacement Project) and are licensed under GNU GPL v2.0. The game streams these tracks directly from our public repository. Full corresponding source is available at: github.com/explodi/microlandia-music.

Reviewer’s guide

How to See the Good Stuff Fast

Start New City → Accept defaults The starting budget is generous ($100M) so you can showcase systems without grinding.
Lay a 3×3 block of roads Each 20×20 m tile costs real money.
Zone two residential lots and one commercial strip along the new roads. Watch the Demand Point meters climb; once residential hits ~20% occupancy the city grants fresh points.
Place a small hospital as soon as the first residents move, admissions start immediately; check the bed counter to tease the mortality stakes.
Open the Budget & Licenses panel Nudge the bus fare up or pensions down and note the press reactions in the newspaper.
Drop a bus depot plus two bus stops on opposite ends of the district. Toggle the transit layer to show parking stress and commuter flows.
Fast-forward one in-game month Businesses will hire, traffic builds, and you should see the first newspaper headline about layoffs or rent pressure.
Screenshot the city overview and newspaper You now have a tidy loop—visible growth, budget trade-offs, housing pressure, and press accountability.

Core Systems Cheat Sheet

Budgets & Ledgers
- Monthly expenses pull directly from real line items: pensions default to $1,500 per retiree; police/fire draw fixed salaries.
- Raising or lowering line-items updates the ledger instantly and drives citizen approval plus newspaper commentary.
- Bankruptcy triggers at –$100M; the UI warns once you cross –$10M.
Demand Points
- Earned when residential or commercial occupancy tops 20% of capacity.
- Spending points unlocks additional zoning or marquee projects (e.g., corporate tower) instead of spamming tiles.
- Keep an eye on approval demand—certain builds cost soft political capital before they appear.
Hospitals
- Beds are hard capacity; each staffed bed consumes $50k/month in staffing and operating costs.
- When bed usage exceeds 100%, citizens either die or emigrate, immediately shifting demographics and tax receipts.
- Ambulance coverage affects response time; place hospitals near dense job clusters to minimize mortality headlines.
Transit & Parking
- Every job trip checks for either available parking or a bus seat. No slot = late employee = eventual firing.
- Street parking defaults to a $12/day fee; use garages or transit to keep lower-income workers employed.
- Bus fares feed operating revenue—adjust cautiously to avoid suppressing ridership.
Press & Stats
- The in-game newspaper publishes every major policy outcome; scan headlines to surface housing, labor, or healthcare crises quickly.
- The Stats panel tracks trendlines—homeless population, average rent, unemployment—so you can confirm whether interventions are working before capturing footage.
Simulation deep dive
- Full parameter tables and data sources live at microlandia.city/simulation_parameters.

Known Issues & Performance Tips

Simulation spikes on large saves. Cities above 150k citizens may see one-second tick stalls while economic audits run. If you capture footage, enable the in-game frame-rate limiter and let the simulation settle before panning.
Post-processing on laptops. Integrated GPUs struggle with shadows + tilt-shift together. Use the in-game Balanced preset or manually disable shadows and set render scale to 0.75.
Save storage. Steam Cloud support is planned but not live; copy the db folder from %APPDATA%/Microlandia (Windows), ~/Library/Application Support/Microlandia (macOS), or ~/.microlandia (Linux) if you need to migrate progress.

About Information Superhighway Games

Information Superhighway Games is a video game studio in Berlin, Germany, founded at the same time as the early access release of Microlandia on Itch.io in October 2025. The team consists of Cristián (director, programmer, designer, writer) and Karen (art and design). They build video games with unconventional technologies and use open source tools to create software capable of explaining the world. Microlandia caught the attention of the press, including the prominent outlet PC Gamer, which asked the question: “Is this the Dark Souls of city builders?”