Chrome and neon shootouts between musings on humanity.
Chrome and neon shootouts between musings on humanity.
Cyberpunk as a genre is at its best when it serves as a vessel. This vessel works to enhance dystopian stories that are rife with warnings about a hypothetical future and full of themes about transhumanism and identity as well as corporate rot. There is a full body of work that has sparked interest in these topics since the 20th century; novels like The Sprawl trilogy and Neuromancer, and movies and shows like Blade Runner, Alita: Battle Angel, and the relatively new hit netflix show Cyberpunk Edgerunners have all dominated the space of the genre for years now.
Although currently, while cyberpunk is not a singular thing, there is one particular fictional world which has gained prominence in the genre– the world of the tabletop roleplaying game named Cyberpunk (fittingly), which is also the setting of Edgerunners. It’s famous for the world of Night City and lethal street gangs, corporate warfare, and a near-mythology coated in chrome bodies, indulgence, and death.
This is but one facet of what makes cyberpunk the genre that it is, and just as well as there are movies and books there are also many games which play with the ideas in incredible ways. Here’s a collection of five great cyberpunk games on Steam right now!
For a text based game that mostly consists of looking at pretty art and rolling digital dice to pass skill checks, it tells a deeply emotional story about the player, an android with very lttle to-do, exploring a star system hollowed out by corporations, with everyone else left to pick up the pieces. For being a game about being an android it’s an incredibly human experience, as you go from place to place across the Starward Belt and help people here and there, all while dealing with your own impermanence. The character is an android, remember. And when they break, they don’t heal so easily.
What Starward Vector does right (besides being shockingly beautiful and hauntingly emotional) is that it hits all of the main points of the genre. Space is not an unfamiliar place for cyberpunk to go if you look at the original Blade Runner’s main antagonist for example. And here the setting contributes to that weird emptiness that pervades everyone who lives in the Starward Belt after corporations have dismantled everything else. Corporations being evil is the easy part though, the hard part is how the game nails what it means to have a body made of metal, something strong and durable and yet the strangeness of it all as the dice you use to make skill checks can break– signifying your own inexplicable loss of function in your own body. It’s an impressive game if you like text based, thoughtful experiences like this.
Unbeatable is a game that says everything you need to know right in its first trailer: “a game where music is illegal and you do crimes.”
The game, much like Starward Vector, is story based. But Unbeatable turns the gameplay way up, mostly played as an intense rhythm game that challenges your reflexes. The story takes place in a near future, where the premise describes itself. Some authoritarian or otherwise government has outlawed music, and you play as the lead guitar in a band. It’s a game about music, at its core. Specifically, it’s about music being used as a tool for rebellion and its value as a powerful emotional outlet for people. Knowing this, it’s almost comical in the way that it perfectly hits cyberpunk on the head. It’s no sci-fi shootout with android people and neon lights, but it shows us the other side– government overreach, corruption, and authoritarianism.
If you hadn’t figured it out, cyberpunk is an intensely political genre and Unbeatable is no exception. This game is about rebels fighting for a cause they believe in against a wildly unjust system. It just happens to take the form of a rhythm game with a style that manages to be unique among a panoply of rhythm games that all appear similar. And it’s only two buttons, too.
Not to mention the music is actually good– original soundtracks created specifically for the game. It’s unreleased as of now, but a “demo” is available on Steam for a taste of the full version when it comes out this year!
Stray caused quite a buzz when it came out, mostly because its main feature was a cute cat. But the game takes place in a ‘cybercity’ filled with android people while you, a little kitty, find your way home. This is probably the second highest budget game on this list, with beautifully rendered 3D graphics and controls that feel great to play. It’s cute, which is a big draw, but the actual cat gameplay makes a lot of sense and feels responsive, allowing you to maximize your ability to play a little feline nuisance in a world where you’re mostly the only organic living thing around.
Stay's cyberpunk-ness comes more from its outward appearance than other games on this list so far, but the robotic civilians of the city you traverse have a surprising amount of life to them; fawning over you, talking about their hobbies, running in fear when you invariably trip some loud alarm. But the point that the game makes clear is that while you are super cute, you are made of meat. And in this city, there’s not really a place for you that’s not in the alleys and cracks of this bastion of technological process at the cost of everything else. It tosses you to the side because you’ve become obsolete– you’re a Stray. The cat doesn’t care, obviously, but the cat lacks media literacy skills, something that I hope many of us do have.
This is probably the most different game on this list, just because it’s so scary. Signalis is fundamentally a survivor horror game. It’s about you, an android called a Replika named LSTR-512 (Elster), exploring the depths of this strange and terrifying government facility at the far edge of the universe. You meet a variety of terrible horrors along the way, androids who have lost their minds in bodies that can never die, monstrosities that are terrible fusions of flesh and machine--all the while you’re stressing about how many bullets you have left and whether or not it’s even worth using them.
Cyberpunk can easily be read as horror, although it’s not so common. But the main variety of enemy in Signalis that you face are Replikas that have just lost their mind from hardware corruption and simply can’t die because their bodies won’t let them. There are others, like cyborg things in which the flesh has mutated beyond recognition, but the larger point of Signalis is a story about grief and letting go, or rather– what happens if you don’t. In the game, the cyberpunk elements are more used as a lens through which to discuss these themes, especially when your memory isn’t exactly right and things start appearing differently than they are.
This game is straight up horrifying, so play it only if you can stomach the horror and downright stressful gameplay, but there is a deeply rewarding story in this game if you look for it.
Remember when I mentioned the Cyberpunk tabletop world? Yeah. This is the other major property that takes place in that world. This is the largest game on the list by far and it sure as hell is cyberpunk. High-octane action, steel and guns and mechanical marvels under neon lights, and corporate billboards fighting over a world that’s been falling apart for a long time now. Essentially; the corpos are bad and it’s up to Night City’s most comically powerful mercenary to do something about it.
While the game came out to a mixed reception, the state it is in now is certainly worth playing. You take up the mantle as V, a mercenary in Night City who gets involved in the wrong business and is infected with a data chip. The chip happens to store the personality of a mostly-forgotten legend of Night City called Johnny Silverhand, and both of you desperately try to figure out how to fix the chip before it overrides your personality and takes your body.
Gameplay wise, it’s nothing short of masterful. Excellent combat that feels fluid and responsive and lets you feel powerful at the right moments, and a well rendered world that pretty accurately describes the devastation that Night City is, underneath corporations like Arasaka. I absolutely recommend it if you can stomach the price. It does cyberpunk about as well as you can. The crux of it can be summed up by a quote from one of Silverhand’s more impassioned speeches:
“I saw corps strip farmers of water ... and eventually of land. Saw them transform Night City into a machine fueled by people's crushed spirits, broken dreams and emptied pockets. Corps have long controlled our lives, taken lots... and now they're after our souls! V, I've declared war not because capitalism's a thorn in my side or outta nostalgia for an America gone by. This war's a people's war against a system that's spiralled outta our control. It's a war against the forces of entropy, understand? Do whatever it takes to stop 'em, defeat 'em, gut 'em. If I gotta kill, I'll kill…”
Hi! Welcome back. If you liked this article, there’s plenty more like it on the website. For example, if you’re interested then here’s a list of the best story based games on Steam. And if that’s not your style, then this one is about some great strategy games to whet your appetite.
