If you’re a PC gamer of a certain age, you might remember Impressions Games fondly. For two years, between 1998 and 2000, the studio released three games that would become classics in the city construction genre: Caesar III, Pharaoh, and Zeus: Master of Olympus. SimCity may have established the formula that every city builder has followed since, but if you ask me, these three games made that formula their own in a way that few others have since.
More than two decades later, people are still playing these games, with fan projects like Augustus helping to smooth out some of the bugs and rough edges that Impressions never had a chance to fix. In 2025, one of my favorite games of the year, The wandering villagetook the Impressions formula and applied it to Studio Ghibli-inspired decor. Today, another studio is tapping into this same source of inspiration, with a project titled Theos: Mythical Cities.
The new game is the latest effort from Triskell Interactive, a developer best known for its work on 2023 games. Pharaoh: a new era, which was an HD remake of the original Pharaoh, and an expansion in 2000, Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile. During a press briefing held by French publisher Dotemu, the Triskell team said they wanted to make a spiritual successor to that of Pharaoh following, Zeus: Master of Olympusrather than a direct remake. I didn’t have a chance to ask Dotemu if it had any difficulty obtaining the licensing rights for the Zeus name or if these rights were simply too expensive for a small project like Theos. What I can say is that the new game is clearly intended to invoke its predecessor and feel familiar to anyone who played the old Impressions catalog.
As Zeus before that, Theos is an isometric city builder in which Greek mythology and its pantheon of gods inform both how you design your cities and what goals you must achieve to advance a storyline. In the very first version I played, only the Athens campaign was ready for testing, and even then, most of the game’s tooltips and resources were filled with placeholders.
I began my campaign by laying the foundations of what would later become the Sanctuary of Athena in the city. But before I could undertake this project, I had to first build housing for migrants to settle in my young city, and then provide them with food and water, so that they could build better houses, which, in turn, would attract even more people to my version of Athens. This will all be familiar to you if you’ve ever played an Impressions game before. Gameplay is built around designing efficient supply chains that provide your city’s residents with everything they need to build well-stocked homes. Each building you place – whether it’s a water well, an agora, or a gymnasium – dispatches an NPC called a walker who delivers the goods or services associated with their structure. Your colony will remain a town of huts if you fail to guarantee your citizens uninterrupted access to all the benefits of civilization.
In the Impressions games, the challenge of building an ever-larger city came from not being able to directly control the walkers’ routes. You had to design your city’s roads to accommodate their often buggy pathing AI. This meant that the cities you built never really resembled a real place. Theos attempts to solve this frustration by giving the player full control of the walkers, allowing you to plot the route you want them to take through your town. The Triskell team said this would allow players to design their cities however they want. At least that’s the idea.
In the version I played, drawing routes for walkers felt like it added a lot of micromanagement to the experience. When I went to place my first set of buildings, the game took care of the route for me, but as I expanded my city and added new housing blocks, it didn’t adjust those routes automatically. Each time, I had to go back to the structures I had built to either tell the game to draw a new delivery route, or draw it myself. Here’s the problem, the logic the game used often left parts of my town underserved, and doing the work myself felt a bit weird, with an interface that didn’t do a good job of communicating how far I could send each walker. Once again, I played a very old version of the game, so a lack of polish is to be expected.
It was also difficult to judge the game’s art style. Zeus: Master of Olympus had simple but colorful isometric graphics that did a great job of communicating the warmth and vibration of its surroundings. One of the criticisms leveled at Triskell Pharaoh remaster is that the studio botched the artistic design of the original game. There was an incongruity between different elements.
The buildings and landscape looked true to their original inspiration, while the NPCs all seemed taken from a completely different game. This is one of the reasons I never bought the remake, even though I love the source material. As far as I can tell, the studio doesn’t seem to have listened to these criticisms. NPCs always feel out of step with the rest of the game’s art design.
Even with these blockages, I still had fun playing Theos. Triskell does not reinvent the genre here, as they say Lords of the Manor Or Frostpunkbut it’s okay. There’s something comforting about revisiting a formula you enjoyed in the past and seeing it executed reasonably well. Theos: Mythical cities will come to PC later this year.
