Description
American Arcadia is one of those games where the premise sells itself immediately. An entire city of people living unknowingly as the cast of a reality TV show, broadcast 24/7, where a drop in your ratings gets you killed. I heard that and wanted to play it immediately.
Developed by Spanish indie studio Out of the Blue Games and published by Raw Fury, it released on PC in November 2023 and on consoles in May 2025. You play as Trevor Hills — a perfectly ordinary man living a perfectly ordinary life in Arcadia, a domed city frozen in 1970s retro-futurism — and Angela, a technician on the outside who hacks into Arcadia’s systems to help him escape.
Year: 2023
Developer: Out of the Blue Games
Atmosphere: Retro Futurism · Satirical · Tense
Visual Style: 2.5D · 1970s Aesthetic
Focus / Pace: Puzzle Platforming · Narrative-Driven
Platforms: Windows · PlayStation 4 · PlayStation 5 · Xbox One · Xbox Series X/S · Nintendo Switch
A Truman Show Game?
Everyone calls American Arcadia “the Truman Show game” — and the creative director of Out of the Blue has pushed back on that, saying it is more than that. I think she is right, for one specific reason.
In The Truman Show, the protagonist is special — the star of the show, watched by the whole world, the centre of everything. In American Arcadia, Trevor is about to be killed because he is too boring. His ratings dropped. He is not interesting enough to survive.
That is a sharper and more contemporary idea — about algorithmic popularity, about who gets visibility and who gets erased — and it gives the game a satirical edge that The Truman Show never had. This is a story about what happens to ordinary people in a world that runs entirely on social media and attention…
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The Story
When Trevor’s colleague Gus disappears — officially “won a holiday,” unofficially executed for low ratings — Trevor starts to suspect something is wrong. Angela, watching from outside, makes contact and the escape begins.
The premise is revealed early, so the pleasure is not in the twist but in everything that follows. The dual narrative works well — Trevor’s sections have the energy of a chase thriller, Angela’s have a quieter, more methodical quality as she works through security systems from a distance. The relationship between them is the emotional core of the game and it earns its ending.
My one honest note: the opening two weeks of Trevor’s mundane routine before things kick off is deliberately slow. I understand the point. I still found it slightly testing. Stick with it.
Graphics
The 1970s retro-futurist aesthetic — pastel colours, rounded architecture, optimistic corporate design language — is rendered with real affection and attention to detail. Arcadia looks like a world that someone genuinely believed in, which makes its sinister underpinnings land harder. The contrast between the warmth of the visual design and the horror of what the city actually is gives American Arcadia a specific tonal quality that I find more unsettling than straightforward dystopian greyness.
Angela’s first-person sections shift into a more contemporary tech aesthetic — clean interfaces, hacking tools, security camera feeds — that contrasts effectively with Trevor’s world and reinforces the sense that the two characters inhabit genuinely different realities.
📺 Did You Know?
Trevor is voiced by Yuri Lowenthal — the actor best known for playing Spider-Man in the Insomniac games. It is perfect casting: Lowenthal brings exactly the right combination of likability and gentle haplessness to a character who is, by design, completely unremarkable. He makes you root for Trevor immediately, which is the whole game.
Gameplay
The dual perspective mechanic is the most original thing about American Arcadia and where I think it earns its place in the genre. Trevor’s sections are familiar cinematic platformer territory — run, jump, climb, hide, puzzle your way through environmental obstacles. Angela’s sections are first-person puzzle adventures — hacking cameras, rerouting platforms, managing security systems in real time while Trevor runs through them.
The moments where both perspectives are active simultaneously are the highlights of the game: Angela needs to pass a security inspection while also guiding Trevor past a blockade, or manages a set of rotating platforms while Trevor sprints through them. These multitasking sequences are genuinely clever and create a tension that neither gameplay mode could generate alone.
The platforming on Trevor’s side is not particularly demanding — this is more adventure game than precision platformer — and players looking for the mechanical depth of Inside or Limbo will find it light. But I think the difficulty is calibrated correctly for what the game is trying to do: the challenge is the story, not the platforming, and the platforming is good enough to carry you through to the next story beat without frustration.
Atmosphere
I find it strong and consistent. The score sits in a 1970s lounge-jazz aesthetic that fits the retro-futurist world perfectly, shifting into something more urgent during the chase sequences. The voice acting is excellent throughout — Yuri Lowenthal as Trevor in particular, finding a specific register of confused, slightly bewildered everyman that makes you root for him immediately. The sound design during the hacking sections has a satisfying tactile quality that makes Angela’s puzzle solving feel appropriately procedural.
🎮 My honest opinion
American Arcadia surprised me. I went in expecting a competent narrative platformer with a Truman Show premise, and came away with something that felt genuinely sharp and contemporary — a game that has real things to say about surveillance capitalism, algorithmic visibility, and what it means to be unremarkable in a world that runs on attention. Trevor is a better protagonist than his premise deserves, and the Angela sections elevate what could have been a straightforward chase thriller into something more interesting.
It is not the deepest mechanically, and i think the opening is slower than it needs to be. But it is one of the most narratively satisfying cinematic platformers of recent years, and the dual perspective structure is genuinely inventive. Recommended without hesitation.
Where can I play American Arcadia?
American Arcadia is available on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. The console release came in May 2025, making it more widely accessible than it was at launch.
Games similar to American Arcadia
Inside (2016)
Inside shares American Arcadia’s instinct for using a dystopian, authoritarian world as the backdrop for a cinematic platformer, and both games are fundamentally about a single ordinary person navigating a system designed to control and consume them. Inside is darker and more abstract; American Arcadia is funnier and more explicit about its targets. The two make an interesting pair.
The Cub (2023)
The Cub shares American Arcadia’s satirical anger about the way corporations treat ordinary people — the billionaires, the systems, the algorithmic logic of who survives and who does not. Different aesthetics and very different tones, but the underlying political frustration is recognisably similar.
If American Arcadia’s satirical angle resonated — the idea of a world that punishes you for being unremarkable — you will also find similar energy in Ministry of Broadcast, where a totalitarian regime runs escape challenges for public entertainment. Both share American Arcadia’s instinct for using genre mechanics to say something pointed about the world we actually live in.