Ghostrunner, Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story, and Val-11 Hall-a review

 Hey folks,

    I've been puttering around on Steam, picking up various video games tagged with "Cyberpunk" and playing them as a way to get in the mood for writing my next Agent G book. Most of these are on the shorter side (with an exception) and my commentary is not necessarily going to be as detailed as usual. I hope you enjoy!

Ghostrunner

    Ghostrunner is a kinetic action game where you are a cyborg ninja in a huge towering arcology. You are the last of the Ghost Runners, a group of cyborg ninjas that tried and failed to overthrow the oppressive government. Armed with a katana, super-jumping, and wall-running abilities, you have to murder your way from the bottom of the tower to the top. It is a fantastic game and completely beat me. Yep, I am admitting defeat.

    Seriously, I played two hours trying to beat the first level and could not do it. You are killed with a single bullet and while you immediately get returned to the spot you're killed, I just couldn't pull it off and had to watch the game. Challenges are awesome but this one needed an easy mode for a casual like myself. Maybe something where you could take two or three shots before you're killed versus an instant-kill.

    The atmosphere is beautiful in the game, the music awesome, and the gameplay actually caused me to sweat with its intensity. Unfortunately, it's not something for someone who possesses ordinary human reflexes like myself. You need to have a kind of 1st person Hotline Miami super coordination that not everyone will. It's a cyberpunk work that I really enjoyed and has surprisingly deep world-building for something with almost no conversations and only a couple of people talking over your activities. If you liked Metal Gear Solid's Cyborg Ninja and are supremely gifted at 1st person melee and parkour then this is the game for you.

Available here

Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story

    Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story is a game that suffered a controversy due to the fact that it's developers apparently received death threats due to the fact the character designs are, well, exaggerated is one way to put it. This certainly brought a lot of attention to the game that might not have been initially received. Was it an astroturf plan? I dunno. It's not like the internet isn't fully capable of tearing into people for the stupidest of reasons. The Jessica Rabbit proportions of the main character seems like a really strange reason to go ballistic, though. Ironically, I don't actually think they're all that sexy and go into the area of the uncanny valley even with an anime cartoon.

    Beyond the animation designs, it's basically a two-dimensional side-scrolling version of Resident Evil or Silent Hill. While the opening and closing segments of the game are cyberpunk and very evocative, the majority of the game takes place in a haunted apartment complex from the 1980s. This part has no cyberpunk elements and I feel like this was a missed opportunity as exploring a haunted apartment complex full of robot housekeepers, flickering holograms, or whatever would have been better. I really enjoyed the game, Observer, that has the same premise with the apartment complex being haunted by an AI rather than literal ghosts.

    Much of the game is back and forth item collection with the occasional chase sequence with ghosts trying to run you down. Some of the puzzles suffer from the same insane troll logic typical of the genre with a necessary key requiring you to find the plans, get to a keymaker, find a frying pan, melt down a pewter religious statue, and then use the keymaker to make a copy. Yikes. You also have to beat the game three times to get the "true" ending.

Available here

Val-11 Hall-a: A Cyberpunk Bartender Action

 
    Val-11 Hall-A (Valhalla, haha, yes, we get it) is one of the stranger premises I've seen for a cyberpunk game. You are a bartender named Jill who works at the titular bar in Glitch City. Every day, you have to get up and serve drinks while chatting away with an eccentric cast of customers. The customers will then tell you about their weird and bizarre lives ranging from a gynoid prostitute who looks like a teenage girl (yikes) to an angry newspaper editor to a robotic idol singer.

    There's not really much in terms of the gameplay as you just have to mix the right drinks correctly with the recipe book right next to you. Sometimes you have to mix them, sometimes you have to blend them, aged scotch or on the rocks. Really, your enjoyment of this will be determined by how much you enjoy listening to drunk morons in a cyberpunk setting. I'm okay with visual novels with little in the way of choices but I think this probably won't be for everyone. 

    The 8bit pixelated art is something I enjoyed as a throwback to classic Nintendo games of my youth. Indie games don't have the kind of budget that allow better ones so using photos, art, and things like this is a good substitute. I also like the music even if it is very much on the simple side. I also have to complain about the fact that you can only save at specific times during the story despite free saving being common in virtually every indie game I've played. 

Available here