Weirdly, cyberpunk-adjacent games like this often feature the most cyberpunk protagonists.
Shadowrun: Dragonfall gets the heart of cyberpunk right. Over time these tropes have been distilled into the core of the genre: all the imagery, with none of the messages. The initial wave that followed iconic works like Neuromancer, Blade Runner, and Akira recycled too, using their conceits and visuals in new ways. Recycling is an essential part of cyberpunk fiction, its cities full of repurposed junk given new life. Like so many games Read Only Memories borrows only the visuals from Akira-but in Akira the biker gang are the heroes. It's rough to see the characters with mohawks and shades treated so roughly in a game that's all about evoking the classic retro cyberpunk feel. In the end it turns out Starfucker and Olli are guilty of the vandalism you accuse them of. They feel like a token inclusion, cast aside by the climax, when they deserve to be central. If you don't you get to know them better and learn they're not bad guys, but then they transition to comedy sidekicks-those two wacky guys!-instead. In Read Only Memories you see two punks named Starfucker and Olli, then immediately accuse them of an unrelated act of vandalism and chase them down, after which you're given the option to call the police like some kind of tool of The Man. Games like the Tex Murphy series, Technobabylon, Anachranox, Westwood's Blade Runner (opens in new tab), and Read Only Memories (opens in new tab) all fit into this category.īut even here, with shabby heroes who live in cramped apartments the order of the day, the low-lifes often get a raw deal. Since then, whether detectives like in Psycho-Pass or crusading journalists like in Max Headroom, plenty of cyberpunk stories have been about characters who attempt to solve crimes but stumble into more philosophical questions. Blade Runner gave us the archetype of the futuristic investigator forced to see a bigger, more troubling world beyond the next case. Influential as it is, Neuromancer's not the only flavor of cyberpunk. Because it's a videogame the hero of the story is a white American with a big gun instead of her.Ī rare counter-example is Remember Me from Life is Strange developer Dontnot, in which you do get to play the terrorist-well, "Errorist" because it's the future, but still. Binary Domain (opens in new tab) has an on-the-nose example of a sidelined punk: a teen hacker with multicolored hair named Yuki who lives in the slums of Tokyo and works as a courier for the resistance.
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