Theos: Cities of Myth is the spiritual successor to the one of the great city builders of the early 2000s

If you're a PC gamer of a certain age, you may fondly remember Impressions Games. Over two years between 1998 and 2000, the studio released three games that would go on to become classics in the city-building genre: Caesar III, Pharaoh and Zeus: Master of Olympus. SimCity might have established the formula that all city builders have followed since, but if you ask me, those three games made that formula their own in a way few others have done since.

More than two decades later, people are still playing those games, with fan projects like Augustus helping smooth out some of the bugs and rough edges that Impressions never got a chance to fix. In 2025, one of my favorite games of the year, The Wandering Village, took the Impressions formula and applied to a Studio Ghibli-inspired setting. Now, another studio is dipping into that same well of inspiration, with a project titled Theos: Cities of Myth.

The new game is the latest effort from Triskell Interactive, a developer best known for its work on 2023's Pharaoh: A New Era, which was a HD remake of the original Pharaoh and 2000 expansion Cleopatra: Queen of the Nile. In a press briefing held by French publisher Dotemu, the team at Triskell said they wanted to make a spiritual successor to Pharaoh's sequel, Zeus: Master of Olympus, rather than a direct remake. I didn't get a chance to ask Dotemu if it had trouble securing the licensing rights for the Zeus name or if those rights were simply too expensive for a small project like Theos. What I can say is the new game is clearly meant to invoke its predecessor and feel familiar to anyone has played the old Impressions catalog.

Like Zeus before it, Theos is a isometric city-builder where Greek mythology and its pantheon of gods inform both how you design your cities and the objectives you need to complete to move a scenario forward. In the very early build I played, only the Athens campaign was ready for playtesting, and even then most of the game's tooltips and assets were populated by placeholders.

I began my campaign by placing the foundation for what would later become the city's sanctuary to Athena. But before I could undertake that project, I had to first build housing so that migrants would move into my fledgling town, and then provide them with food and water, so that those people would then build better homes that would in turn attract even more people to my version of Athens. All of this will be familiar if you've ever played an Impressions game before. Gameplay is built around designing efficient supply chains that provide your city's inhabitants