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The trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 at this year's E3 delivered thrills at such a high bit-rate you may not be able to contain yourself. The game's magnetism lies in its buzzing metropolis of Night City. Developer CD Projekt Red has said the streets of its upcoming RPG are filled with 'cyberenhanced street warriors, tech-savvy netrunners and corporate life-hackers.' And while it sounds as if the Polish studio has drawn inspiration from a visit to Shoreditch, it's alluring all the same. Here are a few recommendations to tide you over until the game finally drops – hopefully, a little nearer to now than its title suggests.
Ruiner
Ruiner's East Asian city of Rengkok is a greebled garbage dump, combining classic cyberpunk with a heavy emphasis on industrial pipework and verticality. It isn't so much dystopic as dyspeptic; it's jostling citizens have been spiked with spite, and the entire town is bathed in the red foreglow of bloodshed. And there’s plenty of that to go around.
Developer Reikon Games' top-down shooter is injected with a little of the same anarchic hatred as Hatred; only Ruiner runs on different fuel, casting aside petty provocation for excitement and smarts. You play as a masked vigilante trying to save his kidnapped brother from a shadowy conglomerate. You achieve this through much murder, all the while chivvied along by a psychotic hacker who refers to you as her 'puppy.' All in the name of fun.
Dreamfall Chapters
Dreamfall Chapters is the conclusion to a rich adventure game saga that began in 1999, with The Longest Journey. Developer Red Thread Games gave the game's heroine, Zoë Castillo, capacious pockets of time to wonder the streets. Which is just as well. Its setting, Europolis, is – as you may have intuited – a moody slab of European concrete. Stretching from Poland, across Germany to the Netherlands, swallowing France and the Baltic countries, it's a riven land, sutured with Cyberpunk staples. The streets are hued in bruised blue and livened with pink paper-lantern-light and the fizz of rainy neon. Though it's a joy to just sightsee, Dreamfall Chapters is well worth your time for its story of political subterfuge and inter-dimensional culture clashes.
Remember Me
A cyberpunk sketch or two likely lurks in the back pages of many a studio portfolio, so sumptuous is the subject matter. For Remember Me, Dontnod Entertainment’s debut, the studio unleashed its art team seemingly under the proviso that it must transform the game’s title into a command. They did. Because while Remember Me is largely forgotten for its cloddish combat and floundering plot, its world and its central premise stay in the mind.
Quite literally, in fact, in the case of heroine Nilin and her band of – give me strength – 'Errorists.' Remember Me has you not only futzing around the faded facades of Neo-Paris, but digging around in people's heads to scramble the eggs of their memories. Part of the joy of Cyberpunk is in the fusion of old and new, and to see the neoclassical chic of Paris enjambed with steel and haunted by holographic advertisements is a memory even Nilin couldn’t pry out your head.
Observer
Though you may want her assistance when it comes to Observer. Which isn't to say it's a poor game, just that the sooty murk of its world leaves you gasping for air. Set in Kraków in 2084, the game casts you – better than that, it casts Rutger Hauer – in the titular role: a sentinel appointed by Chiron, a megacorporation, to maintain control of the masses in the wake of a digital plague. How does one go about controlling the population? Hacking, of course – specifically: hacking their minds.
Observer has the nous and nifty feet to borrow from the right places, and borrow well. There are traces of Condemned, in the sifting of crime scenes; of L.A. Noire, in the scrutinising of suspects; and, piqued with paranoia, it recalls the horrors of Amnesia. Though you may need to scrub your skin clean afterward, Observer’s world is one you'll relish exploring. It's a slag heap of wiring, flensed of warmth and lashed with rain. (Perhaps developer Bloober Team went to Shoreditch as well.)
Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided
The hero of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and its sequel, Mankind Divided, is Adam Jensen. He sounds like Keanu Reeves, crinkled with the fatigue of Clint Eastwood – a sort of ornery bemusement. Both games are immersive sims, and have you stealthing, shooting, and relieving folks of either consciousness or, if you fancy unsheathing your augmented elbow-blades, their lives. On top of that, you’ll divest each warren-like hub of treasures – upgrades, weapons, codes, cash.
These trinkets are secondary gold to that which you mop up with your eyes. See the once-roaring city of Detroit rejuvenated, the pistons of its faded motor industry replaced with the stainless steel of the augmentation business. See the loamy grasslands of modern day Hengsha metamorphosed into a two-story megalopolis. Wander the crowded streets, huddled beneath the ziggurats of corporate industry, all of it seared with the yellow of sodium streetlights. These games are, at present, the final word on Cyberpunk in games. Sadly, they are also the final word on Deus Ex, with Square Enix putting the series on hiatus last year. It's a great shame, too; such are the joys of these games.
