All cyberpunk eventually converges on Los Angeles. Yes, I know it’s because of the outsize influence of Blade Runner, and how Blade Runner is explicitly set in Los Angeles, but even places that aren’t explicitly Los Angeles are basically Los Angeles. With the massive social and economic inequality, bits falling into the sea, horrific traffic, and an uncertainty about who even counts as human, the hallmarks of cyberpunk are the hallmarks of Los Angeles. The cyberpunk dystopia is real, and it is here.

The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

Cloudpunk is an RPG set in the cyberpunk city of Nivalis. You play as Rania, a delivery driver for the semi-legal delivery company, Cloudpunk. You drive through the clouds and towering heights of Nivalis, delivering packages, hearing stories, and unravelling the tangled threads that lie at the heart of Nivalis.

Mechanically, the game relies on two elements - a driving element and a walking element. As a delivery driver, Rania, of course, has a flying car that she uses to make deliveries. The player uses the car to navigate the city (preferably without ramming all the other cars along the way, though I was bad at that part), flitting from one floating platform to another. The city itself is divided into discrete districts, with floating platforms within those districts that require the car to move between them. The player can also leave the car to explore these platforms on foot, collecting items and talking to people along the way.

The weirdly sentient appliance is a basic cyberpunk trope, I’m telling you!

There’s a lot to love within Cloudpunk. The world built through its writing is a compelling and vibrant one, and its writing does a consistently excellent job of drawing the player into not only the story of Nivalis, but the smaller stories of its inhabitants as well. Nivalis is a city that feels as alive as Night City or any other setting in the genre, and that is an accomplishment in and of itself. The deliveries Rania goes on further that worldbuilding and create a world that feels worth exploring. I sought out characters to talk to, not because they furthered any particular game objective, but because I was curious about the stories they would tell.

It is also pretty from a distance.

However, Cloudpunk is also deeply flawed. For all the power of its writing to drive the player forward, the actual world that writing inhabits often feels empty. I drove my hover car to my deliveries, pausing on platforms to collect items or talk to characters, and found that the environment never really changed. The districts are not particularly distinct, and walking through an area feels less like an exploration, and more like a sad, soggy slog from one mini-map marker to the next. The sense of mystery and adventure is muted by a minimap filled with colourful markers, telling you which areas will be interesting and which will not. Similarly, the landscape, though beautiful from a distance, is made of voxels, giving it a distinct look that I found off-putting and immersion-breaking. The voice acting is sometimes oddly delivered, and conversations sometimes slow actual gameplay down to a crawl, creating a reluctance to actually engage with a character, lest they suddenly hijack your game and force you to do something you didn’t intend. The game presents moral choices, but these are generally shallow and don’t feel like truly meaningful choices.

Douglas brings me joy.

I find it difficult to come to a final conclusion about Cloudpunk. There’s a lot here to enjoy, but it feels lost behind the reality of a slog of a game. I don’t want to play a game that is sitting in traffic, struggling to find parking, and getting trapped in long conversations. That’s already life, and it’s less interesting than it sounds. I want to cruise and explore a cyberpunk landscape, but equally, Cloudpunk doesn’t effectively allow that, having built a world that is somehow empty, despite its myriad of minimap icons. Cloudpunk is a game of contradictions. I wanted to enjoy it for its writing and story, but couldn’t get past the slog that is its gameplay.

Developer: Ion Lands

Genre: Rpg

Year: 2020

Country: Germany

Language: English

Play Time: 10-15 Hours

Youtube: https://youtu.be/KJSw9lBkUQE