Cyberpunk is a pretty interesting genre. It's meant to depict a near future where tech has advanced so much, yet the gaps in class have only widened to create an unmissable divide. Yet so many of the themes and aesthetics of the genre are so deeply rooted in the '80s vision of the future, often fueled by orientalism and a lacking any acknowledgment of the actual growth of technology in our daily lives.
When it comes to AAA games especially, it can be pretty hard to effectively critique the pitfalls of a broken system, when꧅ it has likely been developed by a massive corporation. Few and far between are the games that actually challenge the idea of what makes the genre punk, and can be hard to find if🅷 your baseline for discovery is wet pavements, neon lights and being set in the year 20XX. A good place to start though is by looking for games that actually have people behind them, rather than just being another corporate product.
6 Red Strings C𝐆lub
Cyberpunk is intended almost as a warning. These pieces aren't always meant as hypotheticals, but rather a researched warning of what's to come if society doesn't avert its course. It's why tying Cyberpunk media to things we can relate to in our own time is so important, or else that future can feel so distant. And what's one of the few things almost every culture in the world shares? Alcohol.
The Red Strings Club has plenty of that. By night, you work the bar, manipulating drinks to try to garner as much info from your customers as possible. Other times you play a freelance hacker, trying to break into the headquarters of a massive world-ruling corporation literally called SuperContinent. Red Stings Club is a tale of little guys opposing that greater power in their spare time while running a day job to keep themselves afloat. That's the real heart of cyberpunk.
5 T♉ransistor
Supergiant is renowned for all its works. Bastion's floating islands and critiques of genocide, Pyre's themes of the downtrodden and the moral justification of revolution, and Hades and its broken family dynamics that put the world on edge. Then there's 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Transistor, a game that wears its themes proudly, though more subtly than manꦓy ofꦯ their other titles.
You play as Red, a singer who's lost her voice in the city of Cloudbank that's succumbing to its digitized fate. Cloudbank is a city ruled by the elite. They vote on the weather, the time of day, the themes of their very city. Regular people are nothing more than their jobs, being digitized into NPCs to populate the world of the rich upon their death. Red existing in this world is a contrivance: a singer without a voice, a person without a purpose. Transistor manages to debate the sanctity of life without falling into the ableist critique of prosthetics removing our humanity.
4 Mirror's Edge
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mirror's Edge is definitely a game many would hesitate to call cyberpunk, especially being published by EA, a company that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:so famously over-monetises its games. Yet Mirror's Edge fits every aspect of cyberpunk that's actually necessary without needing to show a city in visual decay and body modification.
Many people remember the incredible Parkour and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:strong art direction of Mirror's Edge, but few examine how they tie into its themes. This city is surveilled beyond any semblance of privacy. The city is pristine, a shining emblem of white without crime. The only area safe for people to truly be themselves is the rooftops. The only things that guide your way in this monolithic city are the few shades of colour left that gleam against the utopian white. It's a city hiding its decay behind a facade of beauty, and it doesn't need to show you much beyond that to make its point known.
3 ꦆ Ci🔯tizen Sleeper
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Citizen Sleeper was released to rave reviews thanks to its deep mechanics and plethora of diverse characters and stories, but its world is one that truly understands the cyberpunk genre. It's set on the dilapidated space station of Erlin's Eye. Originally a temporary scaffolding made to build a society to survive the collapse of society on Earth, it has fallen victim to the same ultra-capitalists that ruined Earth in the first place.
You play as a sleeper, a human consciousness implanted into an artificial body, but the property of a corporation. There's an obvious evil here, but you're just one person. You're not even trying to make a living anymore, you're just doing what you need to survive. Each day you interact with the people living in Erlin's Eye, the normal people that actually create a community, and the ones that have turned it into a hellscape in the first place.
2 VA💫-11 Hall🅘-A
VA-11 Hall-A themes start in the very name, representing the Norse afterlife of warriors who die in a blaze of glory. A nice analogy, in the wider sense, seeing as people need to fight in their own minuscule ways every day to survive, but VA-11 Hall-A go🍌es further than this surface-level symbolism. Not offering solutions, but showing you the reality of its world, for better and worse.
You play as Jill, a regular girl 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:running the Valhalla bar who's madly in love with her boss. You don't really have a life outside your job, but that's par for the course. Once again, the highlight of this game is the people you deal with on a daily basis, your drinks bring out more aspects of their personality and you learn more about them and their world. These characters are blunt. Cops who throw around slurs, sex robots designed to emulate the Lolita Complex in a legal-but-morally-repugnant manner, and streamers who have turned their entire lives into a video. They're fascinating, and not always good people, but they're a reflection of the grimmy minutiae that cyberpunk media often tends to sanitize.
1 ꧒ Umurangi Generation
Set in Tauranga Aotearoa, Umurangi Generation might not be one that's immediately seen as cyberpunk, but that's by design. Director Tali Faulkner viewed cyberpunk as a stagnant genre ironically stuck in the past, so the game is instead a reflection of our own era and where it's heading, a setting they describe as a .
Inspired heavily by Māori culture, Umurangi Generation has you playing as a courier for the Tauranga Express in a world on the brink. The core of the game is delivering packages and taking photos. The depth of the camera tools is where the game shines. You have so much control ♏over every picture you take, from angles and aperture, all the way to filters, and focus. You take pictures of the world as it is, framing your photos in whatever way appeals to you. A picture speaks a thousand words, and Umurangi Generations lets your photos tell the story of its ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚworld.