Cyberpunk

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/20524903

Cyberpunk stories are often action filled and you as player are directly in the middle, deciding the fate of mega corporations and technological progress of humanity. But in this game? Here you prepare drinks and hear stories about the world outside the bar doors. What crazy stuff goes on, what happened to some celebrity and when the next riot is supposedly happening. It is a Deus Ex story, but you don't play JC Denton, you play a barkeeper and try to make ends meet, so you don't get evicted from your apartment at months end.

And it is glorious. I really started to like games, or stories in general, that don't put you in the shoes of the 1 in a million special protagonist, but in the shoes of one of the other 999.999 randoms, who have to live in that world and can't just change the world by fighting the bad guy.

Your bar has some random people coming, but also regulars you will talk to more often and build a connection with. And each one will have a story to tell you. Now the game play is not exactly breath taking, either you do the drink right or not. Mess up too often and you don't have enough money for the rent. Sometimes you can influence the customer a bit by deciding how much alcohol you put in their drink, but that's it. So mostly you can consider it as a Visual Novel (if you want a cyberpunk bartender story driven game with a bit more gameplay focus, yes there is another one with that description, check out Red Strings Club). But the stories are just so interesting and fun. And following the circumstances of certain regulars was captivating for me.
Especially as you have a lot of variety in your customers: poor people down on their luck, a private law enforcement officer that didn't just join because they wanted to stomp on citizens. Or a cybernetically enhanced dog with a Hawaii shirt. Yeah it's not taking itself always seriously =) And it's mostly about human stories, how they get affected by their society etc. Not about saving the world, but about how they can find a good food store now that the old one was busted for illegally selling cyberware below the counter. So a lot of world building is done through your customers stories.

Biggest drawback of this game? If you enjoy it, you also have to wait for it's sequel N1RV Ann-A like the rest of us. Which still doesn't have any release date. But as Silksong proved: good games take time!

Access to Arasaka has been making cyberpunk-themed ambient music for almost 20 years now. He just released a new EP (Utility) that leans a bit more into the "glitch" genre than "ambient" but it's still great background music. I like just queuing up his albums and letting it play.

His entire discography is available on bandcamp with no minimum price set, meaning you can download it all for $0. I like all of his songs except for the random ones with vocals... those totally throw me off when I just want something ambient in the background. Anyway, I like him as an artist and a new EP is as good a reason as any to recommend him.

A friend of mine started getting into Tabletop Simulator on steam. It's a surprisingly robust platform for building board games, with the ability to shuffle cards, roll dice, place items on a board, etc. The simulator itself isn't a game but there are a bunch of DLCs available which represent individual board games.

That's neat and all, but what we didn't realize until recently (and why we finally bought it) is there's an entire workshop community with almost 100,000 fan-made games of questionable legality. All free. So naturally, I immediately started looking for cyberpunk board games.

The one I'm most excited about and wanted to share here is called Zaibatsu: Speedrunners. And it's a legitimately free board game (what's called a "Print & Play" because you can print the game pieces yourself). You can download the entire game (printable PDFs of the game pieces) here.

I haven't played the game yet (either the Tabletop Simulator version or in real life) but it looks really cool. Each player represents a megacorp and you place hexagonal tiles on a table to build out regions of cyberspace, with the goal of your megacorp having majority control of the tiles. You take over regions of cyberspace (tiles) by placing one of your runners on it and using their Icebreaker ability. If a tile has Black ICE, that runner dies if they fail. So that's fun. Also, you can obtain additional runners like Cleaners, Crackers, Gynoids, or the Idoru to help you. Lots of great cyberpunk references here.

There isn't much information about the game on Board Game Geek and I can't find any youtube videos of people playing the game at all, so it's possible this game is more complicated than I'm willing to play. But I'm intrigued. Also, it's my understanding that Zaibatsu: Speedrunners is a re-implementation of the original Zaibatsu, of which there's even less information. The Tabletop Simulator version of the original Zaibatsu looks like it was better made than the Speedrunners version, though. Oh well.

Anyway, now that I'm taking a step into the world of Tabletop Simulator, definitely let me know if you have other recommendations for cyberpunk-themed board games. I'm not really into full-blown TTRPGs or CCGs though, those are way too complex for me. I like actual board games that I can finish within an hour or so.

Over on the cyberpunk mastodon instance corteximplant.com they're having a watch party for Who Am I and I've never even heard of this movie. I guess it's a German movie but I can't find it streaming anywhere. Anyway, I'm curious if it's any good so I wanted to ask if anyone here would recommend it.

Here's a trailer with English subtitles. I guess it's about a group of hackers but beyond that, I'm not entirely sure of the plot. Wikipedia says it's comparable to Fight Club and Mr. Robot.

Also, I would've posted a link to corteximplant's watch party but it's only available on their Discord server. You can get their Discord invite at https://nightcity.bar/ though.

[SCREAMSHEET // SIGNAL INITIATED]

Encrypted media node activated.

Screamsheet is a defiant ezine broadcasting from the static between corporate firewalls and analog ruins. Expect multi-panel manga collage, horror motifs, protest symbolism, and cryptic dispatches from the N1GHTW1RE Collective.

🕷️ Format:

• Visual manifestos
• Resistance art
• Genre bleed fiction
• Tactical briefings

🛰️ Frequency:
Weekly drops. No algorithms. No apologies.

🧠 Engagement Protocol:

• Drop your own encrypted visuals
• Share nodes worth decrypting
• Collaborate on future transmissions

If you’re tuned in, respond with your call sign.
If you’re compromised, stay silent.

[END TRANSMISSION]\

Screamsheet Website

I don't know how to embed youtube shorts into Lemmy (if there's even a way) so I'm just going to post the links here:

Technofeudalism 2040: A Serf's Day
Technofeudalism 2040: An Overlord's Day

These are just two short animations (1min, 24 sec each) that take place in a cyberpunk future. One of them is from a serf's perspective, the other is from an overlord's perspective. And they're both ridiculous. They also both loop perfectly. Check them out.

I think the guy who made them is on Newgrounds if you'd rather watch there and avoid youtube.

• Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVhjwEM59tQRlOFYqn5ZffkChnlXtP3DO
• other platforms / where to buy (according to the official NIN site): https://nineinchnails.lnk.to/TRONAres
• about the album: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron:_Ares_(soundtrack)

cross-posted from: !nin@lemmy.world

Hey there! I'm a newbie author writing a cyberpunk book called Neodrius. It's ongoing (5chapters a week) with around 250 pages already. If you feel like trying something new that feels familiar, please give it a read, and possibly leave me some feedback! <3 Thank you! Link - https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/127344/neodrius-a-cyberpunk-novel

[Book]

To celebrate my new short story collection, Death March to Happiness, I'm sharing one of the cyberpunk stories in it. This is The Tell-Tale Cardiac Pump Unit, which is my dystopian corporate cyberpunk take on Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart.

https://michaelwmoss.com/the-tell-tale-cardiac-pump-unit

Here's Poe's original if you want to compare: https://poemuseum.org/the-tell-tale-heart/

There are couple more, much longer cyberpunk stories in the collection called Speed Kills and The Miracle, as well as some fantasy, horror, and steampunk stories.

Author @rek2@lemmy.ml

Hello fellow hackers and cyberpunk enthusiasts,

After 12 months of writing and research, I'm excited (and honestly a bit nervous) to share my first tech-thriller novella "Connection Timeout: The PingStarved Chronicles" with this community. This is my first time publishing fiction, so I'm both shy and thrilled to finally put it out there.

Set in 2030 Barcelona, it follows Andrés "PingStarved" Reyes, a 56-year-old hacker who must choose between protecting his estranged son and surrendering a revolutionary mesh networking protocol that could liberate global communications from corporate control.

What makes this different from typical cyberpunk:

• Features real mesh networking protocols (Meshtastic, Reticulum)
• Based on actual security research and exploitation techniques
• Grounded in technologies currently in development
• Authentic hacker culture representation - written by someone who lives it
• NO DRM - All formats are DRM-free because information wants to be free

This has been a labor of love, combining my passion for privacy tech and resistance against surveillance capitalism into a narrative that I hope resonates with our community. As someone who's been hacking for years but never written fiction before, I poured everything I know and believe about our culture into these pages.

Details:

• 29,429 words (86 pages, 2-3 hour read)
• Available in PDF and EPUB formats
• Price: $4.99 USD / €4.99 EUR
• DRM-FREE on all platforms

Available at:

• Gumroad (DRM-FREE): https://rek2.gumroad.com/l/connection-timeout-cyberpunk
• Amazon Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FPZ18STC
• Amazon Kindle Spain: https://www.amazon.es/dp/B0FPZ18STC
• Also available on Amazon in UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Canada, Australia, and many other countries

If you enjoyed Neuromancer, Little Brother, or Mr. Robot, this explores similar themes of surveillance capitalism, digital liberty, and technological resistance - but grounded in the real tech we're building today.

Any feedback from the community would mean the world to me. Thanks for reading!

P.S. - For those who prefer open platforms, the Gumroad version comes with both PDF and EPUB, completely DRM-free. Support indie publishing and digital freedom!

I saw a trailer for this game and was intrigued enough to look into it. It made me realize that I've never seen a cyberpunk souls-like game before. I'm no souls-like expert but every souls-like I'm aware of has a dark fantasy setting. Yet there's nothing inherent to the souls-like genre that requires a dark fantasy setting, it just seems to be where most souls-like fans tend to go. Weird.

Anyway, after looking into it, I guess the developers only call this game an "Action RPG" despite users adding the 'souls-like' tag in steam. The trailer certainly looks like a souls-like but maybe the gameplay isn't actually souls-like. I'm not sure, I haven't played the demo.

Also, I guess this game is the final entry in their Liuyin Trilogy, after Nine Treasures of Liuyin and Redemption of Liuyin. Both those previous games had a dark fantasy setting (maybe souls-likes?) and this game just happens to be far enough into the future to be cyberpunk. So if it isn't souls-like, it certainly looks souls-like-adjacent.

Liuyin's World releases on September 19.

This is a 9-minute preview from IGN about Replaced. I've had this game on my steam wishlist since 2021 but it looks like it might actually be close to release now.

Given that this video is from IGN, there's a lot of hyperbole about how this could be one of the greatest indie games EVER MADE. So hopefully the game at least ends up being "good". It still looks cool though, I plan on picking it up whenever it releases.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1663850/REPLACED/

The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster was written in 1909. It predates Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers by a couple decades. The light bulb was still a recent invention. Yet the world Forster wrote about is oddly recognizable.

It's about a crazy world where everyone just sits alone in their room, staring at a screen and making reaction videos to other people's reaction videos. The main character is a woman who's fully invested in her reaction videos and is perfectly content with her life. But her son has this crazy desire to touch grass. Ridiculous! Sure, anyone can go outside and touch grass if they want, but why would they? All media feeds are on their screens, indoors! Besides, her son lives on the other side of the planet and everyone's rooms look the exact same, so why bother going anywhere at all?

This is just a short story, less than 50 pages. Or if you enjoy audiobooks, it's an hour and a half. And honestly, there isn't much of a plot here. This is mostly the author imagining a horrible world where everyone lives their lives glued to technology and they don't even see a problem with that. So a lot of the story is just the author describing that world. The son fills the role of "voice of reason" as he shouts at his mother for being so obsessed with her videos. And that's where the author injects what he's really trying to say with this story (as if it was subtle before that). Of course, this isn't just a snapshot of life in this world, something has to happen. So towards the end of the story, the machine stops. Because if humanity becomes so reliant upon technology, what will they do if that technology goes away?

A lot of the story made me think of the humans from Wall-E if they never left their rooms. And I liked how the humans weren't being forced to stay in their rooms like prisoners, they just... didn't see any reason to leave. And that's where this story feels proto-cyberpunk to me. It's in the dehumanization through technology. These humans aren't being subjugated by technology, they're voluntarily using this technology. And it makes them less.

Since the story was written in 1909, it's in the public domain. So you can read it or listen to it for free. I borrowed the audiobook on Hoopla and I thought the narrator did a great job of making the mother character always sound irritated by the minor inconveniences in her life. That feels accurate.

This short story isn't exactly a masterpiece but it's an interesting oddity from 1909 and isn't a major commitment to read so I recommend checking it out.

https://store.playstation.com/en-us/concept/10008070/

Dive into the dystopian cyberpunk world of Neo Berlin 2087 – a unique third- and first-person action RPG crafted for fans of immersive single-player experiences. Uncover a deep, narrative-driven story through never-before-seen gameplay, new levels, cinematic cutscenes, and intense combat. Meet new characters Bryan and Phoenix in this action-packed Gamescom 2025 reveal.

First trailer here https://lemmy.zip/post/20994790

Cool animation in the retro-futuristic and cyberpunk vibe

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/46425403

I have mixed feelings about Upload (as I've ranted about before). The setting is so extremely cyberpunk yet the story they decide to tell in this world is a rom-com. It's enough to keep me watching while at the same time knowing this show isn't for me and I'm not the target demographic. But then they'll throw the occasional nugget my way, like a William Gibson cameo, and I keep watching.

Anyway, here's a trailer for the final season, which is just a 4-part finale to wrap up the story. I don't mind that the show is ending but It's always nice when a cancelled show is allowed some closure.

I'm constantly torn between "I should make more of an effort to keep this cyberpunk community alive" and "I should give up on this whole Lemmy thing"... so here's a meme.

I really should find a giant repository of random cyberpunk artwork that I can post regularly since I can't keep up with a constant stream of discussion topics. Of course, if I did that, this community would turn more into r/cyberpunk with its random "here's what I drew in class today" posts.

Ok, yes, this movie isn't cyberpunk. I'm not even sure if it's cyberpunk-adjacent. But it feels like they wanted to make a cyberpunk movie and were forced to shove a War of the Worlds storyline into it instead. I know nobody is going to care about this movie but I wanted to talk about it anyway. Well, I mostly just wanted to share my rambling thoughts after watching the trailer...

First of all, one of the movie's taglines is "DATA IS THEIR FOOD" and that just... what does that even mean? Are the aliens AI now? How does that even make sense? Is that just an intriguing statement for the trailer or is it actually a plot point? I have to watch the movie now just to see if the aliens actually "eat" data because that's ridiculous.

More importantly, the movie seems to be focused on mass surveillance, technology, and personal data. That's where it almost feels cyberpunk-adjacent to me. If the real focus of the movie is on the "surveillance industrial complex" (another line from the trailer) then I'm curious where they're going with this. I've always considered the topic of data privacy to be adjacent to cyberpunk themes so I'm curious if that's what this movie is truly about.

Final thought... Is the entire movie just Ice Cube sitting in his office watching the events transpire from his computer/cellphone? Because that'd be amazing. The trailer makes it look like everything is viewed as a combination of facetime video calls and streaming video news reports and I wonder if that's what the actual movie looks like (and how long they commit to that bit).

I looked into it a bit and apparently this movie was filmed in 2020 and is only just now being released. The trailer dropped today and the movie will be available on Amazon Prime on July 30, so less than a week away. There's no way this movie will be good and I assume the only reason it's seeing the light of day is for tax purposes. It could be a glorious train wreck though.

Ok, this new trailer actually explains the plot and I'm intrigued. It also features a new NIN song which I certainly won't say no to.

While I can appreciate wanting to stay true to the original, I wish this game was more of an upgrade. Something like the 2023 Dead Space remake. That game did a phenomenal job of taking the original's ideas and improving on them in every way. It felt like a new AAA game that just happened to mimic the original 2008 classic.

Instead, this trailer shows a comparison between the original and the remake and... that's it? I guess it has better textures, but that's the only change I see. The character animations are still awkward and clunky, the walls and floors are still just repeated patterns, and nothing seems improved.

Now, I don't want to complain too much. The original 1999 System Shock 2 is a classic, and if they just re-released the original that wouldn't suddenly make it a bad game. I just had higher hopes because this game doesn't look "updated" for a new generation of gamers. It looks like a mod-pack to get the original game running on modern hardware. And those have been around for years.

Of course, re-releasing classic games is Nightdive's specialty and I'm sure they did a great job here. And this game looks just like their remaster of the original System Shock so I shouldn't be too surprised. But SS1 was just an ok game and SS2 was genre-defining. I would've liked more effort to go into this one. I guess my complaint is that it looks like the intended audience here is people who already have nostalgia for SS2 and it's unlikely to introduce any new fans.

Anyway, the game is on Steam and is available now. Sorry for going on a rant; the game has Very Positive reviews and you should probably just ignore my whining and play it.

I think this song is just ok, but the music video is fantastic.

Edgerunners 2 was announced but the creators did confirm that David is dead. For those hoping to see a resurrection, you might be out of luck but this is welcome news for those hoping to see more of this world.