Whatever you do, don’t open the package. That single rule drives Cloudpunk, and no other video game has come as close to capturing the essence of Blade Runner: a city drowning in rain, work you’re not allowed to question, and the nagging suspicion that the figures around you aren’t quite human.
With the official teaser trailer for Blade Runner 2099 now released, the franchise is back in the conversation. Ridley Scott's original arrived in 1982, adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and Denis Villeneuve followed it with Blade Runner 2049 in 2017. Now Amazon Prime Video has a miniseries coming, with Hunter Schafer cast as a human passing herself off as a Replicant after an uprising.
Until then, here’s what to load up. One of these titles isn’t even released until September.
The one that nails the neon and the shadows
Harebrained Schemes’ Shadowrun: Hong Kong is a turn-based tactical RPG set inside the Shadowrun universe. Much like Cyberpunk 2077, its origins are on the tabletop. Harebrained Schemes launched a Kickstarter in 2015 to turn the physical game into a video game, met its funding target and released the result that same year. A remastered compilation now packages Shadowrun Returns, Shadowrun Dragonfall: Director’s Cut and Shadowrun: Hong Kong together.
Much of the atmosphere comes from that isometric camera. You get a dystopian Hong Kong in all its glory, plus the hacking and net-running that goes with it, drenched in neon while the darker corners stay untouched.
Accept the jobs nobody else wants, get paid, and watch the world rearrange itself around the choices you make.
Body horror with a corporate sheen
Every Deus Ex title deserves a place here, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided included. My choice is Deus Ex: Human Revolution, prequel to Deus Ex and the action RPG series’ third entry.
The year is 2027. You play Adam Jensen, head of security at a firm producing artificial organs called “augmentations” — a business the public is deeply divided over. An attack on the company follows, Jensen is heavily augmented himself, and suddenly he’s in far deeper than he ever intended.
This series laid the groundwork for every cyberpunk RPG since, and its obsession with body augmentation is now standard issue in dystopian fiction. Several entries are on sale today if you’re looking for an entry point.
For when running up a wall beats talking
Ghostrunner landed in 2020 and got a sequel in 2023. It’s an action platformer powered by quick, brutal combat inside an original science-fiction world.
Where Blade Runner probes what humanity means in a world shared with artificial intelligence, Ghostrunner grabs the violent half of that question and pairs it with Sekiro-style combat and a staggering amount of parkour.
Its world has been shoved to the edge of collapse, and the survivors will do anything to keep going. Anyone who loves dystopian fiction will clock the setup straight away.
A courier gig with a single rule
If the draw of Blade Runner for you is post-apocalyptic gloom sliced open by neon, Cloudpunk is the pick. It blends the quick-fire action of Ghostrunner with the RPG layers of Shadowrun: Hong Kong. Your job is delivery driver, ferrying packages through the skies above the city. Don’t look inside.
It all plays out in a rain-drenched cyberpunk metropolis, with an open-world design that carries you from the city’s underbelly to the top of its tallest towers.
Androids, AI and humans all cross your path, and the game cares far more about those exchanges than it does about how well you drive.
Roll the dice, spend the day carefully
Now for the outlier. Citizen Sleeper casts you as a synthetic human body owned by a corporation, with a human consciousness poured into it. Built by Jump Over the Age, it’s a dialogue-driven RPG that lifts its rule set straight from tabletop. Each in-game day begins with dice rolls, and whatever number comes up determines how many “activities” you get.
Its backdrop is the wreckage of interplanetary capitalism. You’re a worker “washed up on a lawless station at the edge of an interstellar society,” so nothing about any given day comes easily and every roll counts.
As you dig into the station, you’ll need to work out who deserves trust, who’s worth befriending and who to hold at a distance, all while staying ahead of your past and trying to secure some kind of future.
Should it click with you, there’s a sequel waiting as well: Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector.
The Sims, relocated to a nightclub in a rain-soaked city
My wildcard doesn’t arrive until 29 September. Nivalis Nights is a life simulation game, and anyone who adores The Sims or management sims in general but wants one fluent in neon-drenched metropolis should be wishlisting it already.
Its city climbs all the way from the ocean to the clouds. Keeping the economy turning falls to you, through the businesses you operate — nightclubs and restaurants among them.
When you clock off, there are friendships and rivalries to build, romance to chase, an apartment to buy and decorate, and fishing to be done. The shape of your day is entirely up to you.
And that loops right back to the beginning: Los Angeles as 1982 imagined the future, and a retired blade runner by the name of Rick Deckard, tasked with hunting down and terminating four fugitive replicants — human-looking manmade automatons created to serve, now searching for a way to stretch the lifespans they were handed.