#like. idk. like i said i think cp2077 has a lot more nuance and refelction to it than cloudpunk.

[zevranunderstander]

i don't know what the fuck a cloudpunk is but i do know that i need to hear you rant about it

i love u soo much for this. i really fucking hate cloudpunk, which is a game released by ION LANDS in 2020. i'm not really sure how to say this otherwise, but cloudpunk is a cyberpunk game for 7-year-olds who have not yet understood the moral complexity of the world, and who need to get told what is "good" and what is "bad" in the straightest terms possible. like, there are soo many points to this that annoy me that i will copy some parts of my steam review because I think i phrased it really well there + a lot of addtions because i tried to be civil on steam and not use too many swearwords:

as a PREMISE, Cloudpunk takes place in a dystopian cyberpunk town that is filled with structural problems and complicated people, where you are an illegal delivery driver who works her first shift and gets to know all kinds of people living in the town. And you follow along many storylines that tell the stories of Nivalis’ citizens (Nivalis is the city this takes place in), and get lots of impressions and opinions about the city from them. Also, gameplay-wise you fly around the city in your car and deliver packages and people to different locations.

And like, that sounds like a really good pitch, right? It's just that in practice, almost none of this works out or is interesting in any way. Like, the gameplay is not only boring, it's frustrating. Every area is a hyper-complicated maze filled with annoying elevators, endless stretches of sidewalks and no interesting visuals to look at or objects to interact with. Exploring a walkable area is my personal hell and finding collectibles is a form of torture. Flying around also just isn’t all that much fun, especially after a few hours in the game and the city isn’t very interesting visually. What i really hated was that you never really “get your bearings”, which is what i would expect from a game where you play a delivery driver, because that job for me would be almost synoymous with starting to feel like you know every inch of the city. but yeah, with this game you always just blindly follow quest markers up on til the very end of the game. To make that short, there isn’t really anything I actually liked about the gameplay at all. Player guidance doesn’t exist, it feels like there was zero level design/UX design put into this game. Like, frankly what you should play the game for, if anything, is the story. The thing is. the story also isn't very good.

to stay with gameplay for a second though, the gameplay does not really support the information the story is relaying to you, ever. The game tells you repeatedly that the city is dangerous, that being a driver is a job not many people survive, that you are poor, that you are barely scraping by, that you are unsure if you can even continue to afford rent for another day. And YET ingame you don’t feel any of this at all – I had so much money I ended the game with all purchasable upgrades and still had +6,000$ left, you live in a full luxury flat for all i care after DAY ONE of your job in the city. The game also says that the city crashes in on itself and there are devastating disasters happening everywhere, but they always happen offscreen and you never really even have that much to do with them. no mission involves any real danger and you never actually *see* the city falling apart, which is just like, the opposite of "show, dont tell".

The story also just sucks? like i said, it's like it's written for the "this book is problematic because it condones murder :(" crowd. 80% of the characters are completely one-dimensional. and i mean, one-dimensional. for a story that is supposed to be about the citizens of the city, the game often just gives you over-exaggerated caricatures with one character trait to them. There are very few characters in this game that feel like people, most of them feel like bad cardboard cutouts that hold one (1) belief that they will repeatedly say out loud like “I hate poor people”, or “I hate androids” or “I will do anything for clout on the internet”, and it’s at times frustrating because the critique this game makes is not thought-provoking. I don't want to say it’s *bad* that they try to critique social issues in the game - I want to say that they are not clever about doing it at all.

They never say anything especially original. there is a mission where you have to save a rich person’s life (you have to choose 2 people out of six you can save and the company wants you to pick rich ones, so that they can get money from them as thanks), and the rich person i saved still complained about how much they hated me and poor people the entire time and I actually had to laugh because I felt like the game was afraid I wouldn’t otherwise understand that this is a *bad* person if they made them react with any semblance of human emotion for once. The writing in general often suffers from the bluntness with which the game will tell you everything that is going on in the city – random people you've never spoken to give you unprovoked monologues about how bad their job’s working conditions are or drop incredibly unsubtle lines about the inequality in the city. Often, the main character’s companion – or anyone, really, will, after an interaction, call in to say something like “Wow, that guy was an asshole”, just in case you STILL did not understand that the character was supposed to be *bad*. Like, I genuinely at times felt offended because it felt like the game had zero trust in its audience to understand morality or make up their own opinion on a character.

Like, even in moments where I thought they were going for a good critique they often ruined it by overexplaining how bad that is until you just felt offended. Like, it really would have hit if you get to deliver to the corporate sector for the first time and after all the misery you saw earlier in the city, you realize that this rich CEO and his friends hired an illegal delivery service to order a pizza, since the official ones aren't serving, as business expenses like this aren't legally allowed at the moment to show solidarity with the working class. and they just don't give a shit and just do it illegally. but this "wow" moment you have for a second is immediately ruined by a fuck ton of people calling you say “Wow, that guy was an asshole!”, like i felt like i was just playing out a dystopian cariucature and people were telling me when bad stuff happened. at one moment i had to PAUSE THE GAME to scream, because i felt like i was in kindergarten because, one android friend/occasional companion of yours mentions that there are a lot of anti-android propaganda movies and i dont remember the movies name but something like "androids eat your children 2" or whatever it was was mentioned and the main character just goes "wooow. :( they make movies like that? :( that is soo evil and fucked up :(", like all of the main characters have this unchallenged, perfect moral compass, but NO ONE ELSE in the city has it. it's like they are walking through a museum that shows immoral, fucked up shit and they all go "oh :( that's very evil!" at everything they see.

like, i mean this 1000% this game had me sympathize with irl "bad" people, because no character in this game had actual motivations or reasoning to their actions and they all were so flat and caricature-ish? i mean, in real life, very prejudiced people have a mindset around why they see people like that, but cloudpunk just fails to ever really show that, the characters talk like propaganda posters, instead of showing people's bad thought patterns and the game often just wants to be like "see? you just talked to a racist! this game is very deep" and all the racist did was talk to you about how he doesn't like androids and made one or two allegories to actual racist beliefs people hold against other real-world oppressed groups and then he left and your character immediately called the rest of the main cast and went “Wow, that guy was an asshole!”

also just, the choices you make in the game often feel very meaningless. there are no consequences for disobeying a direct work order or for any choice, really. you can make some pretty villainous choices in the story, but the main character is just not written in a way where it would make sense for her to actually make a decision like that – I went with the bad choices a lot, because i was developing quite the hatred for the game and the protagonists and the main character at one point said, “I guess we’re working for a super-evil guy now?”, AS IF she was not the one who in-game made the decision? It’s just weird to add choices to a story that the pre-written main character would never actually consider (and I'm talking "I gave a corporate guy the only cure to brutal virus") there was also a very clear motive about the fact that the main character’s idea is always the “correct” one – an NPC could tell you that they want you to do a thing, which often even was a very personal wish, and more than once the main character can decide that it’s "not a good idea" and could just take them somewhere else, and it felt very “savior”-y because the game would ALWAYS frame the main character as being in the right about the call they made. It's just really ignorant to people’s struggles to just go against character’s wishes because you assume you know better than them and then also be right, like the NPCs in this game just don't have any agency.

And just. The overarching plot isn't very captivating, and even the main characters all feel very gimmicky. Like, fucking hated the main companion sooo much. He's like, a talking dog AI that has a very naive and childish view on morality so he would at every turn go "why would somebody do something like that? :(((" and then the main character would go, "I don't know... :(" instead of ACTUALLY exploring WHY somebody would do something like that, yk? and your other main companion is an old android who talks like a noir detective and its just. very annoying after a while. like, it's an okay gimmick, but it really just gets old very quick.

like. the game has this horrible attitude that perfectly draws a line between the "poor, exploited worker" and the "evil, rich CEO", but there is no depth or exploration of either and there really is no person who has a good and a bad character trait. i mean, from personal experience, people who are very poor and exploited sometimes really lack the education to be very "woke" or cannot afford to be kind. but in this game, oppressed people are always genuine and kind and self-sacrificing and noble and idk it just to me felt so devoid of any meaningful discussion around ANYTHING. also like i said before, people always were so on the nose about their evil beliefs. like, "oh, youre a shitty poor person. go away, i do not like poor people!", like that's how characters talk in this game.

there were some cool moments in the game that i really actually liked, but overall the game is a complete waste of time lmao. i will stop talking abt this now bc i have been writing this for +1 hour now hjgahsgdsa