Cool Cyberpunk games that are actually punk

Five titles that live within the spirit of genre rather than just co-opting it

Guess who just started reading Neuromancer!

Cyberpunk is a genre that suffers a great deal from very particular people missing the point. That classic tweet about the torment nexus comes to mind, certain folk see a cool futuristic science fiction landscape that’s littered with the corpses of the marginalised, the oppressed and the broken down and beaten and think ‘wow cool implants I wish I could access the matrix!’. It would be considered too on the nose even for a farce if it were’nt so prescient in contemporary discourse.

In this regard, and in spite of recent reevaluations of it, I find myself conflicted about spending any amount of time talking about Cyberpunk 2077, a game that is the apex of everything distinctly not punk. A huge, towering monument to hubris, built off the backs of a thousand late nights, broken promises and a weird obsession with looks that just in itself is at odds with the whole genre.

This isn’t a post about that game however. I’ve not played it, I don’t know if I ever will, despite being a fan of CD Projekt Red’s previous games. I think it’s already sucked enough air out of the room, regardless of whether it’s a genuinely good game or not.

There’s so much cool stuff out there that’s going uncherish, so instead I want to talk about five smaller games of this genre that I find genuinely fascinating, often brilliant and that above all else, embody the true spirit of punk:

Producer 2021

Stuffed Wombat’s grotesque adventure game is at times genuinely difficult to look at, but it has a fascinating relationship with its representation of euclidean spaces that I think makes it worth experiencing first hand. 

Taking on the role of a ‘producer’ you’re tasked with retrieving three prototypes from well hidden researchers across the city. And it's a city of real haves and have nots, condensing down all of civilization beautifully into a handful of screens, where you find the gleaning corporate towers and gorgeous traditionalist architecture fundamentally at odds with a citizenry that have been reduced to nothing. 

It's not even really cyberpunk in the traditional sense, everything has this gross Cronenbergesque sheen to it. Fleshpunk, maybe, you interface with machines via intestinal tubing. While the lexicon differs, the sentiment is evergreen. Not that there’s much green to be found in this world, of course.

The writing is as brilliantly chilling as it is funny, exploring a truly alien world while hanging on for dear life to the intrinsic humanity of its inhabitants. You will meet people and you will know their plight. As you sacrifice your own humanity to pull yourself out of the quagmire, letting yourself become one with the machine and all for the approval of a stranger in an ivory tower, you will come to see humanity's dark heart. No amount of technological revolution will truly hide that.

It's disgusting. It's uncomfortable. It's perfect. Short, not very sweet and with a belter of a soundtrack from the eternally cool ThorHighHeels. It's a dark, disturbing, nauseating masterpiece.

Umurangi Generation

I've already written at length about the relationship between the player and the environment in Umurangi Generation, but what I haven't done is wax lyrical about how incredibly atmospheric the game is. The city is awash with neon and concrete. Ne'er-do-wells adorned in glow sticks and punk couture on every street corner.

A world awash with hypersexual holograms and a suffocating faceless fascist presence. Yeah there are giant entities on the horizon, both man made and alien, and sometimes it's hard to discern which ones are the bigger threat, but there's a whole digital world out there. Hell, the revelation of DJ Tariq's true identity itself is a beautiful homage to Johnny Mnemonic. 

It's a world that feels like its citizens have dragged life and love and culture out of the rubble, giving meaning to a world full of suffering, a truly counter cultural antifascist landscape. No guns, no shadow running or neuromancy, but still a sense of a place that has dug its heels firmly into the future, that although wrapped in a cosmic battle between gods and monsters, has something far more precious at stake.

Umurangi Generation is cyberpunk through and through, and it's cool as hell.

Eastward

The relationship between man and technology is a complicated one in the world of Eastward. Yes there are sentient robots and cities stuffed to the gills with pipes and cables and monitors that do God-knows-what, and the Akira references certainly don't go unnoticed, but it's also a game that wants so desperately to attune to nature. There are no gleaming citadels to be found for the bulk of the game, only communities hastily welded together from the detritus of another civilisation.

That there are modern contrivances: AI powered refrigerators that allow you to save your game, communal games consoles, vending machines that will definitely help you out in a pinch, speaks to a world that hasn’t quite healed from the disaster long since passed.

A society that has not quite moved on from it’s cursed legacy, it's in that plucky, scruff of the neck survival that much of the game's incredible atmosphere comes from, and part of the reason why I don’t mind there being so much downtime in what otherwise is essentially a Zelda clone. The land has altered in the wake of calamity, but humanity has endured. It’s a beautiful setting for a game I really loved.

Quadrilateral Cowboy

Brendan Chung made a fucking wicked heist game where your main tool of the trade is a laptop. There's very little hand holding here. In order to achieve your goals you must develop a kinship with the machine, understanding its power in order to develop very imprecise but incredibly creative solutions to your problems.

Nestled around this central conceit is a world that is incredibly tactile. Big chunky buttons, levers and switches adorn a landscape where the internet of things has become the internet of everything. From lights, to security, to doors and chutes and hatches the mechanical is the digital, in a weirdly blue peter-esque DIY symbiosis. It looks and feels incredible to be in that world, and as the game progresses, things get increasingly weird.

Quadrilateral Cowboy’s success comes from the confidence it’s creator has in their audience to get what’s trying to be achieved here. While levels are small and manageable, they are presented in a manner that makes them feel much bigger. You’ll find yourself often having to navigate multiple floors of buildings, or even multiple buildings, preparing reams of code, setting your devices up with such incredible care to enact what eventually cumulates in about 10 seconds of action. It’s a great heist game. It’s a brilliant puzzle game. It’s a true Cyberpunk game.

Else Heart.Break ()

Cards on the table, I only bought this today and haven’t gotten very far in it. I find the very idea of it incredibly intimidating. Much like Quadrilateral Cowboy, Else Heart.Break() is a game, as I understand it, about using code to navigate the world, and by which I mean you can hack almost any obstacle in your way, almost any object you come across, changing its atomic structure, and its very nature.

What if an apple could be a key? What if your morning coffee could help you break into buildings. What if the very idea of space and time could be folded and interpreted however you want? This is true galaxy-brained stuff, but beyond that it’s a game that portrays those classic anti-establishment ruined-future vibes in such a profoundly cool way.

Else Heart.Break(), even from the scant few hours I have put into it, indulges in this supremely punk atmosphere, the bohemian oppressed vs the corporate suits in a back of beyond port town. Midnight haunts, banging tunes and neon upon neon upon neon. It’s incredibly appealing, and I haven’t even gotten into the hacking stuff yet.

As always, I welcome recommendations of other cool games I may have missed. What’s your favourite Cyberpunk game?