Tech, cyberpunk and conspiracies!

[Zer0wing]

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy - FPS

Well, excuse you, are you trying to misgender misgenre a cult classic? EYE is an RPG first and action second. After all, most of the cool stuff you have to earn and carefully plan your build ahead.

 

[Beowulf]

Perhaps "Paradise Cracked", and its sequel - "Cops 2170"

I haven't played PC myself, but the sequel only - its a russian game through and through - great ideas, but sloppy execution. You have a little bit of everything: bad design (after discovering the enemy you switch to turn-based and have to walk in turn based mode through all of the mission area), sloppy translation from which you have to deduce the writers intent, general imbalance that shows lack of testing, a lot of bugs and half-baked ideas (I think I gave up after the mission where my allies committed sudoku by repeatedly shooting the car that was their cover, which then exploded).

http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/paradise-cracked




There's also:


Which is apparently all about sneaking around and nothing more.

Perhaps:


Would also fit the bill?

I'm searching for a game, that was a FPS with something like Virtual Reality hub, but cannot find it.

In the meantime:
http://www.mobygames.com/game/neuro-hunter

 

[fantadomat]

Don't forget Anachronox

https://af.gog.com/game/anachronox?as=1649904300

Also Beyond good and evil could fit somehow.

 

[Alienman]

Falksi and others, Satellite Reign is free on Humble bundle for the next day.

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/satellite-reign

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

This is still work in progress

and so is this

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Assassin 2015

Spoiler

aka what if cutscene-ridden popamole shooters from 2015 ended up being made in 1996

 

[Explorerbc]

Are you interested in the whole combo of cyberpunk-conspiracy or games with minor elements will fir your list too ? Anyway, I was trying to find cyberpunk adventure games recently so here's a bunch of them plus some other stuff. Btw note that I haven't played a lot of these yet so I can't vouch for their quality but maybe you will find something interesting to further look into.

Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals

A point and click game based on a french comic about a dystopian future neo-paris. This seems to be the only non in-house game Benoit Sokal's company published before going under. I remember playing some of it back i nthe day and it was ok, plus it is weird enough I guess.

Neofeud

You can find the thread by the game's creator on the adventure forums. SilverSpook describes his game as "a Dystopic Cyberpunk adventure game drawing from Blade Runner and District 9, but with an overlay of Game of Thrones-like political intrigue". It might seem a bit prosperous at first but the guy won me over and it's in my backlog.

Nightlong: Union City Conspiracy

"Set in a futuristic world not unlike that of Blade Runner, you play an ex-intelligence/military operative investigating the disappearance of someone which has endangered your friend, Hugh (mayor of Union city). As the plot develops, you realise that things are not entirely what they seem and that someone is involved in a conspiracy so big, it will bring the city to its knees."

Some dystopian conspiracy hidden gems or maybe shovelware ?

The Moment of Silence

The Moment of Silence is a classic point-and-click 3rd person adventure game set in New York City in 2044. Players step into the role of Peter Wright, an advertising executive currently heading up the Government's 'Freedom of Speech' campaign. When a heavily armed SWAT team storms his neighbor's apartment, Peter must uncover the truth behind his mysterious disappearance as he becomes drawn into the deceptive worlds of corruption and power.

Alternativa

Classic point&click adventure game based on the original sci-fi/cyber-punk script which is composed of a number of shorter stories that lead us through the lives of individual characters as well as the fictional world of the future.

Culpa Innata

"The World Union is labeled the 'perfect society'. Prosperity is a science, disease and wars have vanished, sex is entertainment, and the future has never looked brighter. Suddenly this perfect society is rocked by the murder of a World Union citizen in the 'Rogue State' of Russia."
This seems to be some cult classic conspiracy game with branching dialogues and such. Steam version is censored though so grab it from somewhere else.

Some other stuff :

The Longest Journey

Well, the Longest Journey is a masterpiece as probably everybody already knows. The entire game isn't cyberpunk but I always loved the part that is. Haven't played the sequels though.

Remember Me

People here in the codex complained about the devs being SJWs and the plot being retarded but Neo-Paris in this game was pretty sweet and it does have the cliche conspiracy thing going for it.

Requiem: Avenging Angel

This isn't probably what you look for in this list but technically it has all the 3 elements. You play as an angel fighting soldiers in a cyberpunk city to defeat Lucifer. A nice old-school fps.

I got tired of copy-pasting images and links so I will post more stuff sometime later.

 

[CryptRat]

Alternativa

Classic point&click adventure game based on the original sci-fi/cyber-punk script which is composed of a number of shorter stories that lead us through the lives of individual characters as well as the fictional world of the future.

I played this one, it's quite simple from what I remember, dystopian world and conspiracy there are but I would not recommend it.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

Still a shame that Culpa Innata 2 never got finished. The first game had some kick-ass writing and a female protagonist that I could take seriously.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

I love threads like this because I'm a massive sucker for cyberpunk games (especially older games, newer ones kinda scratch the wrong itch if you know what I mean).
Also I'm fighting the urge to be an advertising plant, so...

...this one wasn't released, but it was ahead of its time in a good and bad way. It's a remake of Hired Guns, yet plays like a straight coop game w/ the ability to freely switch between team members w/ their own abilities and the ability to give them orders to help you out. There's a pre-alpha out there, and it's rough but playable -- and I'd say it would be a pretty nice alternative to Project Eden if it came to fruition and had a year+ of additional dev time.

More info: https://www.unseen64.net/2017/08/29/hired-guns-devils-thumb-vr1-pc-cancelled/

I don't have a link for the pre-alpha, but it's floating aroung the 'net. If you want to play in a resolution above 640x480, use nGlide, but avoid setting vertical resolution above 1000 -- mouse controls turn to shit for whatever reason at high res. 1152x864 was the largest res that didn't cause the game to bug out.

Some hi-res screens:

Spoiler

 

[Alienman]

Ah shame. Project Eden was pretty fun in co-op though - totally forgot about that game.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Ah shame. Project Eden was pretty fun in co-op though - totally forgot about that game.

Coop is not accessible in the pre-alpha of nu-HG, at least without tinkering -- never bothered to actually check if the coop is working at all.

The coop focus is very apparent though. For example, in the first mission you need to suppress snipers to let another team member run past the bridge -- unless you're a Rainbow Six fan, this is going to be tough (not to mention they deal a shitton of damage / if one of the team members is dead it's all over). Another example is in the second mission -- Myriel hacks the control computers (a pretty interesting implementation w/ cyberspace and clever usage of reflections in UE to fuck w/ your brain) while Kircher is using regen and tries to turn off the power supply located in a hazardous place. The third one and later missions are bigger than this, but I never bothered to beat them -- always end up losing one of the team members, which causes the game to bug out upon reloading the save.

This wouldn't be a problem is the save system itself wasn't buggy and wouldn't end missions that span multiple maps halfway through if you died/reloaded a save. Still, it's a pre-alpha, so shit like this is expected.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

(especially older games, newer ones kinda scratch the wrong itch if you know what I mean).

I think I get what you mean. The older games retained that classic, bleak outlook of a dystopian future. Urban decay mixed with advancement, lowlife and high tech. It was fascinating yet unsettling. You could detect this atmosphere in the older cyberpunk games like Syndicate which seamlessly felt oppressive and dark. Though I do credit a lot of that to its stellar soundtrack by Russell Shaw which nailed that coldness exquisitely.

There's one thing that really annoys me in many new age cyberpunk games and that is they're too "clean" looking. There's not enough grittiness to the environments and showing off that blend of poverty and prosperity. It's like they focus on trying to make them way too stylish and sexy than having that science fiction cynicism you'd read about from the '70s/'80s and such.

And this is another personal gripe, but a lot of the music in these new games is taken from that whole "new retrowave" thing and while that's all well and good it is too rhythmic and catchy when it should be more along the lines of being unnerving and dangerous.

This is an example of a track that I wish they'd drop the dance club music in favour of instead:

 

[Alienman]

Explorerbc Remember Me had some fantastic visuals and a pretty cool world to explore and read about. Shame the gameplay was so damn lackluster. Main theme was pretty cool too:

Spoiler

 

[Explorerbc]

Yeah, I thought the game was pretty original compared to most AAA and I liked it overall. I am also a sucker for cyberpunk.

Anyway here's another batch of nu-adventures that I plan on trying out sometime soon:

This one gives me some I, Robot vibes when it comes to aesthetics, I have to wait for all episodes to release to check it out.

"A non-linear cyberpunk adventure where genders and species melt into each other."Visuals look good though.

"A journalist-turned-detective teams up with Turing, the world’s first sapient machine, to unmask a conspiracy that will shake the foundations of Neo-San Francisco"

I have a feeling that this one might be too hipster for my tastes but whatever, if it has low life and high tech it's in.

This one is free on itch.io

Another old time classic would be Kojima's Snatcher:

And we can go into pure FPS territory with games like

Hard Reset

Bloom: the Game Syndicate (2012)

and a bunch of other usually mediocre titles lying around.

 

[Alpan]

I couldn't see The Last Night on your list.


Incidentally, I see you've kept the OP updated. How does one edit posts beyond a certain point in time (I don't see the option)? Is that dependent on how long one's been a member here?

 

[Big Wrangle]

The Last Night looks great, hopefully the gameplay holds up. Shame about the drama that happened back at E3, because god forbid someone changes their mind about something trivial they said in the past and anyone who says so is a filthy liar.

 

[lemon-lime]

The game Uplink (2001) by Introversion Software should fit. It's basically a 90s Hollywood movie hacking simulator. I only played the demo back in the early 2000s, but I remember the atmosphere and aesthetics was top notch and fit well together with the original Deus Ex.
Demo is still available: http://www.introversion.co.uk/uplink/demo.html

 

[Big Wrangle]

Oh, speaking of Cypher. Any idea why that game isn't valiable on Steam or GOG? It's only on the developer wesbite, and the only Cypher I found on Steam is another genre entirely.

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

If you're willing to deal w/ emulation, this one offers some tech, some cyberpunk and very few to no conspiracies, yet:

Tetsujin (3DO / 1994) -- almost fully-3D shooter with focus on resourse management, exploration and very light puzzles. I'd even call it a simple dungeon crawler for the lack of better way to describe it.

I've completed it a while ago and enjoyed it a lot. It takes a while to get into it due to slower speed and poor framerate, but if you overclock the CPU up to ~150% in the emulator settings it gets a lot better (>200% caused audio issues in my case). You won't get it to run 100% smoothly due to the way it was programmed, though.

The game is rather linear, but you're free to travel between floors of eath 'episode' and almost all of them feature a light puzzle or two. Enemy types are also different w/ different attacks and ways to kill them (some cannot be harmed by firearms so you need to rush towards them and deactivate them, some enemies can only be harmed from behind, etc). The music is top notch and the gfx are pretty nice too. The progression is rather smooth too -- I think I only got 'stuck' for 15-20 minutes or so when I reached a teleporter puzzle and got disoriented a bit. The game is over in 5 hrs or so, right when it almost outstays its welcome.

Tetsujin Returns (3DO / 1995, PC / 1996) -- more of a straightforward shooter compared to the original. Still beating this one due to emulation issues.


3DO versions of both games are available in English. PC version of the second game is unfortunately inferior to the 3DO version in several ways (hissy audio, shorter audio tracks in certain situations), but runs better.

 

[Alienman]

I couldn't see The Last Night on your list.

It's not out yet.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

While it's not a true cyberpunk game, Project Overkill has that futuristic vibe and involves you playing rogue agents that take down megacorporations with extremely gory results. It's a very action heavy game but there's generally a good mix of objectives and weaponry to keep things feeling fresh (the game has four agents that each have their own unique loadouts).



Come to think of it, Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret may be better fits from a cyberpunk standpoint.

 

[Sukhāvatī]

There was an FMV game based on the cult 1997 cyberpunk film Nirvana called X-ROM; the downside being that it's only in Italian.

There's a nice write-up here: https://genesistemple.com/nirvana-x-rom-cyberpunk

Spoiler

Sweltering summer of ‘92. Italian director Gabriele Salvatores is shooting Puerto Escondido, together with actors Diego Abatantuono and Fabrizio Bentivoglio. Taking a break from the set, the three sit around a table for a quick match of Soccer on NES. As the game is finished, the console turned off, suddenly Diego turns and exclaims: “I wonder what happens when we turn off the TV, do the players wait patiently for our return? Do they go back to their girlfriends waiting at home?”. That throwaway joke will be the spark that shall lead Salvatores, four years later, to direct Nirvana.

On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy
The idea to make a sci-fi movie in Italy, with a budget of around 5 million in today’s money, was very difficult for the producers to swallow, recalls the director. This despite the genre enjoying quite the great surge in popularity in the mid 90s, especially that sci-fi “cyberpunk” flavored, with titles like Johnny Mnemonic and Strange Days. The last real big budget sci-fi production from Italy would have been, probably, back in the mid 60s with La Decima Vittima (The Tenth Victim) by Elio Petri, starring Marcello Mastroianni. Salvatores mentions that, despite the producers’ initial resistance, he was still riding on the high of the Oscar won for Mediterraneo, back in 1991, so he could pretty much do what he wanted.

In the future (a mysterious 2010), overpopulated cities sit beyond skies heavy with industrial smog. Unhappy individuals pass the time by making heavy use of recreational drugs, while the economic system is dominated by greedy megacorporations. Well, isn’t that just so far removed from our reality? Jimi Dini (Christopher Lambert), a tribute to Hendrix by Salvatores, programmer for software developer Okosama Starr, is putting the final touches to his new virtual gaming experience: Nirvana. To work and interact with it, he uses a virtual reality contraption pretty similar to that seen in The Lawnmower Man, back in 1992.

While hunting down bugs, Dini discovers that the game’s protagonist, Solo (Abatantuono), has grown a conscience and is fed up with the endless cycle of dying, of game overs and having to start again from scratch. He wants to be free, thus he beckons Dini to finally delete the game and put an end to this ever perpetrating cycle of reincarnation. This is the beginning of Dini’s journey into the city’s underground, looking for someone who can help him penetrate Okosama’ servers to permanently delete all traces of the game from existence. In the course of his journey, he will also try to get back in contact with his former girlfriend, piecing together all the clues she left.

The movie is populated by several of Salvatores’ usual gang of friends, most of whom are notorious Italian comedic actors whose roles are so small that end up being little more than cameos. The big exception in the cast of Italian actors is, naturally, Christopher Lambert, who was apparently demanded by the production when the budget was inflated, in order to have someone that the international audience could recognize. While the movie is far from perfect, being especially dragged down by the half-baked sentimental sub plot, it presents an interesting melange of Eastern religions, cyberpunk subculture and a pinch of 90s gaming experience. That visual style was so effective that Salvatores is still asked to this day if The Matrix did not, in some way, “borrow” some of the elements from his movie.

Despite what one’s opinions of the movie, which seems to this day fairly divisive, Nirvana still stands as an important production, especially for the struggling Italian movie industry of the 90s. For the first time in history, digital special effects were produced in the country and many of those who worked on it, to this day, mention it as a very positive experience. But, most importantly for the sake of this article, it was the very first (and, unless I’m proven wrong, last) time that an Italian director specifically designed his movie to be released in parallel with a tie-in video game that would work as a direct sequel to the events narrated in said movie. That game is Nirvana X-Rom.

While it might be reasonable to doubt the artistic merits of such an idea, everything in the game connects to the original story and the X-Rom title is even referenced a couple of times in the movie itself. Perhaps, Salvatores was honest in his intentions of seeing the natural prosecution of the story in video game form, but whatever the case, he seems to have, apparently, entirely forgotten about it over the years. The few instances when he’s talked about the movie, he seems to have never referenced X-Rom in any way. For all intents and purposes, while Nirvana is still somewhat remembered, especially by fans of the cyberpunk genre, the game has all but fallen in between the cracks of history.

Let’s look at its development, specifically its original design.

Creating X-Rom - Making magic with a shoestring
The screenplay, or rather what we would today define as “game design”, was handled by Italian writer Bruno Tognolini, whom I spoke to via phone for the article. While Tognolini did not have the technological know-how of a game designer, surprisingly, he had actually worked on a videogame before. In 1994, he wrote the screenplay for an educational title, released on the Philips CD-i, for children’s show “L’Albero Azzurro” (The Light Blue Tree). Tognolini served for several years as a writer on the show, together with notorious children’s book writers Bianca Pitzorno and Roberto Piumini. Bruno tells me that he was directly approached by Salvatores, because the director had heard of his work on the CD-i and his experience with multimedia products. “He asked me to pitch a screenplay based on the movie’s story. I immediately thought of the idea of “the ghost in the machine”: when one uninstalls a program, even on Windows, there are always traces left in the computer. Nirvana, after being deleted by Dini, left traces on Dini’s computer, it is up to the player to delete them for good. Salvatores liked the idea and so I was on board.”

The overall look and feel of the game was based on similar first person adventure games of the time, with Myst being the first inspiration, with the idea of the player walking along “nodes” developed with Quicktime VR. But X-Rom was not really designed with the idea of being a Myst-clone, as Tognolini recalls, but something different. “I started working with the programmers from the CD Italy company, along with Salvatores’ Colorado movie. They gave me all the “b” footage they had, which was not used for the movie so that I could come up with gameplay ideas that could feel interesting for most players. For example, when the player has to get rid of the organ traders, I used a bit of the A footage from the movie, along with some unused B rolls. For that interactive sequence I decided to make their eyes red, so that the players could realize where to click to defeat them. I was conjuring up magic on a shoestring’s budget: trying to make everyone see the rabbit out of the hat trick, while equipped only with a hamster and a baseball cap.”

A big character in the game, as opposed to the movie where it only appears for a couple of scenes, is Jimi’s smart house. “I wanted it to be the first human-like interaction for the player, a reassuring presence for the first few puzzles. Then, for the rest of the game, the smart house would remain in the background as a sort of guide throughout the story, pointing the player in the right direction, but not really giving actual hints.” Several actors from the movie were contacted to reprise their roles for the short movie sequences. Stefania Rocca, who in the movie plays the hacker Nayma, acts as the real guide, dropping hints if the player gets stuck on a puzzle for too long. Along with her, Abatantuono also comes back as Solo. Tognolini remembers the shooting experience as peculiar: “they had built these very simple sets, using some of the original props, but again all very cheap. I particularly remember Diego Abatantuono because, when he came in, it was clear he had not even read the script. So he ended up improvising most of his lines based on his original role in the movie. He did pretty well, quite an expert actor.”

Designing X-Rom: from Cyberpunk to Children's Television
Referring back to his years-long experience with children’s television, Tognolini mentions that the writer’s objective was not simply to entertain the young spectator, but also keeping them busy. “We would not want to leave the child passively in front of the TV screen, but also stimulate their creativity as much as possible. So, for example, we would tell them to go fetch a jar of glue or a ribbon of a particular colour then compliment them for doing so. I thought that the very same style of interaction could also work for a video game. I did not want to just leave the player sitting on a chair in front of a screen, passively clicking away the hours. I thought the game could offer more than that.” Indeed, X-Rom features gameplay solutions that would surprise many players still today, so much so that they probably felt futuristic in 1996.

For example, at one point in the game the player is asked, by Solo himself, a passcode which is an actual phrase from the Carlo Collodi book, Pinocchio. Despite the book being pretty famous in Italy, Tognolini chose a phrase that is not really well-known, because his intentions were not about making it easy for the player. “I wanted the player to raise from the chair and go look for the book, perhaps around the house or even visit a public library to read it. I especially liked the idea of stimulating the player’s curiosity in the real world.” At another point, the game asks the player to insert a floppy disk to save a file on, but – curiously enough – X-Rom won’t allow you to read it back on the same computer one is playing on. Indeed, the player is advised (by the smart home) to seek out another computer, again relating to the “social interaction” that the writer was adamant to feature in X-Rom.

Naturally, the writer recalls that his peculiar gameplay design was not really appreciated by the producers or the programmers. “I remember at one point, one of Cecchi Gori’s (the movie’s producer -ed’s note) people called me and gave me a long lecture on how video games are supposed to be designed. He told me that video games are always supposed to be self-sufficient: the player does not have to go look around for hints in the real world, all solutions to the puzzles should be found in the gameplay and story. We do not want our players to get up from the chair, he went on. But I replied that my intentions were different from that of an ordinary game designer and, in the end, I managed to convince them to leave it as it is. I believe they did so mostly out of respect for my experience as a writer coming from a long experience of theater and television. Still, thinking back to it now, perhaps they were on the right track.”

True enough, the overall critical reception to X-Rom was lukewarm at best, with several magazines criticizing the puzzles’ high difficulty and many players having quite a hard time figuring them out. “In the final product there were several bugs as well, they did not really make things easier. I did what I could to ease the players’ pain, I published on my website the entire solution (and screenplay) for the game as soon as I could. Still, even beyond my peculiar ideas, I think the greatest problem for the game’s commercial reception was the fact that it was designed, from day-one, to be strictly a tie-in product. If one had not seen Nirvana, X-Rom provided no explanations or backstory of any kind. Genetically, it had a very small target audience to begin with.” While Salvatores did say Nirvana was a quite decent box office success in Christmas 1997, along with a good reception in the US, X-Rom did not really follow suit, ending up in the bargain bin by three months later.

Replaying X-Rom today is also no easy feat, since it requires an early version of Quicktime, so a virtual machine would be required to play it. Not mentioning the crashes that will still happen regardless of the platform. Still, its design is really one of a kind, feeling like a weird crossroad between generic multimedia product, video game and “making of”, since the player can also access an archive of dialogues, still images and short sequences from Nirvana. But surely enough, thinking outside the box is required right from the start. The very first puzzle in the game will see the player having to answer four questions, all clues to the answers can be found in the introductory video sequence. A kind of punishment for whoever does not pay attention or usually skips them altogether!

The X-Rom aftermath

Tognolini still remembers the experience fondly and he’s glad to have taken part in what ended up being the last video game he would work on. “I actually had an idea for another game, but it was quite a complicated project. The story did touch on virtual reality again: there is this child playing a game, quite like The Sims, where he is making up this story of the voyage of Mary, Mother of Jesus, while she’s trying to reach Palestine while being haunted by a hitman. In real life, the child meets an artist who is working on a similar story by using statuettes in a nativity scene. The two then team up to try and save Mary from the hitman in the game. It wasn’t very far removed from what Ernest Cline did, later, with Ready Player One. I tried pitching the idea for a game to Cecchi Gori, or at least a movie, but was told my script was too dense and there was no way someone would want to work on adapting that for the screen. So, in the end, I decided to stick to the book format. While my original idea was to just call it “Palestine Quest”, in the end the editor decided to go for Lilim del Tramonto.” (Lilim of the sunset).

"Connection disconnected"
Twenty five years later X-Rom proudly stands as one of the most interesting experience in game design to come from Italy in the 90s. Its weirdly experimental character shines brightly, the way a writer managed to transmutate his experience outside the world of games into an adventure could be quite an inspiration for many designers still today, showing how a different field of expertise can still bring significant ideas to the table. In a similar way to a program that is uninstalled from a computer, but is never really gone for good, X-Rom left traces that still resonate throughout all these years for anyone out there that would like to listen. Tognolini is still playing adventure games to this day, he mentions he has been enjoying both What Remains of Edith Finch and Gone Home, he would be very happy if anyone would get to play them.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

There was also the FMV cyberpunk trilogy by Take-Two. The most famous one being Ripper, which Spoony reviewed many years back. I played a bit of Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller (w/Dennis Hopper) WAY back in the day. The third was Black Dahlia.

 

[Terenty]

Messiah by Shiny is totally cyberpunk with added Shiny weirdness and humour.

Pretty cool adventure/platformer with a possession mechanic

Just watch this trailer, nuff said