You were replaying Cyberpunk 2077 to exact revenge on a certain metalhead after being mentally devastated by the Netflix anime adaptation, Edgerunners, when you had to contact a contractor for water damage. Why? Because when you felt water dripping on your head and you looked up, the roof above you was leaking through cracks.
Since the contractor will work there, you couldn’t use your computer for the time being. Yet you still crave for a world overrun by technology in which the brakes were never pumped, juxtaposed with the blurred human identity and upsetting social order. You boot up your spare laptop or another computer somewhere else at home, but both of their specifications don’t meet the requirements to run your Cyberpunk copy smoothly.
So what other cyberpunk games that you can enjoy in the meantime without facing graphical issues? Not to worry. Here are the recommended four that you can have a blast with just your laptop or spare PC.
VA11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action (2016)
A relaxing start. VA11 HALL-A (or simply Valhalla) places you in the shoes of Jill, a bartender in the titular bar whose job is to, in her own words, “mix drinks and change lives.” It is a visual novel styled game with minor gameplay elements, including mixing and serving the right drinks as well as managing your expenses.
There are no dialogue options, instead the drinks influence the direction of the story. There are a few occasions where you can actually serve a drink other than what a character ordered.
As a spoiler-free example, an idol will ask Jill if there is tea, to which she thinks there isn’t any. Normally you will serve her a drink she orders as a substitute. However, if you actually bought a bottled tea before the work day when the idol appears, you can serve it instead to unlock her ending and achievement.
Valhalla is set in the year 207X in Glitch City, a city state controlled by megacorporations, namely Zaibatsu Corp. It is also the corp’s “testing grounds” for experimental technologies, especially AI and nanomachines, and are tested and deployed in public with little option to refuse. Much of the world’s lore can be found through conversations and news on Jill’s tablet device.
If you want to relax in a cyberpunk setting, this is the game for you. Bonus points if you are also a bartender in real life. The minimal gameplay, visuals and music bring the “chill” factor of the game, but the characters and dialogues also make the game lively enough to keep you engaged. Overall, Valhalla is about people coping with the dystopian hole they are living in and making the best out of it in a bar at a quiet corner of the city.
For maximum chill effect, play this at night and be sure to grab yourself some snacks and drinks to munch on between talks.
System Shock (1994)
In 2072, you, a hacker, are unfortunately caught by a corporation that you infiltrated online, and rather than being criminally charged, you are sent to its space station. Its vice president offers to drop your charges and a military-grade implant in return for removing moral constraints of the station’s AI, Shodan.
True to his word, you are put to sleep for six months while undergoing the surgery. When you wake up, you find that the station is no longer the same. It is overrun by mutants, rogue robots and cyborgs lorded over by Shodan, and you have to stop her before she invades humanity on Earth.
System Shock is a first person shooter where you explore around the space station doing certain tasks to advance your progress against Shodan. You fight enemies with a variety of weapons and enhance yourself temporarily with certain boosters such as night vision and berserker boosters, which increases melee damage.
There are puzzles which you can optionally choose to simplify or solve all of them when you are starting a new game. The same goes to the enemy difficulty, missions and cyberspace.
Speaking of cyberspace, this is an entirely different gameplay where you hack into terminals and float around in a digital space. Besides shooting enemies, you can also collect cyberspace upgrades and tools, but your main objective will mostly be unlocking doors, some that are required to advance further into the game.
It is recommended to get the Enhanced Edition of the game, as it is an update of the original. Mouselook is now enabled, the graphics look cleaner, the camera smoother and many of the original bugs fixed. Still, if you feel intimidated by the controls and HUD, no sweat. Just press 2 to enter fullscreen mode, you do not need all of them. For controls, you can keybind them to your comfort or use this Steam guide like I did.
System Shock didn’t feel as dated as I thought it might be.
While I have nothing against the sequel, System Shock 2, I felt that the first is more colorful, the enemies and weapons more varied, and a lot of the music is a bullseye to my ears. Whether you are playing the first, second or both, you may not deny that in both games, Shodan is the AI that you dread and want to destroy as soon as possible.
Snatcher (1988)
Before Metal Gear Solid, but a year after Metal Gear 1, you have Snatcher, written and designed by Hideo Kojima. Essentially a fusion of Blade Runner and Terminator, Snatcher is an adventure game for the PC-8801 and MSX2 in Japan, and eventually for the West, the Sega CD in 1994. In 1996, it was rereleased for the Playstation and Sega Saturn.
It may be a console title, but thanks to emulators, you can play this on your laptop or computer. I personally played the Sega CD version with a Sega CD emulator. After setting one up, download a Snatcher ROM or ISO file that matches your emulator. For a start, you can get both the SEGA CD emulator and rom here and here.
Snatcher follows Gillian Seed, an amnesiac who joins an anti-Snatcher agency in search of his past. The titular beings are discount Terminators that kill and replace humans while blending into their society in Neo Kobe City. The game is mainly played with text based menus akin to a visual novel, though when fighting, you shoot across a 3×3 grid. Especially in the Sega CD version, the characters actually speak with voices, so you would actually feel like watching a cutscene or a cyberpunk OVA in the 80s to 90s.
Snatcher had a cult following and set the stage for Kojima’s later works, including the Metal Gear Solid series.
Cruelty Squad (2021)
You have reached the solid bottom of a barrel in a good way. Cruelty Squad is what happens when LSD, hyper capitalism, excess and a physical form of “low effort” are blended together and thrown violently down a spiral staircase.
An immersive sim FPS, you are what your friend and employer calls you a loser working with the titular security corporation doing the bidding of other conglomerates. Your main objective is to kill targets in whichever path and method you see fit. Secrets are also prevalent and you can explore around to find secret implants and levels.
If your frame rate drops, you can decrease the resolution and minimize the number of civilians. The resolution shouldn’t be a concern, especially when 640×480 is what the NPCs called “God’s resolution”, a clue to a certain secret.
Everything from the HUD and visuals to the sound designs and soundtrack are designed to assault your senses. The “health” blob takes up a lot of space in the upper left, a border surrounds your screen at all times, characters speak in distorted, Animal Crossing language, the architects stopped caring about making anything beautiful, and the soundtrack feels like it was extracted from the bowels of a drugged up musician. A lot of your implants are also disgusting, ranging from ankle and back “bio-boosters” to a grappler that is basically your intestine.
Cruelty Squad is the cyberpunk game that actually nails the “punk” in the name. A lot of cyberpunk fiction, even 2077, dabbles in such themes from time to time, but often emphasizes more in cyber.
The beauty of those worlds also undermine the protest art of advancing technology without applying its brakes and affecting humanity with rampant consumerism, corporatism and capitalist grind culture. While the worlds are bleak, Cruelty Squad’s is rotten. It actively makes you refuse to participate in it, both for its ugliness and the lore.
The rich in the Cruelty Squad had found the technology to be practically immortal. For a measly $500, you can be revived. This also applies to your character even if you have zero money, the numbers instead decrease to negatives. As a result of excessive life, dying no longer matters and is nothing but a nuisance, making violence an everyday fare and sustaining the organ stock market. The value of human life plummeted down into an infinite spiral, at least until you achieved the third and final ending.
Though Cruelty Squad is at the bottom of the list, it is still a top recommendation as one of the best cyberpunk games to play, even in low end laptops or PCs.
