Cyberpunk is my favorite genre of fiction and it means more to me than I can really say, as the philosophy and ideas at its core not only align with who I am as an individual but greatly shape and inform how I perceive the world around me and engage with it.

Having said this I think I'm more than qualified to say that most cyberpunk sucks, due in no small part to most works within its boundaries' stubborn insistence on remaining locked within the decades that cyberpunk was born out of rather than looking forward into the future or having something to say about the present day-and-age. I, too, love the nebulous concept of cyberspace and The Net and cybernetic augmentations and androids and hackers and shady corporate street samurais and all of that, but there also comes a point where a lot of cyberpunk creators seem more interested in creating genre fiction rather than the introspective, theory-driven text that defined the genre's literary roots to begin with.

With this in mind, you now have the proper context with which you can understand why I find Eliza so refreshing: it's the first time I've consumed a piece of cyberpunk media made within the last five-or-so years that actually feels confident enough in its ideas, storytelling and cohesion as a whole to stand on its own without relying on cliches, visual gimmicks or tired tropes. Instead, it does what ideally every narrative should: draw from the world around it and the cultural context under which the game was developed. Not only does the game's (very nuanced and very well-thought-out) writing reflect the reality that most millennials find themselves in (the gig economy, social media's invasive presence in our personal lives, startup culture and the burnout that inevitably follows, nearly every aspect of our lives being automated or controlled via a smartphone app), but the heart-and-soul of the game is so aggressively 2010s from head to toe that I feel as if ten or twenty years from now this will be considered a seminal cyberpunk period piece, much in the same way that Synners, The Terminator or Serial Experiments Lain are.

Every character is complex enough to feel fleshed out but humble and understated enough to feel believable, as are their relationships with the protagonist Evelyn (herself a masterfully-realized portrayal of getting back on one's feet after burning out of her life's work) and how they do or don't impact her depending on the choices the player's make. I'm not really much of a VN person, but I think that the way that Eliza manages to play with the typical VN formula of "choose dialogue options to influence the path you go down" into its story, themes and Evelyn's character is extremely compelling, especially because for the most part it relies more heavily on a lack of choice than it does branching paths or complete control over what happens in the story.

My only real complaint is that other characters feel sidelined if they're not in the ending that you choose to pick and that the ending itself feels as if it comes up a little suddenly and is forced by a prompt as opposed to a series of multiple decisions – but I also can't imagine the game going on for much longer and this decision makes it easy to go through and get all of the endings, so I can't complain. Some may argue that the political ideals at the core of this game lean too hard into centrism or sympathize with capitalists far too hard for it to be considered a true cyberpunk piece of media, but I personally never felt anything but revulsion towards either of the game's two millionaire characters and I think the game does a lovely job of portraying how difficult it can be to actually bring about meaningful change in society no matter how gifted, privileged or skilled you are.

An excellent experience and a must-read if you're a fan of cyberpunk, even if you normally don't mesh well with visual novels.