Delivering packages in a pixel perfect cityscape.

QUEST LOG #18: CLOUDPUNK

Aug 07, 2024

I have been in a state of not wanting to engage in anything too weighty of late (this was the case when I wrote this, but I have since begun playing Baldur’s Gate III…), happens every now and then when I’ve got other things going on, and when it does, I crave a game that can be picked up and put down in an instant. Sometimes this mood draws me to online shooters or some kind of half-finished open world game where I can just fuck about for a bit, but this time, I wanted something new to just exist in for short bursts, and this is where Cloudpunk makes it entrance. It has been sitting on my Steam wishlist for quite some time, and as one of the latest sales rolled around, I thought that for a fiver, it was finally work giving a go, and I must say, it’s worth every penny, doubly so with a discount.

Cloudpunk was developed by a small team over at ION LANDS, and you can tell they’re small because they use Tumblr for their website, which made me smile. Also, you can tell because their list of team members and collaborators has a grand total of 8 names (barring voice actors and the like). Small teams aren’t unusual by any means, and it’s a recurring story that very small or single member development teams end up creating something that becomes incredibly popular. Early Minecraft or Vampire Survivors come to mind… With Cloudpunk though, you’d be hard pressed to imagine this was created by so few people, and when in game, the only tell-tell sign of it being an indie title is that it’s voxel based. That isn’t a prerequisite of an indie, but it’s invariably associated. What the developers have managed to put together in Cloudpunk is incredibly impressive and captures the aesthetics and feel of the paragon of Cyberpunk inspiration, Blade Runner.

Upon starting the game, you take on the role of a courier named Raina, and you work for Cloudpunk, which is touted as a delivery company which often crosses the line of legality. In order to carry out your deliveries, you pilot a hover car and must navigate the multiple levels of the vast future city of Nivalis. We’re in the territory of Euro Truck Simulator or Space Truckers here, and it does a very good job in fulfilling the doing work in a virtual space category. Missions are varied, and there is an on-foot component too, which has you exploring in more detail the street levels of the metropolis, picking up titbits of information and loot as you ferry your cargo to various people and places. As you explore on foot, you can visit noodle bars or barter with merchants for information, or just chat with the citizenry to add colour and lore to the city of which you’re a stranger.

Climbing back inside your vehicle, which is called a HOVA in universe, you are given near free reign to explore, within the bounds of each level, which can be accessed via special lifts or tunnels. You can follow prebuilt traffic lanes when you’re driving, or you can off road it, as it were, and glide about the city, weaving around the towering superstructures as you make for your destination. Your HOVA can be upgraded too, and can sustain damage, so keeping it in good condition and looking cool is certainly a priority here, as well as refilling it with fuel, which is something I haven’t done in a videogame since my playthrough of Mafia. Aside from some very major differences, the feel of the gameplay, specifically the vehicular parts, reminded me a lot of American McGee’s Scrapland, which is a title about a travelling about a robot populated future city, and traversing it in a hover-bike thing… more sci-fi than cyberpunk, but there are similarities, and I wonder if the developers took inspiration from it along with the vast list of obvious referential material.

The primary draw for me with this title is the atmosphere it creates, and my goodness, it creates a good one. If you’ve read my post about being cosy in games, you might remember that the first on my (no particular or definitive) list was TOCA 2 Touring Cars and my explanation of how sitting within the race car on a rainy day with the wipers going hit the spot perfectly. This game captures that magic. When you’re in first person view, flying through the vastness of the futuristic environment, the cosiness is off the charts. Picture yourself soaring to the heights of the city and picking a good quiet spot, watching in the distance as streams of traffic fly past between the skyscrapers, rain hammering the roof of your hovercar, your wiper blades monotonously swishing back and forth, and your dash instruments glowing in contrast to the dark exterior as you converse with your artificial assistant, which apparently was a dog in its previous incarnation… Sounds good, eh? A nice touch when in first person is that with the click of a button you can look around your cockpit and you can really immerse yourself in the world. This is something I always enjoy about ship combat games, and is a feature that always improves the immersion, especially in the Jump to Lightspeed expansion for Star Wars Galaxies, for example.

Other than the atmosphere, one of the best things about this game is the delivery of the narrative, and by that, I mean the voice acting, and the flavour of the writing. Especially for a smaller game, where in many cases the voice acting is left by the wayside in favour of other features, the acting here is actually pretty incredible. The voice work feels absolutely genuine, and there is a huge variety in the kinds of characters you meet, their accents, their moods, their motives, and overall, I think it’s one of the most impressive aspects of the game, drawing you into the world perhaps more so than the beautiful art direction. The picture that builds up over the course of play also paints the city as a character too, and this is added to by the in-world advertisements and announcements that can be seen and heard throughout. This along with the dense number of NPCs and vehicles that move about the city really make it feel alive.

While the voice acting is fantastic, there is some dissonance between the avatars of those you interact with and how they actually look, for example I could in no way tell I was talking to an android until it was mentioned, and often the clothing or colour of characters is completely off, and sometimes it’s entirely different. This is an issue with voxels I suppose or perhaps there is some kind of random generation with the NPCs? I’m not quite sure. Regardless, voxels aren’t my favourite style, but it works very well for the vehicles, the buildings, and the general décor, but when it comes to faces and character design, it falls just a little short, making the quite believable world seem a tad cheaper when viewed close up. Having said that, the character designs have a lot of variety considering the limited possibilities, and they do grow on you after a while, and I think it’s more a question of taste rather than an objective issue. If you give these smaller details a bit of distance though, the world becomes far more cohesive, and when it comes to the architecture, vehicles, weather, and lighting, this game is absolutely gorgeous.

Another slight issue is with navigation. Controlling your character or vehicle is absolutely fine, and works with either a controller or keyboard and mouse (I played it mostly on the Steam Deck), but actually finding your way to your destination can sometimes be a little bit of a chore. For example, doors aren’t visibly openable unless you’re standing right in front of them, and many doors that look like you could move through are inaccessible. A small thing, but in a game about exploration, it’s sometimes disappointing to see an interior that looks perfectly enterable but end up being restricted by an invisible wall just as you reach the threshold. This is something you cotton tonto quite quick however, and once your expectations are tempered, it occurs less frequently. The waypoint system is a little unrefined too, but not massively. Mostly it just involves a bit of searching, especially for an appropriate parking space that’ll lead to the correct walkway, but I suppose this is part of the process, part of learning to live in the world of Cloudpunk. This is a game you’re meant to exist in, and the exploration is part of that, but it could be ever so slightly better. I am trying to find faults here though, and I really can’t find issue with any other aspect of the game. It runs incredibly well, and looks fantastic no matter what, either played on the tiny screen of the Steam Deck or on a big ultrawide. It sounds brilliant too, with a fantastic soundtrack by Harry Critchley, which adds to the incredible atmosphere with beautifully appropriate ambient synthwave electronica.

I’ve mentioned the in-depth interactions between characters, and it’s through your dialogue that the story is fed to you. I won’t go into the intricacies of the plot, but the manner through which the narrate is drip fed to you as you work is masterfully done, and with all the aspects of this game combined, the end result is something truly special. I can’t wait to give the DLC a go next, and I am just as excited to see what ION LANDS accomplish with their follow-up this year – Nivalis, which is apparently a cyberpunk slice-of-life sim, expected to release in 2025.

I fully recommend this game if you have any passing interest in the cyberpunk genre - a little gem of a game. Have you played it, if so, what did you think?

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