Amanita Design’s Phonopolis is hand-cut from real paper and scores 84 on Metacritic

Phonopolis begins with Felix, a garbage collector living under an authoritarian called the Leader, in a city where every street corner bristles with amplions — speaker towers that broadcast subliminal commands to keep the population compliant. Felix discovers a pair of headphones that blocks the signal, and that small act of resistance sets off a chain of puzzles that slowly dismantles the Leader’s grip on the entire city.

What makes Phonopolis genuinely unusual is not the plot but the material it was built from. Every building, character, puff of smoke, and flickering flame in the game started life as a real physical object — cut from paper, painted with actual pigment, and photographed before being translated into three-dimensional form. The technique gives the game the texture of a stop-motion film that somehow learned to run in real time, animated at 12 frames per second so that every movement feels unmistakably handmade.

This is Amanita Design’s first step into genuine 3D, and the Czech studio behind Machinarium, Samorost, and Creaks has chosen its moment carefully. The visual framework draws from interwar avant-garde art — constructivism, futurism, and suprematism, the movements that shaped Soviet propaganda posters in the 1920s — giving Phonopolis an aesthetic that is at once beautiful and historically loaded. The city looks like a political cartoon crossed with a diorama, and those two things turn out to be exactly the right combination for a story about authoritarian control.

Gameplay is point-and-click in the tradition Amanita has built over two decades, but the puzzles here revolve around sound and the amplion network. Felix’s toolkit involves redirecting broadcasts, repurposing the city’s speaker infrastructure, and finding inventive ways to operate within a world that has been literally tuned to obey. Nothing demands quick reflexes; everything rewards close attention to an environment that hides its logic in plain sight.

The game is not without caveats. Amanita’s previous work communicated almost entirely through visuals, and Phonopolis introduces an English-language narrator that some players find charming and others feel dilutes the studio’s signature restraint. At launch there are 15 subtitle languages but only English voice acting, with Czech dubbing planned as a post-launch update. Runtime is also modest — most players finish in four to six hours — which will feel lean to anyone expecting the sprawl of a longer narrative adventure.

One element drawing near-unanimous praise is the soundtrack by Floex, the composer who also scored Machinarium and Samorost 3. His work here is built from strings, brass, and found industrial sounds that fit the constructivist setting precisely — chamber music that feels simultaneously like a factory and a concert hall.

Phonopolis launched on May 20, 2026 for PC and macOS through Steam, priced at €21.99, with a collector’s edition that includes the full soundtrack and an art book. Metacritic rates the game at 84 based on the current review aggregate; Steam sits at 92 percent positive across more than 1,300 player reviews. A demo is available for anyone wanting to try the paper-cut world before buying. Amanita Design has not announced a console port, though the studio’s previous titles have typically reached additional platforms within a year or two of the original PC launch.