Nikhil Murthy's Syphilisation is a ferociously in-depth, empathic reworking of Civilization and other 4X games

Now out of early access, but still has a demo

Nikhil Murthy's Syphilisation is a "postcolonial 4X game", which might sound like a contradiction in terms. While approaches to 4X and grand strategy vary hugely between games, factions and players, the genre as a whole is firmly wedded to imperial conquest, both structurally and at the level of narrative aspects and set-dressing. Many 4X games are triumphal re-enactments of specific periods of colonial settlement and expansion. All of which is to say that Syphilisation is fascinating. It's a reworking of the genre which dismantles and reconstructs concepts such as diplomacy, research and production. It's also just left early access - find more details and a playthrough video below.

Some quick notes on the title. In attaching his own name, I suspect Murthy is gently sending up Sid Meier and other creators who've built themselves up into global brands. "Syphilisation", meanwhile, is a pun which Murthy originally took from James Joyce's novel Ulysses - it references a sexually transmitted disease whose spread is entangled with the formation and expansion of empires.

One of Syphilisation's most gripping devices is that it's a conversation with itself. Rather than making you the leader of a faction or nation, it casts you as a student participating in a group report on Gandhi, Churchill, the Raj and the Indian Independence Movement during the 19th and 20th century. From afar, it looks a lot like other games in the genre, with units moving across a tile-based map featuring settlements and resources, but the group report premise makes room for disagreement about these fundamentals and the events depicted. The other students are all distinct characters with their own backgrounds, and as Murthy quips on the Steam page, "the politics of nations are just the politics of student groups writ large".

While it's possible to pay Syphilisation selfishly, covetously and aggressively, building empathy is a goal and a site of intense design exploration. "In particular, I try to show that the ideas of winner-take-all and growth-for-the-sake-of-growth that underpin most of the genre have viable alternatives," Murthy adds. In practical terms, this includes experimenting with nonviolent conflict resolution, "non-deterministic" tech trees and cooperative win conditions. Research is partly a question of deciding how to interpret figures such as Winston Churchill, rather than simply exposing a codex entry with a new technology attached.

Murthy has also looked at "history from below", and how the game's 'subjects' might have their own agency. "The citizens of your empire have many requests of their own and will often just handle them by themselves rather than wait for you to get around to them. They will research new technologies, complete buildings and units and simply deal with their issues by themselves. You can make yourself more popular by getting there first, but Syphilisation understands that leaders need the people and not the other way around."

I spoke to Murthy together with former Civilization developer Jon Shafer and Paradox's Ryan Sumo about the idea of an "anti-imperial empire game" last year. It remains one of the most enlightening interviews I've ever done, mostly because I kept my mouth shut while the three of them talked about things like visualising map space and the concept of progress.

I've not played much of Syphilisation as yet - I'm still getting my head around it, partly thanks to the ambition on show, and partly because the presentation is a bit dense and overwhelming (as was the case with the developer's previous, similarly imaginative The Quiet Sleep). One thing I'm currently pondering is whether the bits I find obfuscatory are deliberate rejections of the omniscience other imperial simulations offer. If you're eyeing up the 1.0 release and would like to have a try yourself, there's still a demo on Steam at the time of publication.