The Old City: Leviathan

The Old City: Leviathan is a first-person exploration game with no combat, no puzzles, and no objectives beyond moving forward and listening. PostMod Softworks built it as a pure story vessel: you inhabit a sewer-dwelling isolationist wandering the ruins of a long-dead civilization, and the game feeds you an extended interior monologue soaked in philosophy, mythology, and something close to grief. That is the entire product. If that sentence makes you close the tab, this game is not for you. If it makes you lean forward slightly, keep reading. What works here is the atmosphere, and it works hard. The environments, for a small indie release, carry genuine visual weight. Decayed stonework, standing water, shafts of pale light cutting through collapsed ceilings. The art direction has a coherent vision of entropy, and the sound design supports it carefully: ambient drones, distant water, silence used as punctuation. Walking through these spaces feels deliberate in a way that cheaper walking sims do not manage. The pacing is slow, unapologetically so, and there are stretches where the world just asks you to exist inside it for a moment. I will defend that choice. The game knows what it is trying to create. The writing is where opinions fracture, and the mixed Steam score reflects that honestly. The monologue is dense, allusion-heavy, and at times self-consciously literary in a way that can read as undergraduate philosophy depending on your tolerance. It references isolation, the nature of civilization, memory, and belief systems in overlapping waves. For the right reader it will feel resonant and strange. For others it will feel like a lecture with nice wallpaper. There is no mechanical scaffolding to catch you if the prose loses you, so your engagement lives or dies entirely on whether the voice holds you. The practical complaints are real. The game is short, roughly two to three hours depending on how slowly you move through it. There is no replay hook. Performance and controller support have been inconsistently reported over the years, so check current user threads before buying on older hardware. The 2014 release date means no modern quality-of-life niceties. You get a launcher, a world, and a voice. That minimalism is intentional, but it also means any friction the game has is unpadded. This sits in a specific niche even within walking simulators. It predates the genre's mainstream moment and has a rougher, more earnest quality than the polished narrative games that followed. There is something handmade about it, a small team genuinely trying to make something they cared about rather than something marketable. That sincerity comes through in the texture of it. If you have spent time with games like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture or Dear Esther and wanted them to go further into abstraction and philosophical density, The Old City: Leviathan is the direction that fork goes. It is not a comfortable or universally rewarding experience, but it is a specific and intentional one, and those are rarer than they should be.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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