Cyberpunk 2077: 8 Cyberpunk Games You Must Play Before Release
Body mods, evil corporations, post-industrial dystopias - what's not to love?
With Cyberpunk 2077 looming over the horizon, many fans of the genre are itching to dive back into the genre often described as “high tech, low life”. With great novels like Neuromancer, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (later adapted into the film Blade Runner), Altered Carbon, and Dome City Blues, and epic films like Total Recall, The Matrix, and Akira here's to hoping that Cyberpunk 2077 brings to light a genre of gaming that with the exception of a notable few, is painfully lacking in AAA titles.
As CD Projekt RED, the brilliant creators of The Witcher 3 are behind it, we'll surely have an amazing game to explore. Just like The Witcher series, it's sure to be full of top notch storytelling, characters so real you'll almost miss them when they're gone, and a world so vivid that you'll swear you can almost feel every warm drop of rain as it beats down on the back of your neck.
Until it's release (sometime before June 2019, according to recent hints by the developers), here are a few games listed in no particular order to help you punks scratch that dystopian future itch.
8. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream (1995)
Written by Harlan Ellison and first published in 1967, the original short story is a masterpiece of science fiction storytelling. If you can get past the dated graphics and point and click adventure style, the award winning game is as well.
Like its short story counterpart, it tells the story of a massive super computer aptly named AM (I think therefore I am) and the five humans it's kept alive for 109 years as playthings - or more often, as torture subjects. AM, created when three world powers super computers merged into one, is so advanced it can keep its victims alive indefinitely, modify the world around them, and even alter their physical appearances.
Each one of the five characters has their own adventure and story related to their flaws and past mistakes that AM loves to prey upon, and because of this, each character must overcome AM's trials before completing their respective arc.
Within this game are adult themes that deal with such things as genocide, mental illness, and rape. Expect a gut wrenching story that, for a game released over 20 years ago still hits surprisingly hard.