Indie Cyberpunk, Part 2: Postindustrial Wastelands and Cyberpop Fantasies
Don Everhart, Nate Schmidt, Christian Haines
This is part two of the Gamers with Glasses spotlight on independently made and produced cyberpunk (click here for part one). While cyberpunk designers usually play with futurism, there’s also a whole lot of the present in the genre and in each of these selections. Cyberpunk games can range from confronting inertia about climate disaster to presenting the urgency of going on the run. Or they can just give you a quick hit of anti-corporate media. No matter your flavor, it’s worth checking out these three:
Umurangi Generation (PC)
Cyberpunk doesn’t distribute the future evenly. Some of the best examples of the genre highlight groups of people run over by the bullet train of progress. But Umurangi Generation goes a step further by asking players to consider what we even mean by “the future.” The first sentence of the game’s Steam description says it all: “Umurangi Generation is a first person photography game in the shitty future.” Cyberpunk video games are full of shitty futures, but they usually serve as backdrops for exciting adventures during which your player-character levels up on a path towards transhuman perfection. In contrast, Umurangi Generation asks players to dwell on the shittiness – to use the game’s camera to capture the beauty of a world falling to ruin.
Each level of the game tasks you with taking photographs of a set number of objects, say, 5 birds, 10 solar panels, and a sarcastic message about UN soldiers. There’s progress of a sort, I suppose. You do move from one level to the next and you unlock new photography equipment, but you never feel more powerful. That’s not just because Umurangi Generation doesn’t involve killing enemies but also because you’re often in contexts that resemble detention camps or postindustrial wastelands. There’s no resolution in sight, only a grim sort of stasis.
Umurangi Generation translates from te reo Māori (the Māori language) to “Red Sky Generation.” The game was inspired by the bushfires that burned across Australia in recent years. Without giving away the game’s story, I will say that the situation is post-apocalyptic and that the bright colors of the setting are more like the dying embers of civilization than the lurid glow of the sex shops you usually find in cyberpunk settings. Behind the game’s development is Naphtali Faulkner, a Ngāi Te Rangi (Māori) game designer living in Australia, and it’s clear that at least some of the game’s perspective on the future comes from reckoning with the violence that’s been perpetrated against indigenous peoples by settler colonialism. More generally, Faulkner wants to reinvent cyberpunk so that it’s not just a bunch of tropes about cyberspace and cyborgs but instead a critical lens on the problems of the present. As Faulkner explained to Gameindustry.biz, “For the last ten years, it's been very much cyberpunk as an '80s circle jerk. And that's good, but I think [Cyberpunk pen-and-paper RPG creator] Mike Pondsmith was on the money there when he said it's like a mirror you hold up to what you're currently going through now.” Umurangi Generation is a mirror held up to the combined catastrophes of neoliberalism, climate change, and settler colonialism, but it’s also a chance to capture the beauty in civilization’s embers, as they dance and flicker against the darkness.
Pivotal (Hannah Rose) (PC)
He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that lay at his feat, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he opened was Molly’s: neatly folded clothing and small expensive-looking gadgets. The second was stuffed with things he didn’t remember buying: books, tapes, a simstim deck, clothing with French and Italian labels.
– William Gibson, Neuromancer
Joseph Campbell’s “hero with a thousand faces” monomyth is a weird self-fulfilling prophecy masquerading as comparative anthropology, but he does get a thing or two right about thresholds. There’s always a Time to Go moment in the story; an event horizon beyond which there is no escaping the harsh pull of what you cannot unknow or undo. Rick Deckard has to make his trip to the Rosen Association; Major Kusanagi has to go hunting the Puppet Master. But wouldn’t you think, somewhere in all that “gritty realism” for which cyberpunk is famous, those bionic heroes would have a moment to take stock of all that they’re leaving behind? Hannah Rose’s Pivotal poses a series of questions and leaves the player to invent the answers.
At its core, Pivotal is a very simple point-and-click game. Poke around your apartment; what can you take with you? Anything that you might be able to bring has a brief description that allows you to concoct the narrative of your choosing as you select things to drag and drop into the suitcase at the top of the screen. What all could you cram in that suitcase? Why are you running? Where are you running? A game played entirely in medias res, Pivotal invites you to imagine both how this story began and how it might end. It masterfully plays with easily recognizable cyberpunk tropes to suspend you permanently in the moment where the materials you bring decide what kind of adventure you are going to have. Will you take your childhood stuffed animal or your gun? Turns out they take up exactly the same amount of space in your suitcase. In cyberpunk, sometimes it’s really the objects, not the characters, who tell the story.
End of the Skyline (PC)
Stop me if this sounds familiar: four characters, each with a unique ability, make their way across a series of rooftops while being pursued by waves of faceless security. It’s a generic premise, and one that the developers of End of the Skyline deploy. Narrative isn’t exactly its strong suit. Instead, its designers rely on Lil Chan’s bright character designs to communicate the conflict and feeling of the game.
It’s all in the style. While the game’s itch.io page contains a paragraph stating that the player is in control of a group of “punks,” and that “the corporate security is quickly descending on you,” that frame isn’t present in-game in so many words. It’s left up to the character designs to communicate the premise. Those characters are individualized and use what appear to be found objects to give them their unique abilities. The “Traffic Paladin” has a beefy, round build and uses a repurposed “Yield” sign to bash baddies off the edge of each rooftop. The “Skater Rogue” is slight in size and has discs that work as a grappling hook that can be used to move teammates out of tricky situations or to drag enemies into them. The “Hacker Monk” doesn’t seem to obviously be either of those things, but perhaps the first part of the name is a pun on their use of a hockey stick to scoop characters up and flip them over their back. And the “Artillery Cleric” has a big ol’ green tube on their back that launches ranged attacks. Meanwhile, all the baddies wear pinstripes with spiky shoulders and skull masks. It’s quite a uniform, like a very literal Halloween mash-up gag costume that combines outdated stock-broker-chic and the grim reaper.
End of the Skyline is a minimal experience, but it seems to be an earnest one. The violence of bumping, dragging, and hurling those grim stock brokers off the edge of checkerboarded rooftops is minimal. Everything plays out in the turn-based system of Into the Breach, in which you can see enemy attacks coming and accordingly plan your team’s movements. This is the cotton candy version of cyberpunk - pop-(cyber)punk, if you will. But just because it’s a bloodless affair doesn’t mean that it doesn’t signify big business as the big bad. Sure, this is a generalized piece of anti-corporate media, but it’s a fun one with a good combination of puzzle and turn-based strategy mechanics. Not every cyberpunk game needs to contain a treatise on mind or the fuzzy slippages between nature/culture. Sometimes, it’s enough to plot out how your gang of misfits can scarper across rooftops, bumping off some suits on your way.
For more more cyberpunk brain glitches, check out Christian’s guide to the cyberpunk genre, Don’s essay on Deus Ex: A Criminal Past, and Nate’s antifascist love letter to Extreme Meatpunks Forever.
