Pune City: Early Access
- Sage Penwood
- Jun 21
- 7 min read
Main quest unclear. Side quests include hopelessness, and existential dread.
Welcome to a sandbox city-builder-meets-survival-sim game — part urban planning, part chaos engine. You drop in with no map, vague objectives, and an internet connection that keeps timing out.
Difficulty: “realism.”
Here’s the live log — from touchdown to…
Begin objective: Exit plane and proceed to secure location.
Accept objective.
You scan the cabin. The simulation lurches. One by one, the passengers rise—delayed animations playing out like extras in a scene rendering too slow to keep up. They reach for overhead compartments in janky, unsynced motions. One clips slightly through the luggage handle. Another freezes mid-pose, stuck between “lift” and “wait.” You hold eye contact with a fellow passenger. No dialogue prompt appears. The silence stretches, thick and awkward.
Then—suddenly—the scene reboots. The queue activates. Movement resumes in low frames per second: one step, wait, shuffle. Like traffic inching forward after too long at a red light. You breathe, realising you’re still in control, but the glitches remind you: the system governs everything.
A nearby flight attendant plays a final voice line—“Thank you for flying with us”—smoothly, almost too perfectly. The delivery lands just a little too well, like a recording over-polished for artificial sweetness. You nod without selecting a response. Crossing into the jet bridge, the world shifts.
Loading… Next Zone.
You scan the airport. Plane sounds are dulled beneath overlapping announcements in a terminal too quiet for its size. The building looks newly constructed—shiny floors, reflective glass—but in the distance, a bucket sits beneath a slow leak in the ceiling. A visual bug? Or a warning?
An escalator hums nearby with a distinct roar at one point. Passengers linger around a luggage conveyor belt, stuck in idle animation—moving, but not engaging. “Collect luggage to proceed,” the system’s instruction hums faintly in your mind.
You pace back and forth, the cold tile pressing beneath your shoes. The faint smell of disinfectant mixes with stale air. You turn. Repeat. Moving closer to the conveyor triggers a fellow passenger: “What is taking so long?” You shrug, uncommitted. A stare follows. Then back to pacing. Still no luggage. The crowd thins. One bag remains. As you near, it lights up. A lone beacon. You pick it up, sigh, and one more shrug later, walk out.
A sensory jolt. Start trigger unknown. Like the sudden burst in popular endless runner games, your body kicks into reflex mode, weaving past people and obstacles before your mind catches up.
Game Speed: Boost.
The arrivals hall blurs—fast, dizzying.
Jump left! Over a passenger—almost crash.
Flash—security post.
Passed.
Plane info board.
Passed.
Swerve right—dodge the slow crowd.
Stars collected. Wait—why am I back at departures?
BLINK.
Security post—again? No. No. No.
It whizzes past like a broken loop.
Jump—escalator—climb—jump!
Welcome to the Aeromall.
Because in this city, arriving means you must pass the departures hall... and the entire shopping gauntlet.
Souvenirs won’t save you from this level.
Jump left—hop on buggy.
Right—run.
No choice.
Buggy.
Glide... slow.
The cab pickup? Close... but out of sync.
Game speed: normal.
Enter cab zone. Your phone screen lights up with a code. The next step.
Cab zooms ahead. You add luggage to storage and sit in the car. The driver responds by turning up the volume—music you don’t recognise, a slow crawl of unsettling rhythms that burrow inside your head and stay there. The screen shakes as your health diminishes.
Potholes come fast, sharp. Each jar hits your spine and scatters your thoughts like minor hits to a health bar. The air smells of wet earth and exhaust fumes. Waterlogged roads slow movement. Splash effects activate. The cab stutters forward. Time stretches. Resilience builds, not in triumph, but in endurance.
First signal appears. Another driver leans out, muttering, “Roads, eh?” No one laughs. The cab driver nods slowly, like someone who’s given up hope. The street ahead is flooded with people—dancing, shouting, moving like particles in a festival-level event. No skip option.The driver steps out to negotiate.
Local festival detected. Mission failure in 20 mins.
The driver returns, bobbing his head, and steers forward. Every metre contested. Every movement a decision. Persistence becomes its own kind of skill tree. Outside this consciousness, you long for that Asphalt speed boost with a few ramps right about now.
Just as you near, you arrive at an architectural marvel. It’s an elevated T crossing, however, the signal has been replaced by stares from cars stopping just short of your cab, using glaring squinted-eye action as stop-or-go signals. You wonder if the glitch runs deeper as this too is a new development. Squinting like Hrithik Roshan, the driver manoeuvres out of the matrix and lands in yet another puzzle. One car can pass at a time unless you drive into people’s homes — a tangram to solve. One move triggers another’s curse, a slow, grinding dance until they unplug and move.
You reach somehow.
But the mission failed sign floats in red. Luckily, this is a checkpoint.
No new mission. Open world drift.
Walking, you spot nothing but construction. Every square inch rebuilt in cement or dug deep to plant more cement roots. Construction overlooking construction, watching over land already earmarked. A plot waiting to be built, looking down on a sales office selling futures. It’s a corridor of concrete intention.
Between all this: withering roads, petrol pumps, and shops literally supporting homes above — structurally, economically, barely. Here, drainage doubles as footpath. Walls serve as public toilets and canvases for graffiti. Informal settlements trace the road’s edge. Electricity poles act as lane dividers. Bus stops appear wherever the driver wills. Cycling is an adventure sport. And green spaces? They bloom only on vinyl—printed across roadside billboards. As the environment renders itself more with each step, it brings more of the same.
No outdoor spaces to roam — you hop into a car and head to the nearest mall. Another microcosm of structured, manipulative urban design. Stores mostly empty, salespeople activate as you draw near— each an event triggered module. People carry identical bags, signalling popular culture or sales — markers of consumption in sealed worlds. In a loop of food, games, and shopping, every action controlled. Time is not a concept. Large circuits across floors feel like intentional disorientation.
These spaces are transactional capsules where consumption is exaggerated, and community resembles conformity more than connection—individuality being a ghost.
Suspicion settles deep. You try to leave, but the mall wraps back into itself. The exit signs redirect you through another floor. Another food court. Another sale. Hours later, you exit to the night sky as pollution greets you before the stars.
New mission appears — Hungry. Must locate food for energy.
Idling with purpose, you enter a restaurant. The walls have more flowers than all the gardens in the state combined, albeit fake, plastic replicas. The menu grows increasingly abstract, like a poem you are meant to write. No one knows the unspoken rule: you must outdo the photo on the menu with your own — only then can you eat.
Everything here is a prop first — a token that pulls you into the community. The food rarely earns a Michelin star; if you’re lucky, it’s arranged to look like it might. The food makes you question how 'authentic cuisine' became code for branding and high prices — taste is almost irrelevant. You consume the food like a quick action: walk to table, hover, step back, and after mechanical digestion, you’ve gained strength.
Mission complete.
New mission updated: Seek the glitch beneath the surface.
You approach a road dug up for repairs. Pipeline work in progress but nothing in sight aside from the unmanned JCB. You run up in one short stroke, mount the JCB and place the new pipeline and cover with earth, all done in half a day. You stop and jump out of the JCB and a flicker. The ground sinks again with the pipe exposed and the traffic comes to a halt. Again - mount, fix, jump out and repeat.
Error: New data not saved. Corrupt file.
You tried to dig under the surface. But it only resets itself.
Nothing saved. No progress logged. Try again.
MISSION: FAILED. Start Again?
MISSION: FAILED. Start Again?
MISSION: FAILED. Start Again?
MISSION: FAILED. Start Again?
Long pause.
RESET GAME?
Connection Lost…| (Cursor blinks.)
I take over from here.
Unfortunately, for most of us living in metropolitans, this isn’t a game. This is real life. In one version of this piece, what unsettled me most wasn’t the clearly defunct infrastructure or even the systemic collapse of the administration that we witness daily — it was the game-player-like detachment we’ve adopted. Roaming idly, as if the world is just a sandbox to drift through. No input required. No voice necessary. So as I sketch this portrait of the city I live in, I realise I live inside a contradiction — one where the promise of urban development plays out like a broken simulation, and the only thing glitchier than the system is our quiet acceptance of it.
We, as a population, often aggravate the issues — but there’s something even more damaging in how new structures are created with no regard for the problems themselves. A new airport, built to manage growing traffic, still needs me to walk all the way across back to departures to exit. New flyovers rise, painted to mimic trees, but the traffic they promise to ease is merely displaced a few feet higher. Pipelines beneath freshly laid roads are installed incorrectly year after year, only to be urgently dug up again with the first monsoon rains. With nowhere else to go, people flock to malls — spending money many don’t have — sinking deeper into invisible debt. Builders sell every corner of the city with brochures promising waterfall views, but all we get is a flash flood each July that leaves behind garbage and carries away those who dared to seek success. Beautification is a rare performance — staged for cameras once a decade — leaving behind dead shrubs stained with red spit and walls freshly painted, only to be covered in piss.
What remains is resignation — the armour we all wear to survive. Still, for the sake of sanity, I like to believe the city’s just stuck in a loop — like a glitchy game where the soundtrack repeats, the scenery reloads, and the pipeline never quite stays fixed. But we keep respawning, each time with new hacks. It’s not about fixing the map — it’s about learning to play it better. Finding humour in lag, joy in minor upgrades, and relief in the occasional hidden shortcut. Because even in the messiest sandbox, sometimes, you just have to press start and see where the level takes you.
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