Game: Prospera
Developer: Active Fungus Studios (Munich)
Publisher: Toplitz Productions
Genre: First/Third-Person City Builder & Automation
Release Date: Q2 2027
Platform: PC (Steam)
Players: Single-player
Engine: Unreal Engine 5
🏭 Prospera is a city builder you play from inside the city. Active Fungus Studios and Toplitz Productions revealed the Victorian industrial builder at gamescom, and the Steam page pins it to Q2 2027 — with playtest sign-ups already open.
⚖️ Beauty Is a Resource, Not a Reward
Most city builders treat decoration as the thing you do once the spreadsheet is solved. Prospera’s Prosperity System inverts that:
“In Prospera, beauty is more than vanity. It is as valuable as currency.”
Gas-lit boulevards, manicured plants, benches, flowerpots and the absence of grime and vermin are what attract wealthier residents. Cleanliness, parks and architecture drive progress. Pollution slows it down. You’ll employ street sweepers and gardeners the way you’d employ any other production worker.
Which puts the whole game in tension with itself. The factories that make you rich are the same factories choking the streets that make you attractive. That’s a genuinely interesting knot to build a management game around.
Anno 1800, from the pavement
You don’t zoom out to check on the workers. You walk over and look at them.
Prospera is an open-world city building and automation game set in a fictitious Victorian timeline, played entirely in first or third person. No isometric camera, no plot-assignment overlay — you build houses, lay track and decorate streets with your own hands and tools, from ground level, in the middle of the city you’re making.
Munich’s Active Fungus Studios and publisher Toplitz Productions announced it during the gamescom edition of Webedia’s Find Your Next Game Showcase. It’s on display at Toplitz’s gamescom booth in Hall 4.1 — though that’s the business area, so it’s a trade-only showing rather than something the public can queue for.
The Pitch, In the Studio’s Own Words
🧪 Four Reference Points, One Prototype
Studio founder Jakob Braun is unusually blunt about the recipe, and it’s worth quoting because it tells you exactly what kind of game this is aiming to be:
“What would it feel like to merge the Victorian atmosphere of Anno 1800 with titles like Satisfactory and games like Medieval Dynasty or Bellwright, while adding a heavy sprinkle of city management?”
That’s an aesthetic from one game, a production-chain philosophy from another, and a first-person build-it-yourself loop from two more. Braun says the early prototypes answered the question well enough to take to Toplitz.
⚠️ That’s Four Very Demanding Genres in One Box
We’d flag the obvious risk here rather than pretend it isn’t there. Each of those reference points is a game that does one thing to an exhausting standard — Anno’s economy, Satisfactory’s factory logistics, Medieval Dynasty’s first-person build loop.
Doing all of them at once, from a first-person camera, with an NPC simulation running underneath, is an enormous amount of systems to get right simultaneously. The most common failure mode for this kind of pitch isn’t that any single system is bad — it’s that all of them end up shallow.
None of which means it won’t work. But “Anno meets Satisfactory meets Medieval Dynasty” is a pitch that has to be judged on the build rather than the press release, and there’s no hands-on verdict to give yet.
What the Prosperity System Actually Tracks
🧹 Cleanliness
Grime and vermin push wealthy residents away. Street sweepers are staff, not scenery.
🌳 Parks & Greenery
Manicured plants and gardeners to maintain them. Upkeep, not a one-off placement.
🏛️ Architecture
The look of the streetscape itself feeds directly into who’s willing to move in.
🏭 Pollution
The counterweight. Industry drives the economy and actively drags progress down.
🪓 From Lumberjack to Tycoon
The progression arc, per the Steam page, starts considerably smaller than the trailer’s chimney-scapes suggest. You begin as a humble lumberjack — chopping wood, raising your first buildings by hand.
• Handmade beginnings — first production facilities, homes and retail hubs built personally
• First automation — a single small factory, then production lines
• Industrial complexes — merge and extend factories into multi-stage hubs
• Rail — handcarts scale up to full railway networks across an open world
Goods move physically rather than as abstract numbers, which is the Satisfactory half of the pitch. Crates get hauled across cobblestones; you can watch the logistics fail in real time rather than reading about it in a menu.
Two Things the Press Release Leaves Out
📅 It Has a Date
The announcement gives no release window at all. The Steam page lists a planned release of Q2 2027 — a good deal more specific than “coming soon,” and worth knowing before you calibrate expectations.
🎮 You Can Sign Up to Play It
There’s a Prospera playtest with sign-ups already live on the Steam page. Request access and you’ll be notified when the team opens it up to more participants. No date given for when that happens.
The playtest is the more useful of the two. This is precisely the sort of game where the pitch and the feel can diverge wildly — first-person building either clicks immediately or becomes a chore around hour three, and no trailer will tell you which. If the concept interests you at all, getting into the test is the fastest way to find out.
PC Only, and It Wants a Decent One
🖥️ Windows via Steam
Prospera is PC-only for now — no console versions announced. It’s single-player, with Steam Achievements and Family Sharing support, and ships with interface and subtitles in nine languages, with full audio in English and German.
Minimum: Windows 10 64-bit · Intel Core i7-8700 · 16 GB RAM · RTX 2060 · 25 GB storage — targeting 1080p low at 30 FPS. Recommended: Windows 11 · Intel Core i7-12700 · 16 GB RAM · RTX 4060 Ti — for 1080p high at 60 FPS.
Worth noting that the recommended spec is aimed at 1080p 60, not 1440p or 4K. That’s an honest listing rather than an alarming one, but it does suggest an Unreal Engine 5 open world with a lot of simulation running underneath. Specs this far out from a Q2 2027 release will almost certainly shift.
🏗️ City Builder
⚙️ Automation
👁️ First-Person
🚂 Logistics
🎩 Victorian
👤 Single-Player
Who’s Making It
🍄 Active Fungus Studios
A Munich-based independent studio founded in 2020, working as a distributed remote team in Unreal Engine 5 across first- and third-person games from mystery and roleplaying through to city building. Their first release was Inspector Schmidt – A Bavarian Tale in February 2023. Prospera is a substantial step up in scope.
🏔️ Toplitz Productions
The German-Austrian publisher named after Lake Toplitz, and a very logical home for this one — Toplitz publish the Dynasty and Giant series, which means they’ve spent years shipping exactly the first-person build-and-manage games Prospera is drawing from.
🗣️ Stefan Berger — Head of Business Development & Sales, Toplitz
“We are convinced, Prospera will change how gamers look at city builders and can’t wait to show you more in the weeks and months to come.”
Prospera is on Steam now for wishlisting, with a planned release in Q2 2027 and a playtest taking sign-ups in the meantime.
Hi there! I’m Marie, also known as CtrlQueen. I’m passionate about keeping up with the latest in gaming news and sharing my insights. RPGs steal my heart with their rich narratives and immersive worlds, but I also love unwinding with fun, casual games. Whether you’re here for deep dives into game mechanics or just to chat about your favorite casual game, you’ve found the right place! Let’s game and explore together.
