You do get to pick out “Props,” like roads and trams and giant billboards and hologram objects and flying carports, but the game is similarly non-committal on what you should do with them, or most anything. You put things down, or delete them, expand them, connect them, and try things out until you like how it looks.

And things can end up looking quite nice. This game takes its photo mode seriously. A raft of sliders lets you adjust all the typical dystopian-corpo-city visual effects, like lens dirt, lots of glare and glow, fog, distant mountains, amounts of airborne car traffic, and such. You can export shots at up to 4K resolution and never want for a new desktop background again.

You’ll pick up more about how things work as you play, but there is no rush. This game isn’t “cozy” because it has you making friends in a riverside town of anthropomorphic creatures—which, to be clear, has its merits. It’s “cozy” in the sense of letting you enjoy it at whatever level you like. You can absolutely leave this game running in the background and chill out to its impressively on-point synth soundtrack. You can’t run out of money or have the transportation adviser get fuming mad at you.

Dystopika is not labeled as Early Access, but it is continually improving, with the developer providing regular roadmaps and updates, and there’s a Discord where fans are showing off impressive screenshots in community challenges and suggesting fixes and features. For $7 (at the moment), this dystopian toy box will let you play with the visually impressive parts of dark, urban sci-fi and refuse to make you consider their deeper implications. For all you know, the people down there are having just as good a time as you are.