the vibes and storytelling sustained my interest in this one all the way through, which is rare, but even rarer for a game that i would still describe as not being particularly well written or voiced. story and writing are different things, though, and the story was compelling, and the game felt good to play, limited as it is mechanically. i didn't want to write a thing with caveats, i had a ton more thoughts about this game a week ago when i finished it, but i dragged out on it, so i feel myself bailing out now. this is a worthy little game, though

Cloudpunk é bem atmosférico, e sabe usar essa característica tão bem adornada para te prender durante todo o jogo.

Não se trata de um jogo com mecânicas complexas, é simplesmente ir e vir, entregar pacotes e fazer escolhas binárias ao longo do trajeto. Mas os cenários e os personagens fazem, com excelência, que o jogo se torne muito mais significativo do que dizer,, como muitos já o fizeram nessa site, "a strand type game".

As dublagens também merecem ser destacadas, todos os personagens, sem exceções, foram muito bem representados.

Cloudpunk não é perfeito, porém. Em diversos momentos dirigir não foi tão prazeroso quanto deveria ser, seja por questões de mecânica quanto por fatores de otimização geral.

Enfim, jogue! É um jogo no mínimo interessante.

interesting, had potential with being a blue collar worker in an ultra cyberpunk setting, maybe have you still do deliveries even while the city turns into a warzone or something and find better routes to avoid getting blown up by a driving straight into a stray rpg

but ultimately its a boring game that is doing deliveries for (mostly) shitty people while listening to the main character for all of it (who is also a shitty person) while getting riveting social commentary like "bigotry against cyborgs (trans people) is wrong!" and "corporations done care about anyone or anything but money" really!? I thought about that, oh do go on!

I was really hoping to enjoy this. In theory it sounded pretty cool, a cyberpunk delivery game that would use the framework to explore the moral grayness and themes of the setting through driving around delivering packages to people.

Now, that is still a fairly good description of what the game is at a surface level and in all honesty I could see others enjoying it more than I did. The main issue is twofold. One is that gameplay is not particularly deep, this in itself is fine. Driving doesnt require much finesse or speed, the time limits are generous and any damage done by bumping into stuff is swiftly repaired with basically no cost other than a tiny fine.

There is also a lot of just parking and then walking to your destination that can get tiresome at times. There are collectibles about that serve some sidequests and general vendor trash acquisition and sometimes there will even be an NPC or two to interact with (I will note my favourite characters are the entirely optional encounter with a gang dedicated to urban renewal).

I will reiterate however that prioritising story over gameplay is fine (I enjoy walking sims from time to time) and whilst ideally you would use your gameplay as storytelling, dialogue heavy games are A-Okay with me. However and heres where we get into the real crux of what made me stop playing : your story has to be good!

You may have noticed I have abandoned this game, so maybe it all really gets redeemed by the end but in the 3.5 hours Ive played I got no indication that my issues with the narrative would be adressed. First of all most of the dialogue feels redundant and overwritten, most exchanges went on for longer than they needed or felt natural to. Second of all, the protagonist is pretty unlikeable. And she is supposed to be. They do this thing where most jobs require you to interact with some 2dimensional rich asshole or another so Rania can get sarky at them but shes also kind of an asshole herself. The voice acting in general is spotty (save for your tech support guy, his performance is nice and layered I thought) but good god is Rania's actress incapable of emoting. Maybe she got bad direction or maybe its just her annoying "american equivalent of Received Pronunciation" accent but it made me sour on her.

Another thing that whoever came up with the idea for the dog character should be tried in the Hague. Disclaimer : I am not a dog person, so maybe this is really cute to someone who is but having a human voice a "dog" character AI who has actual human speech but in what we imagine a dog would speak like for the majority of this game is not endearing, its just stupid and embarassing.

Anyways I had enough of this and I doubt I will be revisiting it anytime soon. It is a shame cause the world is fairly well realized visualky and the music is alright.

a lot to love here, the mysteries spun throughout are enough to keep one poking at the nooks and crannies of Nivalis until the game's end, but the lo-fi presentation may be too much for many. the blocky environments are fantastic, it looks really stylish and they really went hard on weather effects, particles etc. to great effect. however, the roblox action figure characters are difficult to appreciate. unfortunately, the narrative choices don't have weighty consequences and the main story thread comes to a fairly abrupt end without much of a build up, the side stories and characters are far more memorable. many systems introduced do nothing (i don't think the buff items did anything at all).

i think a dystopian story where moral choices have near-zero consequence could be an interesting artistic decision but here it feels like limitation somewhere. it's feels great to drive the HOVA around and enjoy the vibe but that won't be enough for most people.

The Strand Genre returns!

Really liked Cloudpunk, definitely the best Cyberpunk game I played in the past two months. Yeah, it's a bit thin on gameplay, but existing in the world, taking in the sights of the city, and going through the various stories was a satisfying time. Not every story was a winner, sometimes the voice acting wasn't great, but on the whole I enjoyed myself and thought it was a good package. My biggest gripe is that I only need to find one or two locations on the map to get the platinum trophy and I have no idea what I'm missing, so that's frustrating... gonna take a ton of aimless flying to get that and I don't care to do that right now.

The things that this game does well are great.
The construction of the city environment, the atmosphere, the visuals, the sounds, the car handling. All of those things amount to a superb ambiance and a great foundation for the game. I have minimal complaints. I think you can get a fair amount of mileage out of just vibing in this city, taking in the sights and atmosphere.
Even though I'm going to complain a lot, I want to underline that those aspects are very strong.
How is this great foundation used, however? The game, and the overall experience? That's where the problems begin.

Instead of a twist on a driving delivery game like Euro Truck, the developers decided to instead make the game a vehicle for story. You're driving around not because you need to deliver packages, but to hit dialogue triggers. In essence this game is a walking simulator with more engaging movement mechanics.
The delivery of the packages presents no challenge, your skills aren't being tested nor is your performance rated in any way. You're going from A to B to C effectively just to hear the next dialogue sequence, and that's it.
A game like Euro Truck Simulator presents minimal challenge, but it's more than this. It has other advantages too, like being able to have your own music or podcasts on the background since there's no dialogue from the game to interfere with your experience.

So they made a narrative based game. That in itself isn't a bad thing. It's not what I would've wanted from the game initially but I still like a good narrative. I personally even like walking sims, so I can get on-board.

The problem is that neither the narrative nor the writing is very good.

The writing is not absolutely terrible, mind you. It's just inconsistent, derivative and boring.
The entire story is delivered in dialogue, and it drags on and on. It felt like nearly every dialogue sequence had so much filler that could've been cut. The writing felt like the work of a hobbyist writer who sorely needed an editor.
There's a lot of jokes that do not land. There's a lot of emotional moments that feel weirdly paced and un-earned. There’s a lot of emotional whiplash with how the tone seems to be able to hold no continuity from one dialogue to the other.
There's a lot of characters who are either one-dimensional bordering on caricature, or complete charisma-voids. Unfortunately, the main character is one of the latter, and her companion is one of the former. For the entire game you're listening to the least interesting character drone their way through every dialogue, and her companion prolonging this experience with variations of the same joke for the duration of the entire game.
There's world building that might feel fresh if you've never read a work of cyberpunk in your life. Even then it's very inconsistent in quality.
Overall, the writing and narrative feels like a mish-mash of ideas that were half-thought out. The main narrative is lacking as a story. It feels slow because there's not much to it. The game is mostly disjointed side-stories with a couple of hints toward a narrative throughline, but doesn't end up amounting to much. Could’ve been interesting, but ended up half-baked.
What makes this all worse though, is that it's all delivered in fully voiced dialogue, and the voice acting is a very mixed-bag. Not all of it is bad, mind you, some of it is even great! The main character's voice acting was unfortunately some of the worst in the game and it's what you're hearing for the majority of your time. When the character you're hearing the most throughout the experience is marred with bad delivery, it becomes a fatal flaw.

And a special note on the social commentary.
Cyberpunk is a genre that is inherently tied with class and social issues. A foundational idea of the genre is to depict a world where technological progress leads to more inequality, not less. A cyberpunk game with no social commentary is cyberpunk in aesthetics only.
However, the nature of the commentary in this game is so shallow and heavy-handed that it borders on satire. At times characters completely discard their established personalities, just so they can deliver messages that are about as profound as a typical political tweet. The world is filled with metaphors that are not only well-traveled territory by works that have come before, but also delivered with complete lack of subtlety. This hurts both the verisimilitude of the world and the impact of the message.
As someone who enjoys this aspect of Cyberpunk, and doesn't mind political commentary in my media in general, I am still disappointed with what I got.

So that was a lot of griping about the story. I still liked a lot about this game. However, the developers decided to make this a narrative game, and a narrative game lives or dies on it’s writing.
If only they would have used their foundation differently. There’s so much good to work off of. This game could’ve been great.

As it stands, this game is squandered potential. Impaired by the story it’s forced to serve

Cloudpunk toma una decisión que me parece acertadísima para un juego ambientado en una ciudad cyberpunk: nos pone en el control de una repartidora de paquetes (además, inmigrante). Eso nos permite ver la ciudad desde todas sus capas, a medida que vamos arriba y abajo, conocer sus gentes y experimentar sus vidas. Creo que hace muy buen trabajo a la hora de representar injusticias presentes y futuras relacionadas con las tecnologías, pero me hubiera gustado que se hubiera contentado con este constumbrismo, ya que no termina de convencerme el rumbo que toma con su historia hacia al final.

A gorgeous and relaxing Cyberpunk game.


I originally played on the Switch and that was a big mistake, I get that the Switch has hardware limitations but the dev said they'd better optimize the game but never did sadly. I bought it again for PS4 and got a free PS5 upgrade. This PS5 patch significantly upgrades graphics, frame rates, load times, and draw distance. There is no combat or real challenge just sit back and relax. I love the idea of being a delivery driver in a Cyberpunk setting. Music was very chill and I love it since I'm the kind of guy who loves to vibe with it. You have the option to fly around in your HOVA in First person view which I didn't use much since it made it difficult to park. There are many side quest to do where you help people who are struggling to live. You will make choices which gives this game replay value. The architecture is out of this world beautiful, and the better draw distance compliments that. One thing I do want to point out is that this game has a 3D pixelated art style, if that bothers you I don't recommend this game. Also you will get lost A LOT. Some of these areas are very complex.

Like many other Cyberpunk games this game truly lets you know how dark this future you live is. You'll meet all kinds of characters going through tough times. Their stories can really make you sympathetic. Story was pretty good. Your choices will hurt people for you own personal gain or you can help people out of the goodness of your heart but then again doing the right thing doesn't always benefit you. Voice acting sometimes feels forced and emotionless. It feels like they didn't really put their heart into it. And the world building and lore is great.

This game can get really boring at times but definitely had so much fun. The city of Nivalas is neon joy to behold and I'm very thankful for the PS5 patch which made my experience all the more better. While I do like this game the biggest problem with this game is the fact the developers don’t care enough for this game. There are so many bugs and glitches that haven’t been addressed nor fixed on the PS5 and the Switch version was NEVER optimized as promised.

Cloudpunk is atmospheric and engaging throughout. The worldbuilding, storytelling, and overall feel of this game is just plain excellent. I'd been struggling to play story-based games for some time lately but I think this is the one that will break my plateau. I miss unique designs and characters in short-form titles like this. It's my first story-based game I've completed in a long time, but it absolutely earned it's right to do so.

Also this was almost exclusively played on my Steam Deck in Medium settings at 40fps. I used my main PC for cleaning up some achievements. Game runs very well on Steam Deck and is a blast on the go.

Night Call shows us Paris in the present day. Neo-Cab takes place in a not-exactly-distant neon future. Cloudpunk takes place in a time inconceivable to us. But each story is the same: the way things are is utterly fucked. People are stratified and kept in their place in society not by choice, indeed often by force, and with no other options. Those above dump their refuse and bad decisions on those below. Class solidarity is suppressed because everyone up to a certain point is “just trying to make ends meet” and the poisoned system is allowed to metastasize to a point of unsustainability. In the process our friends and family get hurt or killed and nobody bothers to notice. Even our very unimportance is leveraged against us by everyone from our real-world bosses threatening to fire us, knowing we need the job more badly than they need us, to the shady deuteragonists in the kinds of narratives games like Night Call and Cloudpunk employ.

I might just be sleeping badly.