In Pax Autocratica, you aren’t just running a colony. You also need to worry about propaganda, public executions, mechanized warfare, and whether the population is secretly preparing to overthrow you.
In case you missed its release-date announcement earlier this week, developer Multiverse has confirmed that Pax Autocratica will launch into Steam Early Access on August 10, 2026. The darkly satirical hybrid combines colony management with first-person roguelite combat, allowing you to construct a totalitarian state before personally leading its soldiers into increasingly chaotic battles across the Tyris System.
Build the State You Think They Deserve
Pax Autocratica gives you plenty of ways to keep your citizens obedient, although very few of them would survive a human-resources meeting.
You can shape society through surveillance, propaganda, punishment, and fear, watching as citizens become loyal, grateful, terrified, or increasingly rebellious. A more benevolent approach is also possible, with comfort and prosperity offering an alternative route to maintaining control. Either way, your decisions continue to affect the relationships, loyalties, and tensions forming inside the colony.
Those citizens still need to keep the State running. They can be assigned to mine, gather resources, haul materials, conduct research, and manufacture food, armor, weapons, and other supplies. What begins as a small collection of fragile shelters gradually grows into a self-sustaining regime capable of supporting your ambitions far beyond its walls.
Recruitment Gets Uncomfortably Efficient
Not every future citizen will arrive willingly.
Weakened enemies can be captured during expeditions and dragged back to your colony, where resistance can be dealt with through fear, indoctrination, execution, or conversion. A prisoner might eventually become another productive member of society, a devoted believer in your cause, or a public warning to anyone beginning to question your leadership.
It is dark material, but Pax Autocratica is deliberately presenting its systems through satire. The colony is not merely somewhere to upgrade between battles. It is a society shaped by every policy you enforce and every unpleasant shortcut you decide is necessary for the greater good.
Leave the Paperwork and Join the War
Once the colony is functioning, you can step away from the administrative side of tyranny and join your troops in first-person roguelite expeditions.
Battles begin with hostile ships and smaller skirmishes before expanding into mechanized conflicts filled with infantry, tanks, mechs, drones, missiles, artillery, and overlapping projectile patterns. You can issue orders to your soldiers and strengthen them as part of your setup, although using them as expendable shields is apparently another perfectly valid command decision.
Cores collected during each expedition determine how that run develops. Weapon Cores alter how your guns behave, Combination Cores create synergies between different sets, and others strengthen your squad or make sacrificing them considerably more useful to your own survival. The aim is to build a shifting war machine around both your weapons and the soldiers fighting beside you.
Combining a colony simulator and an FPS roguelite is an ambitious way to run a dictatorship. We will find out whether Pax Autocratica can keep both halves of its regime under control when Early Access begins on August 10.