Cloudpunk: Running in the clouds

Flying cars are a universal symbol of the future for everyone who was born at the end of the twentieth century. In a beautiful place, wheels have long been out of use! Antigravity, a kind-hearted woman who will lead you into the aerial maze of horizontal megacities. A game about flying on such units, and even a story-oriented one, couldn’t help but interest me.

I personally can’t remember any projects about flying cars, namely flying, and not floating on antigrav. Yes, there was the “Pursuit of the 5th Element”, aka the New York Race. But she did not gain popularity in her 2001 year. Moreover, flying in the open world should be much more exciting, so we have a one-of-a-kind project.

The talkative courier

Welcome to Nivalis, the great cloud city, the last one on the planet. Such things would sound like a terrible mockery to the main character, a girl named Rania. Debt problems brought her to the big city. This forces her to get a job at the illegal Cloudpunk delivery service. We have to live with her for one interminably long night shift.

The benefit is not alone! We will be accompanied by an elderly dispatcher, a kind old man whose voice we hear over the radio, and a beloved dog named Camus, or rather his consciousness, turned into the on–board computer of our car. The dog’s body was taken away for debts.

The story itself is archetypal for the setting. Corporations, hackers, the social network, AI has realized itself. Everything is according to the classics, reduced to a stereotype. The form is much more interesting. Because it’s a domestic novel. Chatter behind the wheel about music and social structure, conversations with customers and random passers-by about a difficult fate. The city consists of people, their stories, their lives. These stories, colorful as reflections of lights in puddles, color a banal plot and give it a filling.

The characters of the narrators are no less vivid. What is worth only the android detective Huxley, whose lines consist of the text of tabloid fiction in the noir style about everything around him, which he tells himself. Why do I call the characters “storytellers”? Because there’s nothing else you can do with them. Gameplay Cloudpunk is a walking/flying simulator and a visual novel. Dialogues are not variable, you can only listen to them. Fortunately, with the exception of one single character, they are perfectly voiced in English with subtitles. But everything is always linear, and two or three forks in the story throughout the game lead to the same results. Why play Cloudpunk?

Cyberpunk in a snuffbox

The atmosphere is the main reason to play this game. The cloudy metropolis of Nivales, the last city in this world, is absolutely always flooded with rain and neon. How pleasant it is to look at its monumental views, moving between the mighty skyscrapers. It is no less pleasant to wander on foot, explore its nooks and crannies, look into the windows of shops and eateries, snatching a bowl of miso soup from a street vendor. The overall tone of the game is reminiscent of Red Strings Club. It’s as if you can now see the world outside your favorite bar with your own eyes, explore, taste.

Unfortunately, there is no gameplay motivation for research. In addition to the main quest points, there are NPCs on the minimap that you can talk to. There is at least one stifling quest to find items (as many as sixty pieces!). Your courier can also eat the same miso soup and other products, collect all sorts of junk, and even buy drugs from traveling dealers. And all this doesn’t make any sense, because it doesn’t reflect gameplay.

Everything is the same with the car: there are literally a couple of useful upgrades, the rest are uninteresting cosmetics. Yes, the car needs to be refueled, repaired, in case of conditional damage, but all this is somehow shallow. Not once in the sixteen hours of play-through have I had a situation that resembled a gamer.

An element of survival and some simple resource management would make the situation much more interesting. The heroine is in need of a story, but it is completely not felt in the process. There is a feeling of incompleteness in this aspect. Only history and aesthetics save the situation.

Not like Bruce Willis

Maybe it’s because Rania is a courier, not a taxi driver? The management of your hoverboard, as the flying cars are called here, is as clumsy as possible. There is no feeling of speed, there is no feeling of the weight of the car. You won’t make any turns here. The machine can only descend horizontally and gain height by pressing individual buttons. At the same time, you control the car with the mouse, not the camera, as in GTA, for example. And this is in a game, the main thrill of which is in contemplating the world around you!

But don’t get upset. Anyway, you will spend most of the time, about 2/3, on foot. The situation is better there, because it’s very difficult to screw up a walking simulator. I am glad to be able to switch between three camera views. There is a first person, a classic third with a view from behind (here you can turn the camera as you like, unlike a car) and a third perspective, similar to a platformer. And it is very useful, for the following reason.

The cubic elephant in the room

Yes! I didn’t realize it right away! I didn’t see it from the screenshots at all, and it wasn’t until I launched the game from the library that I noticed it much later. This elephant is voxel graphics.

Yes, the whole wonderful neon world consists of cubes, well, almost all of them. And it looks very organic when it comes to the city: huge buildings with an effect of scale turn it into an artistic device, like oil painting.

But with the characters, everything is much worse. They don’t like voxel art in the style of “stick stick cucumber” at all. The tone of the story is very confusing, especially if you play from the first person. I can’t help but feel like I got into Minecraft with my child or younger brother, with all these cubic men. It’s especially bad from a first-person perspective in dialogues. The whole point of living stories of living people turns into a puppet show.

Moreover, this is not a technical limitation of the engine! The animal models in the game are made in a different style. Also minimalistic, but not from these huge cubes. They tried to fix the problem with faces in the addon, but only slightly. It still looks like untidy children’s crafts, but now you don’t have to worry about a child with developmental disabilities.

The developers also announced a new project “Nivalis”, more similar to Stardew Valley in genre. It should use a style similar to the remake of System Shock, with low-poly textures. And it’s much better!
After all, who needs a game without gameplay, with a beautiful but dead city?

Like Ryan Gosling

I often found text on the Internet from conditional zoomers, the ones who smoke cigarettes, are sad and listen to post-punk in panel houses. In this text, a character exhausted by life enters an openworld game, most often in GTA, to just aimlessly drive a car, watch virtual sunsets and listen to music.

The essence of the phenomenon of, as it is called, gaming autism is not in playing a role, but in the player himself, who is terribly, infinitely tired. Crushed by life, the player can only dream in front of the screen by pressing three or four keys or buttons. Cloudpunk is great for this.

Cloudpunk is a long walk through a cyberpunk city distilled to the stereotype, with eternal rain, neon and syntwave. Not so much a game as a sticky interactive series, which is nice to immerse yourself in after a long day.