Playing Cyberpunk 2077 and Cloudpunk back to back made for a fascinating experience. The former treats cyberpunk as material for pastiche, and the latter as genre conventions to imitate in service of a point-and-click adventure game-style comedy drama in the German tradition; yet both end up tackling the individual’s response to an atomsed society in ways which authentically build on the work of the cyberpunk authors and auters which inspired them. Reducing said movement to pastiche and genre conventions is also very much in line with the original movement of cyberpunk itself, as the original cyberpunks mined noir and counter culture material in an equally reductive way.
But Tom’s review is just about City of Ghosts, not Cyberpunk 2077. Or is it? In any case, check it out here.