Never look inside the package. That’s the only rule in Cloudpunk, and it’s the closest any video game has come to bottling what makes Blade Runner work: a rain-soaked city, a job you can’t ask questions about, and the creeping sense that the people around you might not be people.
The official teaser trailer for Blade Runner 2099 is out, which means the franchise is back in the conversation. Ridley Scott’s original landed in 1982, pulled from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 followed in 2017. Now Amazon Prime Video has a miniseries coming with Hunter Schafer playing a human pretending to be a Replicant in the wake of an uprising.
So here’s what to play in the meantime. One of these doesn’t even come out until September.
The one that gets the neon and the dark corners right
Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a turn-based tactical RPG from Harebrained Schemes, set in the Shadowrun universe. Like Cyberpunk 2077, it started life as a tabletop RPG. Harebrained Schemes ran a Kickstarter in 2015 to turn the physical game into a video game, hit its goal and shipped later that year. There’s now a remastered compilation bundling Shadowrun Returns, Shadowrun Dragonfall: Director’s Cut and Shadowrun: Hong Kong.
The isometric view does a lot of heavy lifting here. You get the beauty of a dystopian Hong Kong and the hacking and net-running that comes with it, soaked in neon but with the darker corners left alone.
Take difficult jobs, earn money, watch the world reshape itself around your decisions.
Body horror, but make it corporate
Any Deus Ex game earns a slot, including Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I’m picking Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the prequel to Deus Ex and the third game in the action RPG series.
It’s 2027. You’re Adam Jensen, a security officer at a company that manufactures artificial organs known as “augmentations.” The practice is controversial. Then the company gets attacked, Jensen undergoes extensive augmentation himself, and he’s in far deeper than he wanted to be.
The franchise cleared the path for every cyberpunk RPG that followed, and its fixation on body augmentation has become required equipment for dystopian fiction. Several entries are available now if you want to start somewhere.
For when you’d rather run up a wall than have a conversation
Ghostrunner arrived in 2020 with a sequel in 2023. It’s an action platformer built on fast, violent combat in an original science-fiction setting.
Blade Runner asks what it means to be human in a world where artificial intelligence lives alongside you. Ghostrunner takes the violent end of that question and adds Sekiro-style combat and an enormous amount of parkour.
The world here has been pushed to the brink of collapse and whoever’s left is doing whatever it takes to survive. Dystopian fans will recognize the shape of it immediately.
The delivery job with one rule
If what pulls you toward Blade Runner is the post-apocalyptic gloom cut through with neon, Cloudpunk is your game. It has the fast-paced action of Ghostrunner and the RPG elements of Shadowrun: Hong Kong. You play a delivery driver hauling packages through the city’s skies. Never look inside.
The setting is a rain-drenched cyberpunk metropolis, and the open-world structure takes you from the underbelly up to the tallest skyscrapers.
You’ll meet androids, AI and humans along the way, and the game is more interested in those conversations than in your driving record.
Roll the dice, ration your day
Here’s the odd one. In Citizen Sleeper you’re a corporation-owned synthetic human body with a human consciousness loaded into it. Developed by Jump Over the Age, it’s a dialogue-heavy RPG that borrows its rules wholesale from tabletop. Every in-game day opens with dice rolls, and the number you land on is how many “activities” you get.
The game is set in the ruins of interplanetary capitalism. You’re a worker “washed up on a lawless station at the edge of an interstellar society,” which means no day is easy and every roll matters.
Explore the station and you’ll have to sort out who to trust, who to befriend and who to keep at arm’s length while you try to outrun your past and lock down a future.
If it lands for you, the sequel, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, is out too.
The Sims, if the Sims had a nightclub in a rain city
My rogue pick doesn’t launch until 29 September. Nivalis Nights is a life simulation game, and if you love The Sims or management sims generally but want one that speaks fluent neon-soaked metropolis, put it on your wishlist now.
The city stretches from the ocean to the clouds. You run businesses, nightclubs and restaurants among them, to keep the economy moving.
Off the clock, you can make friends or enemies, find love, buy and decorate an apartment, and go fishing. How you spend the day is yours.
All of which brings you back to where this started: Los Angeles, 1982’s version of the future, and a retired blade runner named Rick Deckard sent to track down and terminate four fugitive replicants. Human-appearing manmade automatons built to serve, hunting for a way to extend the lifespans they were given.
