Cloudpunk Review
Release date: April 23, 2020
Developer: ION LANDS
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows
Price: $19.99
By all accounts, I should like Cloudpunk. The vast neon-swathed cityscape evokes the best moments of Blade Runner, complete with the murmur of dystopian advertisements in the background. The flight controls are simple and smooth, allowing you to change height and swing through the city with ease, trailing twin neon contrails as you swerve around Asian-inspired buildings and avoid cars. It’s actually kind of relaxing, even at its most tense, sending you through gorgeous neighborhoods and actually letting you get out to explore them, having conversations that serve to deepen the world and helping various people with their problems. And lastly, it’s the kind of everyday-job noir-flavored experience that I’ve always loved, tasking you with doing a relatively low-level job as the plots around you darken further and further, as seen in such games as VA-11 hall-A and Night Call, among others. That’s all really cool.
So what bothers me? Why this feeling that something’s off?
Cloudpunk 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. 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. 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. 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. Rania just wants to survive the night, but she might end up doing so much more.
So first, the game has a unique style that works incredibly well for it. 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. 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 seamless, and in an age where that’s an issue for most triple-A games, that’s impressive. 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 really cool, and gives the flight a weight and meaning as you swerve through buildings and around cars.
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 never intrusive, though, instead adding accents to the existing action, ramping up and down as scenes get more or less intense. 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 was that integral to the atmosphere.
The flight is also really easy, just WSAD for direction, and shift/space for ascend/descend. 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. 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. Well, that and waiting for elevators. It’s immersive, but sometimes you just don’t want to have to wait for an elevator. I think it’s both a plus and a minus. 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.
But this is a game based on a narrative, and once it gets into that mode, the cracks start to show. 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. 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. 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.
Rania is kind of uneven in general, sometimes. She’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. But then whenever she meets certain characters, most notably a human “companion” for a robot and a dominatrix, suddenly she seems to view what they do as exploitative and dehumanizing, lecturing them on their lifestyle and business choices in a way that feels (since they’re doing something completely consensual and not hurting anyone) condescending and wrong. It’s a little problematic, and the sense you get occasionally from Rania that these people and their lives are beneath her. It’s jarring when compared with the character arc that sees her becoming more and more a part of the city as she goes, getting embroiled in the various factions and lives of its inhabitants piece by piece, and really annoying at times.
It’s a small out of place patch in an otherwise perfect cloudy sky, though. The story is suitably dark and noir in all the right places, the smooth flying around the city is incredibly relaxing, and apart from some timed segments, the ability to explore the city at your own pace and even leave the car at some points to explore on foot are all a lot of fun. It’s a fantastic and ambitious game that’s perfect for moody evenings. Put on some low jazz, load it up, and give it a go. Just maybe fiddle with the voice settings a bit first.
The Good:
- Relaxing and deep experience of driving around a futuristic city
- Loads of plot, atmosphere, and an open-ended experience
- Smooth controls and a wide-open map full of collectibles and sidequests to explore
The Bad
- Uneven voice acting can lead to jarring moments
- SWERFery makes the lead character seem kind of unsympathetic
- Lead character can kind of be a jerk
- Occasionally the environments can look a little similar