Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2019 i PC Gamer

For kids, Fortniteis still the game of the moment. Not that this comes as any surprise, since it has everything going for it. It’s free it’s immediate, tension-filled, complex, rewarding, and every season adds events and new features to explore. It’s a good game! And like every game kids love, many parents are terrified by it. A visit to the UK parenting forum Mumsnet immediately surfaces threads such as, “Does Fortniteturn your kid into an arsehole too?” and “F*#@ing Fortnite… ruining our lives”. They describe their kids “turning into monsters” while playing, and achieving lower grades. As a parent to one tween and an early teen, I can’t help but understand their concerns. I’m not quite so angry or fearful, but I’ve found Fortnitehas introduced new tension into my household,…

The twins Jenn and Tristan are pretty much the kind of teenagers I wanted to be, both unbothered by the world around them and unbearably stylish. But this isn’t mere nonchalance – still shaken by the loss of their father, they’re tasked with stopping a threat coming from a world hidden below. Through their own house, Jenn and Tristan enter a sprawling world of dungeons filled with monsters and gain magical powers that let them show fiends what’s what. What makes Young Souls so interesting is that it’s not just about combat and looting, but about striking a balance between the real world and the fantasy battles in the dungeons. During the day, Jenn practices fighting at a boxing gym, the two of them listen to records at the local…

Desperados 3 lets you use dark magic to control the mind of a chicken, making it an unwitting participant in some good old-fashioned cowboy murder. This is thanks to Isabelle Monroe, the real-time stealth game’s final and most unconventional playable character, whose mystical abilities would make her equally at home in Dishonored. When I’m introduced to Isabelle she’s been locked up by some bandits. While Desperados gives you a team of up to five, Isabelle starts out alone, though she’s far from helpless. Around her cage are several guards, one of them holding the key, and accidents waiting to happen, like precariously piled crates. Isabelle can’t reach them to do anything, but the guards can. It’s not just chickens that can be put under her spell. All humans and animals…

After piloting a light aircraft over Lake Washington in the game, I was lucky enough to experience the same trip for real. I squeezed into a Cessna 162, the same model I flew in the sim, and took to the skies with an instructor. We flew over the lake and took in a few local sights including Snoqualmie Falls and downtown Seattle. The instructor handled the technical stuff, but I was able to take the yoke for a while and I was amazed by how light and responsive it was – a sensation Microsoft Flight Simulator recreates to an impressive degree. It was a thrilling feeling being in command of that tiny plane and the game evokes the same sense of freedom.…

The 3,294 RED dots represent EVE’s null-sec solar systems. There are no laws here, except those created by EVE’s player-run empires that battle for supremacy. The 1,090 GREEN and BLUE dots are called high-sec. This is EVE’s relative safe zone, where any unwarranted violence is punished by retribution from EVE’s NPC police. The 817 ORANGE and YELLOW dots represent low-sec, where EVE’s pirates tend to hang out. Killing other players can result in you being marked as a criminal. Somewhere out there are 2,600 wormhole systems that are everywhere and nowhere at once. EVE’s bravest (and often scariest) players call these systems home.…

Borderlands 3 is a game with long, earnest quests about how darn good coffee is punctuated by gore and gun violence. Borderlands 3 walks by dog poo, laughs at it, and then sets it ablaze. Borderlands 3 stays up until 11.30pm drinking soda and looking up crass Flash animations, taking notes. It’s stuck in the late 2000s, when basic vulgarity was enough to qualify as edgy. Borderlands 3 is seriously obsessed with turds. It’s stuck in a time when memes lasted months rather than days, when referential humour was still a novelty and not exhausting, when you could point at something the slightest bit abnormal or gross and call it a joke. Simpler times, not necessarily better times. I help a guy escape from a porta-potty for a poo-spewing rocket…

A combat droid called Jack and some pithy one liners. For all the spectacle, all the bluster, all the carefully orchestrated standoffs with stratospherically proportioned enemies, those are the scant bits of Gears 5that stick around in the memory when the dust settles. It’s a funny kind of game. It sweeps you up in the moment, but the enjoyment it delivers is always surface level. This is the most sophisticated and involving Gears title so far Traditionally it’s been a series in which you were never totally sure if you were laughing along with the characters and dialogue, or just laughing at them. Marcus Fenix, protagonist in the original trilogy, wore an unironic soul patch and shoulder pads more spacious than most London flats. The man carried a chainsaw bayonet…

Imagine having lived a life in which you’ve only ever seen football played through the prism of FIFA, then happening to catch Match of the Day on telly one fateful Saturday night. What is this? Goals scored from situations besides counterattacks? Successful long balls? Players pressing in the opposition half? It’d be like eavesdropping on a broadcast from some mad alien world. And it would really suck the fun out of your next game of FIFA. The problem isn’t that FIFA 20, like so many of its predecessors, doesn’t play very much like a real game of football. That’s a necessary evil of cramming 90 minutes of the real game into a digestible ten minutes you can control with a gamepad. The problem is that FIFA 20’s quasi-football simply isn’t…

From pinball to, er, Goreball, which is surprisingly similar despite the promise of blood inherent in the name. Imagine Hotline Miami, but with one bouncy ball instead of a variety of weaponry, and you’re pretty close to this satisfying ping-’em-up. Each of the handful of levels is full of simplistic enemies who will swarm towards you when you wander too near. To progress you’ll need to dispatch every one of them, with the only weapon at your disposal being a ridiculously boingy beach ball that will rebound hither and thither, exploding whatever monster that happens to be in its way. I’m sure we’ve all made use of weapons or ammo like that before in games, but it’s particularly well-implemented here. There’s a satisfying amount of screenshake, a nicely measured cocktail…

Everyone is too busy to play with me, so I run from house to house kicking my football into these huge green flowerpots, laughing gleefully as they tip over. The old man who set them up is rightfully annoyed, but eventually he takes a break from his work to help me fly a kite. Then the scene fades away to a ghost-like image of the same boy in the middle of a rain-soaked road, picking up his football. The boy dissolves into the raindrops as a car passes by, and then the scene changes again. I am now the man, Carl, driving that car, abruptly waking up from a deep sleep in my living room. I look to my right and see an empty armchair. I look to my left…

They asked me to write about cyberpunk and discuss some of the little fellows operating in that arena, presumably due to my effete, soft-bellied physiology which hints at a motherly instinct for the deprived. As purge week rolls out, we turn our eye to the people using free range organic human blood in their products, giving you that fair and balanced reporting you crave during Oscar season. Bonafides: I’m a poor, the official cyberpunk caste. I modify my body as much as the next gal, maybe an Overton window or two more. I made some cyberpunk games including the sequel to System Shock. My healthcare is 432Hz – The DEEPEST Healing | Let Go Of All Negative Energy – Healing Meditation Music 432Hz and Trauma Recovery Theta Waves Meditation Music…

Few fictional genres possess such strong stylistic associations as cyberpunk. The word instantly conjures images of cities soaked in neon-lit rain, where glittering glass skyscrapers loom over squalid slums, where the lines between the organic and the synthetic have become blurred beyond recognition, and where virtual worlds are often just as real and just as dangerous as the physical one. The strength of cyberpunk’s aesthetic makes games which adopt it easy to identify, but it also makes breaking away from that style a challenge. Here, we’d like to celebrate the different shades of cyberpunk gaming has conjured, delving into how these virtual visions of imagined futures reflect the themes their developers wanted to explore. SHADOWRUN RETURNS Shadowrun Returnsblends cyberpunk with fantasy to create a world where orcs with prosthetic arms…

Lead designer Alex Hutchinson calls Journey to the Savage Planet an “earnest comedy”. What he means by that is on the colourful planet you explore as part of the fourth best interstellar exploration company, you embrace that things can and will go wrong, and you get to laugh at yourself in the process. The point of Savage Planet, and by extension exploration games in general, is that you don’t set off beset with sleek, expensive gear. Instead everything from your equipment to how you come across new locations and species, has a distinct air of improvisation to it. My jetpack belches huge clouds of smoke when I use it to double-jump onto a platform, and a wide-eyed, birdlike alien I shoot splatters me with goo. Kindred Aerospace, the company that…

My tiny Cessna light aircraft is barrelling down the terrifyingly short runway at Lukla, an airport nestled in the mountains of eastern Nepal that’s said to be one of the most dangerous in the world. The end of the runway approaches fast as I yank back on the yoke, but I’m not getting any lift. I resign myself to my fate, but half a second before I slam into the barrier separating Lukla from the misty void below, the little plane lurches into the air and suddenly I find myself soaring down a deep, vast Himalayan valley scattered with little fluffy clouds. Ten minutes later I’m flying over New York City, a dense urban sprawl that stretches as far as the eye can see, sunlight glinting off the skyscrapers. Then…

You don’t really know EVE Online until you’re crammed into a hot tub full of drunk, naked Finnish players and two developers chatting excitedly about chaos and wormholes. I’ve travelled thousands of miles to end up here, in a stranger’s house on an island called Kemiönsaari, the boondocks of Finland. My journey to this county of some 6,000 Swedes and Finns isn’t just for pleasure, however. I’m here to cover a historic event in PC gaming – EVE Online’s first-ever Fanfest to be held inside of one lucky player’s house. Normally these events are held in developer CCP Games’ home of Reykjavík, Iceland, and thousands of players from all over the world fly to party with the developers and learn about what’s next for EVE Online. Last year, though, CCP…

From the very beginning, Rockstar North wanted Grand Theft Auto V’s multiplayer mode to faithfully replicate the GTA experience online, with the same level of quality as singleplayer. “We used the game’s architecture, geography, and mechanics as a foundation and wanted the same kind of wide array of activities, and the ability to build on them to create new experiences,” says Rob Nelson, co-studio head at Rockstar North, reflecting on the GTA Online journey so far. “We’ve always wanted to build these immersive, complex living worlds to hold our stories, regardless of whether it’s for a single player or multiple,” he says. “We had created complex systems for weather, traffic, population, and more, to give people as much freedom as we possibly could to create unique experiences. “And creating online…

Horror cinema is blessed with tons of visually iconic monsters: the Xenomorph, the Thing, the Brundlefly. And then there’s the Blair Witch. Never so much as a blur on screen, at least in the one film that counts, she exists only in the sounds of a branch snapping in the distance. The one visual we have is a stand-in, those little twig effigies which Blair Witch – the videogame, sans ‘Project’ – distributes liberally through its woods. It’s an inevitability, perhaps, of adapting this source material into a game, of having to find new verbs in a story where the lead characters mostly just get lost, argue and scream – but to its credit, Blair Witch resists many of the obvious traps. The game keeps the UI and the explanations…

Deck13 is nothing if not tireless. Back in 2014, the studio made Lords of the Fallen, a pretty but derivative Soulslike that was perhaps too in awe of From Software’s source material to seriously forge its own identity. But with The Surge a couple of years later, Deck13 was onto something, introducing crunchy dismemberment mechanics and propelling the setting into an industrial sci-fi future reminiscent of a longshoreman’s waking nightmare. With The Surge 2, Deck13’s five-year grind in that formula of tough, stamina-based combat, corpse runs and shortcuts takes another thudding step towards self-actualisation. From the sound of metal on bone as you cleave enemies in half with hulking weapons, to the joy of a perfect parry, The Surge 2 is a satisfying, action-RPG that Deck13 can really call its…

Exemplaris Excomvnicationis. I have no idea what these words mean, but every death is accompanied by the same grim message. I’ve been seeing it a lot. Blasphemous is a 2D Metroidvania set in a Catholic-themed apocalypse and, like every other game released, has a clear Dark Souls inspiration. With its gory pixel art style, moody soundtrack and tortured enemies, it’s easy to get sucked into Blasphemous’ doomed and miserable world. You play as a grim, pinheaded warrior, the ominously dubbed ‘Penitent One’, who begins his quest after waking up in a castle flooded with identical, naked, corpses of his fellows. Little nuggets of lore fed via the various characters you meet throughout the journey do a good job in fleshing out the world. Saints, oracles and, guilt-ridden pilgrims; all the…

GreedFall’s systems parrot those of successful RPGs, but they’re all a bit thin. It has a tactical pause system that lets me queue up an action for my protagonist, but not the members of my party. I can assign armour and weapons to my party members, but not manage their skills or combat tactics. And so on. GreedFallcontains all the things I like in RPGs. I wish that I could pick even one of them to praise without caveats. The mildly uncanny lip movements are a minor distraction I’m interviewing a grizzled member of a mercenary faction as I investigate the disappearance of a talented young soldier. Sweet-talking and browbeating people with my title is a big part of my job as the ambassador of my own faction, the Congregation…

Is there a more go-backable title than No Man’s Sky? It’s the jilted lover of games, tempting players to return with teeth-whitened, bespoke-tailored updates. If this was a romcom, we’d be approaching the fourth act finale when No Man’s Sky sashays into the church looking fabulous, interrupts our wedding to Astroneer by banging on a window, and we speed off together in a ruby convertible. Tear off that veil. Laugh vivaciously. Roll the credits. “New tools that let me build bases and manipulate the earth” Actually returning to it, however, can feel like the difficult sequel. Having spent weeks playing the game when it first released, it makes sense to go right back to the start and see how it’s changed. I start on a planet that feels like it…

The setting for Remedy’s new shooter is the Oldest House, a monolithic, windowless skyscraper in downtown Manhattan that serves as the HQ of the Federal Bureau of Control. This is a severely warped place where the natural laws of physics, space, and time do not apply, and it’s one of the most interesting places I’ve ever explored in a game. If you’ve ever watched a classic James Bond movie, you’ve probably admired the set designs of the late, great Ken Adam. This legendary production designer was doing such incredible work on Bond, including Dr No’s Caribbean island lair, that Stanley Kubrick poached him to design the war room for Cold War satire Dr Strangelove. THE OLDEST HOUSE IS A TERRIFYING, MIND-BENDING, ILLOGICAL PLACE I’ve been a fan of Ken Adam…

At the risk of encouraging you to sharpen your pitchforks, I’m a lapsed PC gamer. Modern setups have been too expensive for me. But recently, like the responsible father and husband that I am, I decided to splash the cash anyway. Naturally the first thing I play with this tech is something that looks like it would run on an expensive calculator. A good point-and-click game is one of the things I missed most about PC gaming. With no new Monkey Island or Toonstruck sequel on the horizon – and no machine to play them on even if there were – I resorted to trying to pick things up by pointing at them and clicking my fingers, which rarely worked. When I encountered a seemingly insurmountable problem, I would start…

How do you cram battle royale into Civilization VI? Easy: just remove all the civilisations. No cities, no civ-building, just military units rolling around a post-apocalyptic map as a deadly circle of radiation closes in. Six of us clashed (when we could actually find each other on the map) in Civ VI’s new battle royale mode, Red Death. Chris: I’ve played four hours of Civ IV, eight hours of Civ V, and zero hours of Civ VI. I think the odds were stacked against me going into Red Death. But I do like battle royale, and a turn-based Civ BR is an interesting if weird idea. The max player count is 12, but you can play on maps small enough for only two players as well. Tyler: I didn’t hate…

ROBIN VALENTINE Specialist in Shadowrunning Twitter @robinlvalentine This month Determined that corrective shoes do count as a cybernetic implant. I’m something of a cyberpunk myself, you know. The weak flesh of my eyes has been laser-corrected. My computer is a glowing octopus of wires. Even my hoodies are neon. Oh, also I like to smash the system. It’s only right and proper, then, that I should be the one to oversee this tome of dystopian knowledge. Within these pages we’ve laid the genre bare – from its origins, to its most shining stars, to the art that’s brought it to life. And, of course, we’ve chatted to the creators of perhaps its most extraordinary entry to date: the superlatively ambitious Cyberpunk 2077. Hack the planet, street samurai. TALK TO PC…

1 2nd Amendment, a gun shop. You know, because of the “bear arms” bit in the US constitution. Worst expansion pack ever. 2 Not sure what exactly King Size is, but it looks like another bit of commentary on sexualised advertising. Or a dick joke. 3 Kabayan Foods represents the Filipino influence on Night City. Reckon they do adobo? Mmm, adobo. 4 The Night City Police Department. Sure you’ll have no bother with these, given how famously laid-back the US police are. 5 The unicorn just has to be a reference to the one from Deckard’s dreams and Gaff’s papercraft in Blade Runner, right? 6 Brain Wash? After giving every single one of these signs the ‘zoom, enhance’ treatment, my brain could do with a quick spit and polish.…

Although earlier examples do exist, nothing sums up the mood and aesthetic of cyberpunk quite like the opening of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” It’s a genre of science fiction often marked by its contrasts; low life and high tech, to quote author Bruce Sterling, and a vision of the near future with its feet heavily planted in both the obsessions and pessimism of the 1980s. It’s instantly recognisable, and yet defies neat categorisation, with elements of noir, satire, fetishism and paranoia all typically mixed together. In its stock form, it’s the near future as seen from the gutter – individualists struggling to live as they choose in the perpetual darkness and driving rain of…

In a little less than a year, the Dota Auto Chess mod’s popularity has already spawned plenty of imitators, as well as a standalone follow-up from the original developers. Now they’re even making surprise cameos in other games’ tournaments. Hearthstonepro Linh ‘Seiko’ Nguyen was playing a Grandmasters match against Elias ‘Bozzzton’ Sibelius in September and, during the course of the battle, made some catastrophic errors that ultimately cost him the match, surprising the viewers watching and his opponent. Viewers could see that Nguyen was distracted, and he wasn’t watching the screen. Instead he kept looking down at his lap. He was so busy doing something else that he was the last person to realise he’d lost. And it turns out that ‘something else’ was playing Auto Chess. “THE EXPECTATION IS…

Many games dabble in Nordic folklore, but most of them cast you as axe-swinging ruffians or bearded giants ready to take on the beasts of yore. But Rökidoesn’t deal in action, or any kind of axe-swinging. It deals in kindness and a quiet sense of wonder. As I first take control of Röki’s protagonist Tove (read: ‘toe-vey’), a young girl sensibly dressed for Scandinavian winters with big boots, mittens and a bright red bobble hat, I’m greeted with nothing but the chirping of birds and the soft crunching of snow underfoot. The sun is low, throwing wide shadows from the trees onto the ground. It’s incredibly peaceful. Tove isn’t just out taking a nice stroll however – in order to save her family, she’ll have to interact with mythical creatures…

Gamedec is a cyberpunk RPG from a Polish developer, but you’d never mistake it for Cyberpunk 2077. Set in Warsaw, in a future where people escape reality by plugging into virtual worlds, it’s an isometric detective yarn that plays out case-by-case as you solve VR crimes with real consequences. The hands-off demo, begins in a street soaked in rain and neon. There is, of course, a bar nearby. It’s a watering hole for gamers that’s filled with topless women and places for people to plug into VR. It’s a sleazy, bleak joint, but we don’t stick around. There’s a client who needs the services of a gamedec, and they’re waiting inside a free-to-play farming sim. Each case is a discrete mission with several possible conclusions based on evidence you’ve collected,…

There aren’t nearly enough games that let you play the villain. The beauty here is that, as much as it might feel like it on occasion, geese are not evil creatures. They’re just birds adapting to a world that humans have taken over with a cold disregard for nature. I, on the other hand, take immense pleasure in being a horrible git and therefore, I love this game. I adore fowl behaviour (such as that utterly disgraceful pun). I’ll get the sod wet, steal his lunch, make him buy back his own trowel Controls are simple, never getting in the way of your desire to wreak havoc. Hold one button to run rather than waddle, one to lean down, another to flap your wings, another to grab or drop things…

Crying Suns is both a good strategy game and a bad roguelike. It walks and talks like FTL, the indie hit that directly inspired it, but ultimately fails to mimic the endless replayability and daunting challenge that makes FTL so enchanting. Don’t get me wrong, though, Crying Suns is still a good game – thanks largely to its surprisingly human story and frantic space combat. It just isn’t the spiritual successor that it wants to be. Like FTL, I captain a spaceship through a randomly generated gauntlet of solar systems trying to keep my crew alive while navigating increasingly difficult encounters with the local populous. But where FTL gave these decisions as little narrative dressing as possible, Crying Suns creates a grim and vivid world that tees up an ambitious story.…

Danilo D’Ambrosio heads off an opposition pass with an outstretched foot, finds some space on the right and surges forward. He looks up and notices Radja Nainggolan’s made a run clear of his Bologna marker and outside-foots it to intercept his trajectory. It’s a few seconds of lithe, deeply human football that cuts out half the opposition, and with the final third theirs for the taking, my attackers descend on the box, smelling blood. Perisic is the spearhead of that advancing line, and Naingollan picks him out with a perfect through ball. All he has to do is dink it up past the keeper’s flailing arm. He gives up on the run and watches the ball roll harmlessly past him. There’s an influx of new animations in all aspects of…

Some games take you by surprise, creeping up from behind and coshing you on the head with their ingenuity or, to be frank, their sheer weirdness. Mr Flipper is such a game. It’s a pinball game, except it isn’t, throwing much of the established framework of the ancient amusement out of the window. You’re the titular Mr Flipper, a sentient flipper who, at the touch of a button, can walk around. Your ultimate goal is not to set a high score, but merely to transport a single ball to the top of a vertiginous, scrolling pinball table. This is easier said than done. Obstacles are numerous, including enemies determined to munch the ball, the inexorable pull of pesky gravity, and a steadily rising pool of lava that will completely destroy…

I love how clear everything is in Heat Signature. Instead of apologising for asking you to use the pause button, it positively encourages it. It’s like a supportive parent, albeit one who’s incentivising me to board spaceships and bludgeon strangers. There’s a ruthless efficiency to the way it operates. I wish I could say the same of myself. My early attempts to complete missions are often ruthless but rarely efficient. Because of this, my first life is a short one. I do some great wrench violence to begin with – there’s something intoxicating about a bright future where clubs are better than guns – but I get overzealous during a rescue mission and smash into the ship I’m tracking, destroying my pod. It’s a lesson well learned. I approach my…

I’m trying Endless Space 2 after seeing and getting excited by Amplitude’s upcoming Humankind. There’s something about it being set in space that feels more challenging for a strategy fan used to planting crops and researching longbows, and the density of information in the UI compounds this. But it clicks once I’ve clambered over the precipitous learning curve. And as much as I love the variety of approaches I can take, it’s the absurd level of panache that makes me want to keep playing.…

Your PC is made of sand. Or at least the bits that make it a PC are. Melted and refined sand is made into microchips because sand is made of silicon, which is a semiconductor, an element that acts as an electrical conductor under some conditions and as an insulator under others. Fabricators such as GlobalFoundries, Intel, and TSMC turn sand into crystals, cut them into discs, etch complex circuits into their surface and turn them into i7s, DDR4, RTX 2080s and the like. This has been fine since the invention of the transistor in 1947 (though some transistors are made from germanium, another semiconducting element). Now though, as the size of the integrated circuits on microchips reaches impossible smallness measured in single nanometres, the hunt is on for the…

There’s something intoxicating to me about Amplitude Studios’ games. Its Endlessseries – three 4X games all taking place in a sprawling shared setting – are given an incredible amount of life by gorgeous art and animation, imaginative writing, and a wonderfully creative approach to crafting sci-fi and fantasy cultures. I’m helpless before such evocative world-building. I pick up every Amplitude game on launch, and any time I see even a whisper of DLC, it’s seconds before I’ve got it in my cart. But the truth is, I don’t actually like playing any of them very much. After five years of DLC and free updates, science-fantasy entry Endless Legend leaves me spoilt for choice when it comes to picking my empire. There’s the tribal Kapaku, who seek to turn the world…

Final Fantasy XIII strikes a perfect balance for the series One of the best lines in Final Fantasy XIII is uttered by its narrator, Oerba Dia Vanille, when she says, “Maybe we’d fall short. Maybe we’d never even come close. But someone, someday, would know we’d tried.” These days the anticipation for the Final Fantasy VII Remake on PS4 grows stronger with every passing day. The reception for this updated version of the most beloved Final Fantasy makes me think of Final Fantasy XIII and how its legacy has shaken out in comparison. Like Final Fantasy VIII (the only other instalment that can contest it for the title of the most divisive Final Fantasy) it took risks and, as a result, fell short of the expectations of many fans. But…

Naming your game after the genre of fiction it’s set in is a funny thing. Imagine if BioWare had spent the last decades peddling its two big RPG series, Space Opera and High Fantasy, before floundering a bit with the release of Mecha-Science-Fantasy. It’s especially bold when the genre in question is cyberpunk – a subcategory of sci-fi that has always been kind of nebulous, its edges as fuzzy as if you’d just swallowed a palmful of Dex octagons. There’s a bulletpoint list of markers you can run through, sure. Cybernetic limbs. Mega-corporations. Hackers. Neon billboards and Japanese kanji. Ethernet cables that go straight into your skull. Neologisms that sounded cool and futuristic in 1984 but now seem a little silly and dated… and, yep, Cyberpunk 2077has them all. Ultimately,…

In Night City, even the sky glows neon. Radioactive fallout from the Fourth Corporate War has turned dusk and dawn red, some districts are nothing but rubble and abandoned combat tanks, while others have been reclaimed and thrive again. This is the setting for Cyberpunk Red, a tabletop RPG in the same world as Cyberpunk 2077, but a few decades earlier in the year 2045. It’s a pen-and-paper RPG played with dice and character sheets, like Dungeons & Dragons or Call of Cthulhu, a format for games that’s seen a popular resurgence in recent years. The best explanation of tabletop RPGs is still that given by Abed in Community: “This is a roleplaying game. It takes place entirely in our collective imagination. I tell a story and you make choices…