When Cyberpunk 2077 dropped, my computer was a budget rig already going on ten years old. I assumed the old gal probably wouldn't handle the upcoming release too well, so I let it pass me by. Turns out this was a clever play on my part, for the game sucked ass at launch, and I already had enough on my plate as it was. The world kept turning, Cyberpunk sank into the murkiness of memories past. So it goes.

It's late 2023, people are talking about this game again. I haven't thought about Cyberpunk since the initial slew of giggles caused by cars sinking into the pavement, 3D penises, and the anti-fun teleporting police force. Turns out, CD Projekt Red was beavering away on un-fucking the video game and now people I trust are quickly reporting that they've managed it. Indeed, it's good now. There's a new DLC. There's a tie-in anime animated by Studio Trigger. There's clearly a big push going on, and it sticks in my mind. Before long, it's 2024 and I'm reinstalling Steam on a hot new PC after holding a memorial service for my now-deceased old gaming rig. What can I use to show this fucking thing off?, I wonder to myself. I notice Cyberpunk 2077 is 50% off. Why not.

I didn't know anything in detail about the Cyberpunk setting before booting the game up, but I spent enough of my misguided youth flipping through Shadowrun rulebooks to know the jist of what to expect. Corporations rule America, if not the world, and the increasingly commercialised future sucks. But at least you can install a jackhammer for your dick or relive a violent kidnapping using virtual reality. Strictly speaking, I don't know whether Shadowrun or Cyberpunk came first and don't care to get into the weeds of it, but this felt like a fairly loving depiction of the trash-heap future we've all come to know and love. Equal focus is given to the glitz and glamour of the ultra-rich as well as the dirt-grinding poverty experienced by the rest of the population. Night City looks good, and there were a couple of times when cruising between objectives I would pull over and just admire the scenery.

I'm grateful to the game's commitment in forcing the player to assume a role. Rather than a blank-slate glass of tap water, V is kind of a pisshead who fancies themselves bulletproof. This makes sense for someone who makes a living through violence and extortion in a culture which lionizes it. You can steer how V responds to things, usually whether you dismember someone who crosses you during a mission or whether you live and let live, but there are constants which you won't be changing. I found the consistency in this made it easier to pick options other than the usual doormat Neutral Good choice of letting everyone go and excusing every sleight against you. This world is a violent pit of suckass, so sometimes you have to shrug and ignore the dude tied up in your trunk. V isn't getting paid to ask questions. I also appreciate that some Quest NPCs aren't given any magical protection, so I was able to complete the questline about a middle-manager getting away with a hit-and-run crime by interrupting her with 90 submachinegun bullets to the head and departing through a window.

At its core, the story is a relatively simple one. The main thrust can feel longer than it is because it's so easy to fall down the rabbit hole of doing random sidequests, but the actual time it takes for V to get dicked over and have Keanu Reeves installed in their brain-computer isn't high. If you put your nose down and only hit the critical path, I don't think the game would take much longer than 20-25 hours on a first play. I don't think the main story would feel terrific if you did that, since a lot of the enjoyment for me comes from better understanding the world and the complexity of your struggle against it, which is informed massively by the more involved sidequests with major characters. At the end of the day, V wants to get the Keanu Pentium out of their dome, and has a few different paths to get there. I don't think the story is saying anything earth-shattering, but I also respect that it has a simple and narrow focus: find the cure, or die trying. No matter what ending happens to V, the world's going to keep on turning, and only a scarce handful of people will really know what went down. I like it. It's very ham-fistedly contrasted against Johnny Silverhand's desperate struggle to change the world (and the total failure to do so), but this isn't a harsh criticism. Sometimes the blunt instrument of narrative is fine, too.

Special mention should be made for the Phantom Liberty DLC, which has a much more reactive and crazy finale than the base game. At least, the path I wound up on was dope as hell. Capping the frentic encounter by strolling through a crowd of Tier 1 operators as they pop and fry with red/black lightning and spooky screams cut with low-fi modem noises is chef's-kiss good. This shit sizzles. More of this please.

The game's mechanics are its weakest point, in that knowing not all of them are ones you might want to engage with. At its core, Cyberpunk 2077 is a first-person looter shooter with a GTA framework for driving and police action. I guess a more modern take would be Red Dead Redemption, but fuck you, I didn't play the cowboy game. You can get lost infinitely in identical plot-less sidequests that pop up while you are driving from A to B, which might tire you out before you do something with a bit more bite to it. Similarly, anything related to getting GTA-esque police stars is a waste of time and effort. Just drive past anything cop-related and save yourself the time.

The gun-game portion of this feels less mechanically brittle than something like Borderlands, but still runs into the same shortcomings: hitting someone in the head with an assault rifle bullet for 15% of their health bar never feels fun. This can be circumvented by not using assault rifles. I'm not sure what niche that weapon class was meant to fill, but they're effectively a long-range poking device which tries to be everything at once, specializing in nothing. If you want to explode someone in one hit, use a sniper rifle with explosive bullets or a double-barreled shotgun. If you want to kill someone in a hose of bullets, use a submachinegun. If you want to win the encounter, use a two-handed club or a katana. Just do not use assault rifles. Fucking popguns. Having played on Very Hard, the game was at its most fun when using bullet time implants to go all Metal Gear Rising on people or circlestrafe around them while dumping 1000 rounds/minute into their heads. Trying to play this as a tactical shooter ala Squad will just get you chipped down unless you vastly overmatch the encounter. I think if you are the kind of person who can enjoy a gun game where numbers come out of people's heads, this does the job very well, or at least as well as I have seen that kind of gameplay.

Ultimately I enjoyed my time with Cyberpunk 2077 more than I expected I would, given the apparently dogshit state it released in. I feel bad saying this about something with so much work put into it, but I don't think it's an era-defining masterpeice. It's a very good game that looks and plays well, with a focused story and a fun cast of characters. The tale it told did not make me think very hard, and the gameplay did not demand any tough decision-making on my part. The finest summer blockbuster you can muster, yeah, sure, but wake me when Labyrinth of Touhou 3 comes out.

I don't know what it is about 2024, but it's a year where people keep linking me RPGMaker games that put new-release titles to shame. Ruina: Fairy Tale of The Forgotten Ruins, is a solo jam by one inspired fellow named Karekusa who casually decided to use the RPGMaker 2000 engine to make a western-style CRPG which kicks ass and is all killer, no filler.

The game doesn't make use of fields and maps made of tiled sprites the same way most RPGMaker titles do, nor do you actually walk a character around with the arrow keys. Instead, the steerable player avatar is a selection cursor, and the maps are all hand-drawn pictures with selectable points of interest on them. You select a point of interest, and are presented with a narration (and possibly an image) of what you encountered there, kind of like a tabletop RPG session or a narration-decision segment in Pillars of Eternity. Your choice of character background and the party members you bring with you translate into having different skills which can be applied to an encounter. The maid from the noble household, for example, can pick locks and spy ambushes before they happen. But she won't have a clue how to decipher ancient scripts.

After an encounter is resolved, more of the fog of war from the map is cleared, more points of interest are revealed, and you go scope out what awaits next. You repeat checking out encounters, fighting, exploring, and filling out the map until you either run low on resources and go home to town, or find a checkpoint like a big boss fight. It's a simple gameplay loop which is executed smoothly, which rewards players for pushing further in a single dive with some minor bonuses, but you won't (or shouldn't) feel punished for losing out on them if it's your first time through and you keep getting your clock cleaned. Mechanically, the fight system is no-frills RPGMaker fare applied cleverly. Regular encounters are usually about packing the right damage type to sweep before you take too much attrition, which is fine, and Boss encounters are where the sauce really lies. There's usually a hint about how to hand the major antagonists their own asses, hidden in the themes and lore you'll have collected over the course of the game. One early-game boss seems insurmountable, a figure from myth who can't be harmed by weapons of war. Nobody said you couldn't huck a cauldron of bad cooking at him and poison his ass, though. Or find a party member who can rip people apart with their bare claws. Or get the Mage band together and nuke him. And so on.

The storyline is much more compelling than your typical dungeon-dive, so let's not spoil anything there. Some specifics depend on which origin story you pick for your main character, but the main mystery remains the same past a certain point. Again, this feels more like a TTRPG tale than a breezy console JRPG, both in terms of the tale told and the cadence at which detail is given. I found it compelling enough to stay interested until the end, which I guess doesn't sound like high praise? But it was enjoyable. Your party members are all very well-defined characters, I only found personal quests for a few of them. I might've missed some, and they're not all equally interesting or dramatic. One of them in particular felt much more of a big deal than the rest. Vague, I know.

What makes this all stick together so well is the presentation. Everything in this game is hand-drawn, so there's a unified and unique style present in all the maps, areas, character and enemy portraits. The game's resolution is low, owing to RPGMaker 2000 being an ancient piece of software, but I didn't find it mattered much. I found the character designs were really enjoyable, especially the brooding huntress you can add to your party, and some of the maps and CG scenes have a fantastic charcoal & watercolor vibe that lends itself well to the slightly dreamy vibe the game puts forth.

There's more I could talk about, like how breezy and easy it is to craft new equipment and break the tightly-controlled power curve and feel like a sick badass, but this has run on long enough. Ruina is a very good CRPG-style game made in RPGMaker which is now available in English and you should play it if you like RPGs, RPGMaker menus won't instantly kill you, and you feel like experiencing a fresh take on the 'the labyrinth is haunted, dude, now go clear it out' formula with some cool twists and a nice little cast.

Dragon's Dogma II whips ass to jump around and headbutt things in, but suffers from a somewhat rushed production cycle and some odd pacing. Don't get me wrong, I'm still over the moon we got a sequel.

The game really picks up speed at the final chapter, where a lot of characters get some much-needed characterization, but that leg of the game is too short. Travel between settlements feels more painful than in Dark Arisen, but I'll replay that later this month and see if those are just rose-coloured glasses.

Anyway it's a total mess and I had a lot of fun with it. People are freaking out about the paid DLC items for this game but it's just the same thing Capcom always does with their games, and nothing you can buy on the store is very impactful. You can grab a mod from Nexus Mods to bring in 99 cosmetic kits of whatever instead of paying $5.

Dragon's Dogma 2 is a game you can enjoy.