Microlandia, the brutally honest city builder, arrives on Steam.

Cute voxels, hard reality. Build a city that has to face the real challenges of a real city. Pull the strings and watch your town grow into a metropolis. Make the wrong calls and bankruptcy is on the table, just like in brutally honest reality.

Microlandia is the newest title in the city builder genre, but with a radical difference: its brutally honest social and economic simulation, which doesn’t sweep the challenges of city life under the rug: housing shortages, mobility, corporate taxes, the cost of public services, and on and on…

This game grew out of a question its director Cristián had already asked himself as a child:

“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 takes in the good, the bad, and the sometimes uncomfortable parts of city life through a thoroughly built socioeconomic simulation drawn from real-world datasets: the World Bank, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the OECD, and many more.

This input gives Microlandia a depth rarely seen in the city builder genre. The seriousness of the simulation, however, stands in stark contrast to a narrative layer full of humor and gimmicks. Players have to pay attention to in-game elements that help them diagnose what is happening in their town, for example by reading the sensation-hungry local press, which follows every move you make critically.

In Microlandia, democracy is not a backdrop, but the core mechanic that keeps you from losing. Every five in-game years, the citizens vote and decide whether to re-elect you or kick you out. Each individual verdict is shaped by your performance across six policy categories: shelter, occupation, safety, cost of living, recreation, and healthcare. A live polls panel lets you track your approval in each category, while the newspaper holds you publicly accountable for every decision along the way.

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

Democracy as the win condition: Every five in-game years the citizens go to the ballot box and decide whether you stay in office. Your approval is measured across six policy fields (shelter, occupation, safety, cost of living, recreation, and healthcare), and a live polls panel shows each rating. Lose the vote, the run is over.
Budgets with bite: Roads cost real money. Pensions and public services tear deep holes in your budget. Where to save? Where to invest?
Real estate sharks: Housing shortages drive rents up, and landlords smell the next deal. Rehousing the unhoused becomes a visible task.
It’s (not) just business: Bring companies into your city to fuel prosperity. Pull the right strings. Only black numbers protect you from the insolvency-driven wave of unemployment.
Healthy and well: Hospital bed capacity and ambulance coverage shape mortality, migration, and the mood of voters.
Traffic that moves: Buses bring in revenue but require careful planning. Street parking and garages decide whether your citizens can reach their jobs at all.
What’s going on here???: Economic crises, heatwaves, ransomware: unexpected events put you and your city to the test. All under the eyes of the watchful local press, which celebrates your decisions or pillories you.

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, Linux) and itch.io (Mac, Windows, Linux)
Studio: Information Superhighway Games (2-person team in Berlin, Germany)
Languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Polish, and Turkish

In the press

80 Level: Developing Microlandia, a Socioeconomic City Builder Based on Real-World Data (2026-04-10)
PC Gamer: 'Brutally honest' city builder Microlandia gets brutally honest crime simulation: 'It's a spectrum of consequences that can become a death spiral every single day' (2026-01-25)
Rock Paper Shotgun: Microlandia is a 'brutally honest' scion of SimCity that thinks of cities as 'beautiful but insane machines' (2026-01-08)
PCGamesN: Cities Skylines' traffic headaches are nothing compared to this brutal new city builder, where your population's lives are literally on the line (2025-11-03)
PC Gamer: This 'brutally honest' city builder features greedy landlords, cutthroat corporations, and a newspaper that gives you 'a constant reminder that your citizens' bad luck is perhaps your fault' (2025-10-06)

Credits

Cristián: Director, programmer
Karen: Art, design
Original game soundtrack by Pablo Rubio

Reviewer’s guide

How to interact with the interesting stuff quickly

Start New City → Accept defaults The starting budget is generous ($100M) so you can showcase systems quickly.
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 in, admissions start immediately. Check the bed counter to see what is at stake in terms of mortality.
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 headlines about layoffs or rent pressure.
Screenshot the city overview and newspaper You now have a compact 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.
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 roughly $20k/month in staffing and operating costs.
- When bed usage exceeds 100%, citizens are placed on a waitlist where they may 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 available parking or a bus seat. No available slot means the employee cannot reach work and is fired.
- 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.
Elections & approval
- Citizens vote every five in-game years; losing the election ends the run.
- Approval breaks down across six categories: shelter, occupation, safety, cost of living, recreation, and healthcare.
- Open the Polls panel to see per-category ratings; pair it with newspaper headlines to anticipate political fallout before the vote.
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/docs.

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 two-person indie studio in Berlin, Germany. Founded alongside the first Early Access builds of Microlandia, the team consists of Cristián (programming and direction) and Karen (art and design). They build games without “professional” engines (leaning on open-source tools they love) to make playful systems that explain the world. Early Microlandia builds on Itch.io already attracted press interest; PC Gamer asked: “Is this the Dark Souls of city builders?”