Holonoptic Makes You The Human Face Of An AI-Run Company On July 16
You are the new CEO. Not because you earned it, but because your predecessor vanished, everyone else was fired, and the artificial intelligence running the company needed a human face to wear. That is the opening of Holonoptic, an alpine cyberpunk economic sim with party-based RPG mechanics that launches on PC on July 16.
The company is Glazial, a former Swiss tunnelling firm that grew into something much larger, and it shares its name with the game's solo developer, Kevin Bloch, who spent six years designing, writing, coding, and illustrating the whole thing. The AI in the corner office is named Geist, German for "ghost," and it is cold, patient, and openly contemptuous of you. You do not get to argue with it. You get to work and decide which faction gets to use you.
An Economic Sim With A Death Drive
On its management surface, Holonoptic is a proper economic simulation: supply chains, facilities to build and upgrade, thousands of employees to hire or fire, and more than 50 companies to trade with, undercut, steal from, or absorb through friendly deals or hostile takeovers as you push Glazial across a weakened Eurozone. The spreadsheet is real, and it runs deep.
The twist is that the game never lets you forget there is a person in the chair. Your CEO carries 40 psychological traits, some of them frankly pathological, plus eight mental and emotional states. Before a high-stakes negotiation, you can reach for a pharmacopoeia of 16 psychoactive substances to nudge your own focus, euphoria, or detachment. It asks not just what the optimal move is, but whether you can stand to be the person who makes it.
Eight Ideologies And More Than Ten Endings
Underneath the dashboards, Holonoptic quietly scores every decision across eight ideological currents, from free-market globalism to symbiont collectivism, plutocracy, and the underground economy. Lean into a current, and it unlocks its own missions and story routes; lean too hard, and its opposites turn on you. The payoff is more than ten endings, backed by 16 recruitable executives (each hand-painted, many voiced, all carrying their own way of betraying you), nine character classes, six skills, and over 70 feats.
If you want to try before the launch, a free demo is on Steam now, currently sitting at a 4.4 out of 5 player rating, with reviews singling out how the art style and tone sell the cold corporate atmosphere really well. Holonoptic arrives July 16.
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This story was originally published July 10, 2026 at 6:51 PM.