#cyberpunk
#cyberpunk
by Dante (@videodante)
I have a complicated relationship with cyberpunk. It’s a complicated genre, to be fair. In all good cyberpunk, there’s a tension between the society and the individual. Above many genres, I would say that it’s its most defining feature: the creep of augmented personhood and augmented society and its effect on the individual, on the day-to-day.
OBSERVER, by Polish studio Bloober Team, very much understands this concept of cyberpunk. And, to its credit, delivers on the tension between those forces. It’s a game that tries mightily to invoke the inherent horror of a human society grappling with forces beyond its capacity, and for the most part succeeds.
By Omar (@siegarettes)
Cyberpunk is a volatile thing. Conceived in a time of growing corporate power, technological advancement, and social turmoil, cyberpunk was largely concerned with a dystopic vision of the future where “progress” had overwhelmed our ability to contain it. So what does it look like in a world where those concerns have arguably come to fruition?
This is what Dex comes into. Following in the template of the genre, Dex presents a messy world of hacking, conspiracy, and urban decay. It has an obvious reverence for cyberpunk, to the point where it makes a point to straight up call residents of its world “cyberpunks”. In a way, that is indicative of the tone throughout, a straightforward, obvious allusion to its predecessors.