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Cyberpunk Video Games

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Cyberpunk 2077:

> Gameplay Type: First Person Shooter Role Playing Game Summary: A long anticipated release with eight years of development time, the game’s launch has been plagued with bugs and poor performance as well as decidedly mixed reviews. Regardless, the title offers gamers the largest open world cyberpunk universe thus far, so despite the rather uninspired art design and a plot that brings nothing new to the genre, this game is the best available to allow players to immerse themselves in a cyberpunk setting.

This is a very dated and seriously opinionated review.

> this game is the best available to allow players to immerse themselves in a cyberpunk setting

Depends what you mean by "immerse". If it means driving through Night City on your bike and enjoying the view, sure.

If it means role-playing as a character and building it your position in the city via meaningful choices with consequences, really not.

I call this genre of game, "Illusion of choice" games, but to be fair to cyberpunk 2077 it still does it better than any other games of its type.

If you think of it as a tree and each decision point branching out to millions of possibilities and outcomes then you'll be extremely disappointed, but if you think of it the other way, of a strong narrative that has a funnel of lots of different ways to reach the same outcome you'll find there is an impressive amount of ways to interact with the world.

If you suspend your disbelief and never play through a second time, then you may even come away feeling like your choices had severely important consequences.

That's about as good as you'll ever get from the genre. If you want full world simulation then you'll ironically end up with a boring game, because if all choices have genuine consequences, then it becomes impossible to tell a narrative, and you end up with something like rimworld or dwarf fortress. Impressive games in their own right, but are story generators not story-tellers.

I enjoyed the game for the reasons you mentioned. I'm even able to enjoy the completely scripted and linear railroad shooters just like I'm able to enjoy a Hollywood blockbuster when my mood calls for it.

I have some issue with the initial marketing and the discussion surrounding the game though: choose your own backstory? Absolutely no impact at all, except some pre-recorded wingers in dialogues. RPG with a skill-tree? Absolutely 0 impact, you always have a way to get to a closed room, regardless of the perks you pick. And even if you pick non there is a vent open.

As long as you are aware that you are getting into what is basically a linear story in an open world, instead of another CD Projekt RED game _à la_ Witcher 3 which involved side stories that are as fleshed out as other full-sized games, yes it can be enjoyable.

It still one of the most amazing open-world futuristic games I have personally explored, which is a shame considering the rest of the game.

Haven't really played CP2077 so I can't tell, but I was always of the impression that CRPG works best for fantasy or apocalyptic (System Shock, Fallout) genres because the world is typically much less complicated and the information doesn't travel easily, so it doesn't have to be fully simulated (especially in terms of consequences to your actions).

That I believe was always a problem for true cyberpunk games. In cyberpunk stories, information is everything. I am not sure I have seen a game that does cyberpunk really well by leaning into this complexity.

That is such an old school way of describing dialog trees. This isn't how it's done anymore. You're going to see more NN's making the decisions than fuzzy matching. That said, I think CDPR kicked the can when they didn't add more "lived in" scenarios in CP2077. The story was good but the world was hollow.

Which games currently use NN's for managing decisions-consequences in the story?

coming... What you have today is the result of 5 years ago of decisions. Give it time to catch up. There's a couple on the horizon that are going to blow you away. However, there are a few indie titles that have already incorporated some of this in smaller, unique ways. OMEA for example, or Wanderfolk.

From what I see these games simply use LLM apis, not some kind of sophisticated NN mechanics handling the decision trees.

They are not new in that, I have seen a couple of games that were basically slop (and terrible games, judging them as games) wrapping chatgpt.

Wanderfolk seems does not seem particularly inspiring, even the trailer has terrible audio mixing (there are times you cannot hear the narrator because of the game sounds, it is either fully made by an llm agent or by humans that do not seem capable of making a game if they cannot even make a proper short video) which does not make it feel very promising. Everything seems ai generated in general, and more like slop.

OMEA seems a bit more decent, and I would be curious to try it, but I do not like its visual art very much (it is ai generated "and curated by an artist" and it actually shows), and in particular the ai generated images of humans. Irrespective of what I think about ai image generation in art in principle, I think there is a deeper problem here as a game in (broadly) the visual novel genre must imo have a distinctive visual style, and their images just reads as ai generated (before I even read whether they are ai generated, it is that obvious). In general, I find this style of ai generated images of humans very offputting/uncanny (other assets, backgrounds etc I dont get bothered aesthetically as much) and I think I will find it hard stay engaged for long with such a game. Regardless, it seems a more decent attempt than most others I have seen. They do employ writers etc at least to create narratives, so it is probably not a total slop (otherwise, I can just roleplay with chatgpt directly or whatever).

In any case, these games are closer to being "llm wrappers with a certain harness" than having some actually new and sophisticated way to handle decision trees. Another issue with these games is that they do not even use some finetuned local llm, but use apis to providers, with which I am not that comfortable either.

I think you are taking things way to literally. Walking around in GTA and in RDR2 was a NN trained in bipedal locomotion (Dynamic Motion Synthesis - NaturalMotion Euphoria). LLM api's are how many are going to use the GPT's without wasting 6GB of VRAM on your GPU for a language model. No, there won't be some novel local neural net powering your next video game but there will be a neural net trained on the games narrative to provide you a more robust experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyP5Pl7pzG0

People are finding ways to include it in existing games but its going to take some time for the game devs themselves to release the games where narrative and dialog are more free-flowing.

Outside of that, there's also a huge huge opportunity in the TRELLIS.2 / Pixal3D space for quickly generating props and 3D assets.

I don't disagree with the points you made, I just never made it clear that upcoming games that utilize AI like this are not exactly how you would picture it. Still, expect some deeper integrations in the years to come.

My biggest complaint about the story is that it basically robs you from player agency. You are the side character in story of someone else. It is fully forced on you. And not in traditional I say acceptable manner. I understand if you are playing story of set character. But with Cyberpunk it feels like you are not. You are just carrying someone else around.

Side content itself is fine. I can pick to do it or not and approach it at least in some ways. With main story I only get to choose how to suffer.

> You are just carrying someone else around.

Interesting. When I was playing I didn't care about Johnny and anything related to him. He was basically, mostly a politely treated hallucination for me.

Yeah, I wasn't a great fan of the story - it felt like they put a lot of emphasis on Keanu Reeves given he's a big celebrity and helped promote the game.

Hopefully, the sequel (which I believe is already being worked on) won't have such a story.

That said, I really liked the story in Phantom Liberty. In fact, that entire DLC was really well done.

I agree with that, and there was another thing that really bothered me: The combination of "realistic" graphics and weaponry with "RPG-style" hit-points and combat mechanics simply doesn't work. It can't possibly work. When you empty a magnum revolver's cylinder directly into somebody's face, and they're just fine, still fighting you at 100% capacity -- there's too much dissonance between what you see and what you must expect to see.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution got around this by making gunplay genuinely dangerous, especially to your enemies. (Okay, much-maligned boss fights aside...)

In CP2077, the majority of enemies were just bullet-sponges, though. It was frankly terrible.

And, yeah, the world was disappointingly empty and lifeless. I don't think that the aesthetics were bad -- the game hewed closely to the fairly generic 2005-2015 "cyberpunk" tumblr aesthetic, and didn't do anything too interesting or take too many chances, but it was okay for all that. The setting was just vacant and boring, though.

It's basically WRPG vs JRPG. I think it's safe to say based on historical game performance/sales that most people prefer the "railroaded" story format of JRPG than WRPG role playing.

For most people, video games are about relaxing/unwinding, not embarking on a creative DnD roleplay with "real" consequences.

This is also why linear stories are so much more popular than "choose your own adventure" or "audience participation".

Calling art design uninspired and plot that brings "nothing new" has to be the dumbest take about art I've seen in a while.

I wonder if they actually played the game to write such nonsense.

Dude they literally just aped the styles that were popular on tumblr in the decade before the game was released. Here you go:

> https://tacticalneuralimplant.tumblr.com/archive/2013/4

> https://cyberpunktech.tumblr.com/archive/2015/8

Aesthetically, what the game did was literally the very definition of "nothing new" and "uninspired." It wasn't bad, but they definitely weren't pushing any new angles or visions.

The general cyberpunk aesthetic was indeed established, what they did was bring it in a 3d, first person perspective world. And they had to bring it to that level of detail that it would look good and realistic from different angles, closely as well as from afar etc and in a way that represented the state of the art computer graphic realism of the time. I don't think this is trivial, "nothing new" or "uninspired".

Deus Ex:HR did the same thing, and did it in a much more original way. That game's black-and-gold color palette was objectively unusual for the cyberpunk genre -- where the conventional color sets were either black-and-green like an old terminal (or The Matrix), or the various shades of blue/pink/green/yellow/white neon lights. This is readily apparent if you browse cyberpunk tumblr, and the generic color sets map perfectly to CP2077's aesthetic.

The Deus Ex character designs, environment designs, and armor designs were also much less conventional.

I think that it's fair to call CP2077 aesthetically uninspired. It copied wholesale from the conventional and well-established aesthetic of the 2005-2015 period, without even changing anything. The end result is perfectly generic and looks like "art by committee" or "the path of least resistance."

The bright neon etc aesthetic is indeed a standard cyberpunk aesthetic, back since the 80s already. CP2077 is part of the cannon cyberpunk TT franchise, and they wanted to stay close to its aesthetic. It is not a brave choice, but it is a choice that targets familiarity of the audience that may be intimately or minimally aware of the 80s-90s cyberpunk retrofuturistic aesthetic. In this sense I do agree that it was "the path of least resistance", but I think it made sense. You cannot target both novelty and familiarity at the same time. It is not the case that the aesthetic is exhausted in computer games and it makes sense to target something new, in which case I would think that the criticism made more sense.

By which I guess you mean they copied Syd Mead? Sure. But that's totally valid. I personally don't really like the game (too many rpg trappings of being stuck in conversations I truly don't care about) but the way the city was realized is gorgeous, especially if you're into brutalism in any way. It's very reminiscent of the BTS system in Bangkok the way that there's a lot of straight concrete.

Not only Syd Mead, but he's in that set. (One of the great environment designers, but not a particularly noteworthy character designer or, e.g., UI designer.) Put it like this: They copied a well-established aesthetic, which was extremely popular at the time. It fed, and fed upon, the synthwave genre's ascent in the early 2010s. There was even some fawning over brutalism in the ~decade before the game was released: https://tacticalneuralimplant.tumblr.com/post/47196027149

Thing is, nothing was added to the game's aesthetic. No artist or designer put, as it were, his own stamp on the game's designs or environments. It was strictly generic and derivative. So by the time it came out I had seen it all a million times before. It could not have been less original, less inspired.

This is such a bizarre take - a piece of media set in "New York" isn't "uninspired" because it uses NY as a backdrop. It's what it does with it.

Same as a historical/fantasy game isn't "uninspired" and "nothing new" if it grounds itself in medieval style.

Same here - CP2077 is an established gameworld and putting the game in it is what the title promises. It's so strange to see complaints that a Cyberpunk franchise game looks like Cyberpunk IP. Especially when you see just how beautifully realized it is in IF YOU ACTUALLY PLAY IT.

I mean, yes the technical problems have been fixed, but it's still the same old boring story, repetitive gameplay and a very abrupt ending. And for being a cyberpunk game there's definitely too little cyberspace and 'netrunning' in the game. It's essentially a "GTA 2077" with slightly better gunplay (FWIW though, I still enjoyed the first playthrough for what the game is - e.g. a first-person-shooter with some very light RPG elements, but I couldn't endure a second playthrough, for that the different character stories and builds simply don't differ enough).

To be fair, I think it is probably hard to implement actual netrunning without losing immersion. Netrunning is its very own world there. Not sure what are good examples of netrunning implementations in videogames. In shadowrun series it was ok, but esp in the last one it became a bit tedious.

It had nice cinematic moments - but it felt like GTA with a Hollywood cyberpunk movie attached. Going from bunnyhopping around rooftops and killing 1000s of gangsters and cops in broad daylight with heavy weapons and ridiculous cyberware, to a fairly railroaded narrative about apparently obscure mercenary V barely surviving was some tonal whiplash.

Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) should be on this list.

It's freeware, available from GOG: https://www.gog.com/en/game/beneath_a_steel_sky

Even worth playing through with a guide for the story, pretty trippy.

I started playing that at least three times along the years (if for nothing else, then for the dialogue: "You need a rad suit to go in there! -- What do you mean?! This suit is totally rad!"), but somehow never got very far...

There is currently (for a week, until 2026-08-10) a Cyberpunk-themed sale going on on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/category/cyberpunk

I love cyberpunk as a genre/style/aesthetic but there are almost no open world videogames that actually nail it.

For me the cyberpunk aesthetic basically requires bustling small streets with tons of detail (shops, trash, crowds). That's where most games that try to use an open world fail in my opinion. We just don't have the technology yet to create these dense detail rich scenes without a lot of work on the developers/artists side as well as keeping it performant so it can run on mainstream gaming PCs.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a prime example of that in my opinion. Most parts of the city look like it's Covid again and people must stay at home. Some parts of the map come remotely close but the illusion breaks once you inspect your surroundings.

I like Cloudpunk (https://store.steampowered.com/app/746850/Cloudpunk/) a fair bit but even that suffers from the walkways and buildings feeling slightly empty. At least the pixel art style helps it from falling in the uncanney valley that cyberpunk constantly dips in.

I think Cyberpunk has a good basis but as you say, it's heavy weight; they did increase or tweak crowd density in an update I think, but also it's a PC game so it can be modded and improved as hardware gets better. The challenge - and you already see it on lower crowd density numbers - is getting enough unique and different characters. Cyberpunk seems to have a number (dozens?) of NPC characters making up the crowds, but it gets repetitive and you frequently see identical ones.

Procedurally generated characters would already improve that, and some games do have it but they tend to pick from a fixed set of animation and behaviour stereotypes still. More of those stereotypes make it better (think GTA), but it's still fixed.

I don't think going all in on procedural generation or even AI would fix it though; especially AI has a tendency to go for a mean / average character quickly. And in video games, you still want predictability.

That said, maybe a different visual style (lower fidelity or 2d) would work.

> they did increase or tweak crowd density in an update I think

I assume something like that to be the case, as I played the game last year and "empty streets like covid" definitely don't describe my experience. But apart from stuff like the NCPD-marked encounters spread around the city, you probably do not want to look too closely at the random npcs, as it does get repetitive fast. But they do give an image of a lively city, at least, as you walk through. But imo it had enough of random encounters, side quests etc around the city to give you reasons to explore and immerse into it outside the main story (which I did not hate anyway, but can def imagine playing the game without it).

> and "empty streets like covid" definitely don't describe my experience

I think I gotta explain myself a little better here.

If you play the story it doesn't feel like that too much, but if you just walk through the city you often encounter quite empty roads and walkways. See here for example: https://youtu.be/0J55aRPrgOM?t=1285

Like mentioned above, you sadly can't properly fix it by just upping the population density since there are far too few models and you constantly notice the duplicate characters.

An example of what kind of crowd density and aesthetic I think is necessary for big populated cities can be seen in Altered Carbon: https://youtu.be/aDrj-_dB09k?t=22.

Don't get me wrong I'm not trying to dunk on the game, it's all just my personal opinion of what I want from a game with thats trying to nail the cyberpunk aesthetic.

Well, that's in the US (sort of), most people use the cars /s

No, you are right. I see what you mean now, it does not have the population density that corresponds to a superpopulated megacity.

There is a mod that makes it much higher (apparently activating a setting that gdpr had introduced but hidden)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgsRpxZU-0M

But even then, apart from the absolute amount of people, there is imo an issue with how people are distributed as they increase. People irl are not distributed uniformly and walk alone, they cluster (walk together, hang out in groups etc). Even with increased density with a mod, model repetitions aside, it puts them in a way that feels imo fake/weird. And in a game you have the time to notice these details.

The Ascent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_(video_game)

Definitely the best cyberpunk world right now. It looks absolutely stunning. Id love a Witcher 3 style game in that world.

Neon Giant have an FPS game called No Law, which is to be released later this year, which is based in a Cyberpunk-style world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD6kFXZlX00

Is there any open world game in any genre that manages the "bustling city" effect well? I didn't play Cyberpunk 2077 but Witcher 3 never quite got there either. It seems like 'detail' is a fractal/exponential problem that scales poorly in many respects.

I think Witcher 3 is the closest we have right now. Novigrad is a fantastic city and I loved to immerse myself in the game, I even played it without the minimap because it makes you think about your environment much more (NPCs even gave clues where you had to go for a mission in their speech!).

But yea I generally feel the same, that there are no open world games that manage to accurately portray a city (including residents and traffic).

I think the better route than trying to chase realism is using a stylized version of a city. Mirrors Edge does this particularly well imo. "The Ascent" is probaby the best detailed cyberpunk "world" right now (I haven't played it). From what I've seen that game has insane amounts of detail and they make it work by not trying to immitate real life and giving players access to a city but having custom built areas that mimic some aspects of a real place.

I'd love to read more about the whole virtual city topic etc. I feel like it's under-discussed.

I would add Citizen Sleeper to the list. Board-game inspired narrative cyberpunk RPG with a nice story. I loved it and currently I'm playing the second one. It's a short game. Took me around 10 hours to finish though I didn't go throught all the tasks or the full DLC.

Citizen Sleeper portrays exactly the kind of future I have nightmares about. A rented artificial body owned by a megacorporation with a required subscription and planned obsolescence built in. And this was why the game really clicked for me.

That's one of my favourite games in terms of narrative/characters. I usually have troubling reading through too many dialogues etc in games, but in this one the storytelling was great and it made you really care about the characters and their stories, that it was easy to read through it all with pleasure.

System Shock should be on this list.

I second that - they do write "this list has been truncated to those titles with heavily involved narratives with settings and themes that are decidedly within the genre", but a game about a hacker hired to hack the AI controlling a space station, who gets a neural implant as a reward for completing the task, and then wakes up after the operation to find out that they're the only survivor after the AI ran amok, is as cyberpunk as it gets...

Gamedec is a cyberpunk story driven , sort of rpg game with a very interesting dialog system that makes reading the dialogs and sometimes picking bad options worth it.

What's a fluff text in other games in Gamedec gives you psychological affinity point. With enough points in relevant affinities you can retcon a specific background for your character that lets you to perform cool actions later (basically like a special perk/trait).

The story is decent too. Society where messy virtualization of huge chunk of human experience is common.

Syndicate (1993) should be on the list.

100% I spent endless hours playing this on my Mac back in the 90s.

I loved Syndicate, but I never beat it. There was a mechanic I couldn’t figure out that caused my whole operation to fall apart after a certain amount of time.

Try Satellite Reign. It's also almost retro by now (2015), but it's essentially a modernized Syndicate.

I absolutely loved Burn::Cycle on the Philips CDi, where it was the definitive version (apparently the visuals were much better than the PC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoLw7SEmLYk

The gameplay itself was a bit rough, but the music and immersion I felt while playing it I still recall to this day.

Not mentioned, but probably my favourite cyberpunk game of all time: Satellite Reign (2015).

It's a modern Syndicate remake in spirit, and a relatively small indie game (to set expectations), but the gameplay loop is tight and rewards experimenting. I still like to do a quick playthrough occassionally and it has aged great.

Get Shadowrun 2058 for the Genesis/MegaDrive version ROM plus an IPS patcher and enjoy a much better gameplay experience (and balancing).

On Deus Ex (the first one) installing GMDX and playing it with that MOD it's a must. No, forget that crappy HDTP or whatever it's called, it has broken Chinese/Japanase Hanzi/Kanji in Hong Kong and it looks tacky as hell. GMDX it's tons better and it expands the game areas, interaction, objects and such a lot. For instance, the NYC Statue Park looks far more realist this way, with logically (and architecturally speaking) set objects for a more lifelike environment.

I recommend the Shadowrun series on Steam. Not large games but really fun.

Also the author forgot Cataclsym DDA:Bright Nights. Contrary to the former CDDA, here you have a proper ending.

If you like something like a blend between a 2D Minecraft, object crafting, zombie/mutant/cyborg survival and tons of Cyberpunk references this is almost the game. It has everything.

https://github.com/cataclysmbn/Cataclysm-BN

Shouldn't the Watch Dogs franchise be on this list?

Missing my favorite - Transistor

Also missing the classic Dreamweb.

And we can't mention Transistor without shouting out Darren Korb (and Ashley Barrett on the vocals) for its amazing OST:

https://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/album/transistor-origin...

It plays an important role in the story, so it double the reasons to talk about it :)

It is safe to assume anything Darren Korb works on has an amazing OST.

Heck even the games that aren't that good (of which there is arguably only 1) have an amazing OST.

> of which there is arguably only 1

IYKYK :)

Another interesting game missing is NeoTokyo[1], essentially a "Ghost in the Shell" skin as a half-life mod. It had a soundtrack by Ed Harrison that was available to download, though it seems as though the site hosting is down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeoTokyo

Cloudpunk and its sequel City of Ghosts should be on the list. Very laid back games heavy on charming atmosphere with a great soundtrack. The voxel city design is excellent.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/746850/Cloudpunk/

I admit I'm not fully attuned to the cyberpunk genre, but I loved playing Mean Streets[1] as a kid and feels it should get a mention.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Streets_(video_game)

The most instructive thing about this list is the 7 year gap between 2004 and 2011. Why did cyberpunk go out of style during the war on terror? Why did it come back in 2011? Did snowden in 2013 impact its popularity at all?

A couple more worth mentioning. Beneath a steel sky, flashback.

A couple of games that might not quite meed the definition, but fit the aesthetic or themes: Tron 2.0, Prey (2017), Ghostwire: Tokyo

Is the “best” cyberpunk game the game that is most like Blade Runner?

Wat, no SpectreVR?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game)

An oversight. This was one of the very first viable multiplayer network games and it definitely belongs in the list ..

Uh, have you played in the comedic cyberpunk alternate cold war world of Jazzpunk?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/250260/Jazzpunk_Directors...

The list got hugged to death so I can't view but, but shoutout to Neocron!

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