Chances are you have played a title that Untold Games have been involved in. Often working behind the scenes, Untold has been the hidden team behind the ports of some of the mist successful and acclaimed series of the last decades. The team was integral in bringing the Batman: Arkham series to Nintendo Switch, as well as working with with Hazelight as a co-developer between It Takes Two and Split Fiction.
With City 20, a post apocalyptic survival sim, it’s Untold first foray out of the shadows, transitioning from the somewhat secretive world of “porting studios” to an original developer. “Within the industry, porting studios are known and respected by the people who work with them,” Elisa Di Lorenzo is the Co-Founder and CEO of Untold Games tells us. “Invisibility is more structural: NDAs, partner agreements, and the fact that publishers control most of the public narrative around a release.
“Among players, the situation is different and more extreme. Many players don’t even know who developed the original game, let alone who handled the port. They know the publisher, and that’s often where it ends. When porting is done well, nobody notices, and in a way that’s the goal. But it does mean the craft stays largely unrecognised outside of the people directly involved.”
Despite often being “invisible”, the skills the team has learned “translate well” into original development, and so it was only a matter of time before focus shifted to creating an IP of their own. “What I’d say is that the skills you develop doing ports, deep technical knowledge, performance optimisation, platform expertise, can translate well to original development if that’s the direction you want to go. But it’s a choice, not an inevitability,” they said.
“The skills you develop doing ports, deep technical knowledge, performance optimisation, platform expertise, can translate well to original development if that’s the direction you want to go.”
Elisa Di Lorenzo
Enter City 20, a world ravaged by a nuclear disaster as a result of humanity’s need to push the limits of what could be achieved with quantum mechanics. The world you find yourself alone in is devoid of rules, with an ecosystem split into factions. As the player, you’re dropped in with one objective: survive. As Di Lorenzo explains, there are clear parallels with the likes of Kenshi and Rimworld, which both placed simulation at the heart of the narrative engine. A key part of selling these fictional worlds is capturing unpredictability whilst ensuring player choice ripples through the game’s social and ecological systems, and that’s exactly what City 20 hopes to evoke.
“On the design side, the clearest influences are Kenshi and RimWorld: games where the simulation is the narrative engine and the story emerges from systems rather than scripts,” Di Lorenzo explains. “We wanted a world that runs whether you’re watching or not, where NPCs have their own routines, needs and memories, and where choices ripple through interconnected social and ecological systems.”
She continued: “Visually, the game draws deeply from European science fiction cinema of the 70s and 80s. The desaturated photography, dystopian settings and oppressive atmosphere of directors like Tarkovsky with Stalker, Truffaut with Fahrenheit 451, Terry Gilliam with Brazil, and Lopushansky with Dead Man’s Letters were all reference points. For mood and art direction we looked to artists like Piotr Jabลoลski, Ivan Shishkin and Jakub Rรณลผalski. That combination of systemic depth and a very specific visual and emotional tone is what we were reaching for.”
City 20 is currently in early access, and can be played right now with the game’s latest Bunker update adding mew dynamic systems for NPCs. Di Lorenzo confirmed it’ll be some time before the game releases proper, citing that the early access period is “invaluable” for its development.
“For a game like City 20, the difference is fundamental,” Di Lorenzo explains when asked about why the studio opted for an elongated early access period. “Patching a released game means you’re fixing and adjusting something players already consider finished.
“Early Access means you’re building in the open, with players who understand and expect the game to evolve. The feedback loop is genuinely different: players who join Early Access are invested in the journey, not just the destination, and that changes the quality of the signal you get from them. For a systemic game where the interactions between systems are complex and sometimes unpredictable, having real players stress-testing that in real time is invaluable. You simply cannot replicate that internally.”
At the end of the day, development of an entire project is vastly different from porting an existing title, but most of the ingredients are already in place. City 20 is an ambitious project for such a studio, and one that the team is hoping will have a long life ahead of t.
