3/30/2023 0 Comments Cloudpunk guideShe’s not presented as unsympathetic or ignorant in any particular way, and even has numerous encounters with the usual army of male straw-man idiots, from the guy who tries to ask her out randomly to a creep who demands a debate on how women are inferior, to a music-video director who tries to appropriate her look and culture for a pop star he’s working with, that allow the player to sympathize with her. Rania is kind of uneven in general, sometimes. I should say that there are standouts in the voice cast- a lot of the characters you meet are acted wonderfully- but when Rania is really uneven and you have to spend the most time with her, the immersion the rest of the game works so hard on tends to stutter a bit. I finally turned down the voices, because having the text entirely detached from the voices felt wrong somehow, but hearing the stilted conversations between Rania and Camus, her AI dog, got on my nerves. The voice acting tends to vary from person to person and even from line reading and line reading, sometimes making the emotion and inflection in scenes feel a little jarring. It’s relaxing and really satisfying zipping around the city and being immersed in the day-to-day of being a package deliverer in this odd futuristic world, meeting eccentric characters, and trying to solve their problems.īut this is a game based on a narrative, and once it gets into that mode, the cracks start to show. It’s immersive, but sometimes you just don’t want to have to wait for an elevator. It’s a very no-fuss kind of movement, with only the annoyance of a fixed camera and its predilection for messing up your transitions from screen to screen to keep from a whole recommendation. The controls are smooth and don’t really give you a lot of trouble, and work just as easily moving around the pedestrian scenes as much as the city. The flight is also really easy, just WSAD for direction, and shift/space for ascend/descend. Usually, I listen to my own music or podcasts after a while instead of game music, and I immediately switched off my audio so that I could listen to the soundtrack. It’s never intrusive, though, instead adding accents to the existing action, ramping up and down as scenes get more or less intense. The soundtrack is also perfect, it’s clear Vangelis’ Blade Runner score was an influence, and it works perfectly over the towering spires of the city and rainy streets. It’s really cool, and gives the flight a weight and meaning as you swerve through buildings and around cars. Particularly impressive is that you can fly right up to and even into buildings, as everything in the city is actually there in front of you. It’s seamless, and in an age where that’s an issue for most triple-A games, that’s impressive. It’s also smooth enough that you can fly around the large districts and even get out and walk through areas without having to load, save for flying to or from another district. It’s got a perpetually raining neon-dystopia aesthetic with pleasantly chunky voxel graphics that looks retro while also keeping a sort of modern edge and makes the best use of its graphics, with buildings seeming to tower off into the distance and buildings full of lights. So first, the game has a unique style that works incredibly well for it. Rania just wants to survive the night, but she might end up doing so much more. But something ominous is going on in the city, whether it’s the mysterious ticking packages, the increasingly terse AI running the Cloudpunk service, or the engineers’ fear that the entire city is falling apart. The game follows Rania over the course of one night, criscrossing the vast city and cruising from district to district as she delivers packages, helps out lonely postal robots, dodges annoying street harassers, and has to deal with a drunk dispatcher who knows more than she lets on. She’s given her own delivery vehicle, an AI assistant she gives the face and personality of her pet dog, and two simple rules: Follow delivery instructions, and never look in the package. So what bothers me? Why this feeling that something’s off?Ĭloudpunk puts you in the driver’s seat with Rania, a fresh-faced new arrival in a vast multi-tiered megalopolis who has just joined the Cloudpunk courier service.
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