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The Problem With Cyberpunk Games

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Big budget power fantasies like Remember Me aren’t cyberpunk.

The Wikipedia category page for Cyberpunk Games contains 136 entries. That's more than such venerable genres as Tower Defense (48) and Psychological Horror (102), and nearly as many as the entire Stealth genre (158). It's a staggering number for a kind of game that isn't held together by a common style of play but by a common look, inspired by a movie (Blade Runner) and a novel(Neuromancer) that are three decades old. Like, no one would call themselves a fan of "cyberpunk games" specifically.

And yet there's no end in sight. The much-discussed PS4 launch title Watch Dogs puts players in the role of a master hacker in a near-future Chicago. There is a game coming out that is actually called Cyberpunk 2077, a title that has been accepted at face value but is actually incredibly strange. What if Rockstar had decided to call Red Dead Redemption "Western 1890"? And the new game from the developer Dontnod and publisher Capcom, Remember Me, is set in "Neo-Paris" at the end of the 21st century. It's out today.

In Remember Me you play as Nilin, a so-called "Memory Hunter", with the ability to steal and alter the memories of the residents of Neo-Paris in the year 2084 (that's 100 years after the year 1984, for those counting). You see, everyone in the City of Lights 2.0 wears a brain implant that allows them to save, share, and delete their memories. Which yes, sounds as awesome and safe as Vineing, but turns out to be a real social hazard in the hands of a totalitarian corporate state. Anyways it's Nilin's job, along with her fellow "errorists", to gunk up the works and break the state stranglehold on memory. Or something like that.


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