Ghostrunner (Xbox One, PS4, PC)

Christian Haines, Managing Editor

There’s a reason couriers have been popular protagonists in cyberpunk fictions since at least William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic”: cyberpunk is all about movement and speed. Even the fantasy of cyberspace, a term coined by Gibson in the 1980s to capture the dizzying possibilities opened up by the internet, is really a fantasy about movement through space. It’s the dream of pure speed, of space collapsing in on itself so that you can be here one second, there the next. From this perspective, Ghostrunner (One More Level, Slipgate Ironworks) manages to be cyberpunk – I’m tempted to say ultra-mega cyberpunk – not just because of its aesthetic but also because of its gameplay mechanics. It’s a first-person platformer in which you jump, slide, swing, and slice your way from one arena to another. When the game’s running on full cylinders, or maybe I should say when the player’s performance is optimum, Ghostrunner earns its name: you feel as though you were a specter surfing effortlessly through brutalist architecture along the digital slipways of cyberspace.

In cyberpunk fiction, standing still is a prison and the city’s your warden.

Ghostrunner has a story, though like a lot of cyberpunk games, it’s more atmosphere than fully-realized narrative. You’re ascending a tower, which happens to be a city, in order to challenge the Keymaster. There’s an artificial intelligence/uploaded consciousness guiding you on a mission of revenge. There’s also the remnant of a resistance group. It’s a little stale but still sufficient as an excuse for the game’s true pleasure: platforming. First-person platformers are notoriously difficult to make, or at least difficult to pull off. Without being able to see your avatar, navigating from one platform to another feels like leaping into the void. Ghostrunner solves this problem by multiplying your means of traversing space and organizing the campaign into a series of carefully-arranged levels. Levels are laid out to in ways that encourage chaining together actions: you’ll jump into a wall run, bound across another wall, leap, then dash into reach of a grappling point, swing over a chasm, and then drop into a slide. Although the levels are mostly linear, the game creates opportunities for player agency in the different ways you can move through and around combat arenas.

Philosophies like transhumanism/posthumanism become literal platforms for zipping across.

As for the combat, it’s not particularly deep. Enemy interactions consist of the occasional dodge, bullet deflection, and a single swing of your katana. Enemies are less opponents than obstacles, not unlike a pit of spikes in Super Mario Bros. The point is to move through them, rather than actually engage with them. Even the boss fights tend to revolve around platforming challenges. There are power ups that complicate combat: Tempest sends out a telekinetic blast, allowing you to send bullets back to their sources. Blink pauses time so that you can line multiple enemies up and take them out with a single slash of your blade.

Life is cheap in Ghostrunner, as in most cyberpunk fictions. You will die repeatedly, respawning at generously distributed checkpoints. Because the levels are linear and there’s usually an optimum path from point A to point B, you will die when you dash where you should have grappled or when you just barely miss the window when you should have jumped from one wall to another. It can be frustrating, but my Xbox one X reloaded it with impressive speed, so the process of trial and error ends up having its own enjoyable rhythm. This endless respawning makes Ghostrunner feel like a game in the narrow sense – a set of challenges that require you to hone your skills through repetition – but this largely works for a game that revolves around learning to navigate the dense tendrils of a city as quickly as possible.

Enemies are obstacles. The goal is to move through them at maximum velocity..

There is, however, one significant game design flaw that for me, as someone with limited time to play games, stands as an even greater obstacle than enemies or tricky platforming sections: the save system. Not only does Ghostrunner lack manual saves, it also only autosaves between levels. “Levels,” it should be noted, can encompass multiple regions of the city, as well cyberspace portions of the game that serve as tutorials for new powers. In other words, they are long. It’s one thing to ask the player to test their mettle on difficult action sequences, it’s quite another to make it difficult to save one’s progress. This wasn’t helped by the fact that when I suspended the game after late evening sessions of play, I would usually come back to find the game having rebooted itself, my ultra cool cyberninja having sheathed his nano-katana, me realizing I would have to restart the level from the beginning. My guess is that this might be due to the Xbox OS updating, but it wouldn’t be a problem if the game’s numerous checkpoints doubled as save points.

You can’t have cyberpunk without a now retro view of cyberspace. Rebranded, here, as the Cybervoid, it includes puzzles and tutorials for new powers.

I wonder if Ghostrunner isn’t maybe a little too cyberpunk for its own good. In a sense, its lean save system is perfectly well-suited to the genre: there’s no time to pause, no time to save, only the endless rush rush rush after the optimal leap, slide, swing, strike through the towering city. I might pick the game up again – I certainly will if they patch in a better save system – but, for now, I’ll content myself by imagining that I’m one of the nobodies tucked in the city’s sewers, not ascending the tower, not going anywhere, just simmering in the beautiful neon glow of a world leaving me behind.