…loading //:: Ice_breaker.Mc
The genre of cyberpunk has an unspoken rule.
Wikipedia defines the genre as lowlife and hightech, which functionally
speaking is fine. The bvgroti has his
own stipulations. The bvgroti is a fanatic. He reads gibson like it’s
scripture. Adhering to it harder than a computer does a line of code. Bvgroti
knows that cyberpunk is when tech breaks society, and consequently society
becomes incomprehensible and incohesive. A cyberpunk protagonist who has any
idea of what’s going on? Yeah? Nice oxymoron, you Wilson.
I was given Cloudpunk by a friend; they didn’t
say why, but they said it was up my alley: they were right.
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You play as a delivery driver, just arrived in
the city, working their first night on the job for an illegal delivery company:
cloud punk. The city is falling apart. Systems fail at random and the city
engineers have no idea what’s going on. If you smell social allegory, I have
some good news for you cupcake, your brain isn’t totally fried yet. Lets stick
some trodes.
The gameplay isn’t complicated, you have a
hover car, you fly it about the city, picking up and dropping off packages
while heavy synth music and rain hammers down from on high. You meet characters
along the way, they all have a lot of personality squeezed into a few fleeting
lines. You get out your car and walk around sets of interconnected platforms, where
you can buy noodles and watch the ceiling of clouds pulsate in swirling mauve
tinted patterns
Days later I'm talking to a friend pointing
out how so many of the characters in this game are very obvious sci-fi
references, he hadn't noticed. The hardboiled android detective Huxley is my
favorite character, when i tell him he goes quiet for a moment, at the time I
didn't really notice.
The game is pretty even though it’s rendered
in chunky pixel form. The character models don’t really line up to their head
art, but none of that bothered me, it uses its style to go for scale, having
large busy environments that won’t melt your gpu because their pixels are the
size of your fist. What it does with the environment is smother you with
ambience, it’s very immersive, better than any stimsim.
The emphasis on the game is not the challenge,
the way it keeps you engaged with the story is the decisions the player is
given; i don’t think the decision affect the story in any meaningful way, but
they clearly affect other characters, and i can’t help but care a bit about
them; asking the player to make judgment calls about individuals with limited
information and with questions that often exist in gray scale. It shouldn’t
work, but the questions are often actually interesting and with no clear
answer.
My favorite was the quarantine block. There is
a gas leak in a city block, you have room for three people in your car, there
are six people to choose from, the company wants to make sure the job pays for
itself. Some of the people are horrible, there is a CEO who doesn’t know what
company he runs, a rude scientist, a haunty posh woman (Mrs Octavia Butler).
Then there are the nice but poor people, a retired army sarg, an android fresh
out the box, and a kind doctor.
To my shame I left the new android behind and
took the posh woman. I had dropped her off at an apartment earlier in the game.
I had met her husband, an android; they had both been so privileged that they
barely saw me as a person, but they were happy together and that meant
something to me. If i hadn’t known them, would i have picked differently? I
didn’t know the others; they could have had family too… fuck.
Each delivery is its own little story, and
they often link back and reference one another. There’s a lot of emphasis on
android and automata as second class citizens, it’s used mostly as a race
allegory, and the story is very quick to stress the wealth divide and how
exploitative the system is. It leaves one with a lot to think about, and while
cruising around the city; that’s what I was doing, quietly mulling over the
things i’d been seeing, the lite challenge supports the story by giving it room
to breathe, it’s good game design.
This all culminates in the driver meeting the
city's emergent Ai consciousness and being asked to sort the mess out. How?
Delivery and choice making, of course. Needless to say the story is loaded with
the feels, I was surprised at how moving it was, that each character with so
little dialogue manages to connect so easily with me. It’s a lovely short
little game. Best experienced and not taken secondhand.
