We all know Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed. Again. That’s a bit irritating because, if you’re anything like me, you’ve been waiting in anticipation since the game was announced for the next bit of good news. The last bits of news were more in relation to delays. But the new release date is right around the corner on December 10th. The other important thing is how you’re going to get your genre fix while you wait. Here are some ideas to bide your time with. You might already have some of them, but if you do, there’s nothing wrong with revisiting games, especially if you loved them before.
Now, one of the more surprising sources of a cyberpunk story was Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy VII showed a world in which a corporation was the largest superpower in the world. The Shinra energy company, emulating Big Oil and being the driver of multiple different technological innovations, holds sway over the world. Well, until the events of the game, when a variety of disenfranchised resistance forces and environmental terrorist groups start striking back. To make things worse, one of their most skilled warriors who has been thought to be dead has gone insane and murder-happy. Whether you play the original or the remake, which only covers about a third of the regular story, you’re in for an engaging story and world with great characters and a vivid art design.
Deus Ex is an iconic series. Futurism and transhumanism run amok. Corporations and secret societies bull every string possible. Every conspiracy theory is true to different extents and the news is run by an AI curating access to information. The well-off get more and the poor suffer, sometimes even dying in the streets. All of the main games are worth playing, but if you are someone who only has consoles, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided will knock out at least 80 hours. If you’ve got a PC, the original Deus Ex will be worth it. Invisible War is the weakest of the non-mobile games. You won’t miss anything by not playing it, though it does have some good atmosphere and expands some peripheral details from the original Deus Ex.
Look out for the Blade Runner point-and-click adventure. Acting as a side story to the Blade Runner movie, you’re playing a different Blade Runner who gets framed for murder by a corrupt Lieutenant. Through the story, you’re trying to clear your name while also potentially killing the person who framed you. What you’re getting is a wonderfully crafted cyberpunk world with an unsettling atmosphere, interesting characters, and a deep enough story to offer 13 different ends.
What would you say to a fantasy-cyberpunk melding? The Shadowrun games take typical D&D concepts and shoves them into a near-future neo-noir cyberpunk setting. The world features a lot of class strife and corporate warfare. Corporations tower over governments. There were recent installments that are available for PC (Shadowrun Returns, Shadowrun: Dragon Fall, and Shadowrun: Hong Kong). That trio of games is well done, though the best of the three was Hong Kong. You don’t really need to play the previous games to understand what’s going on. So if you just wanted to try Hong Kong and not miss a thing, you can easily do that. Alongside that, there is tons of Shadowrun material including novels and a tabletop game.
These are just some examples that I like the most. There are tons of others depending on the style of cyberpunk that you’re looking for. It’s a subgenre that covers a lot of different subject material already. So there’s a lot of ways to branch out. Even though there’s tons of material that I can recommend, the ones previous listed are some of my personal favorites on the standpoint of design and story. This just happens to be a set of content with at least 20 hours each. Considering work and/or school schedules, that would be more than enough to reach the new December 10 release date of Cyberpunk 2077.