Cloudpunk's stratospheric deliveries and noir conspiracies are out today
Old punk yells at clouds
Bad hours, shady bosses. The gig economy's tough enough as-is, without the risk of dropping a package off the side of a ten-mile-high balcony. Released today, Cloudpunk lets you traipse around a stunning voxel cityscape, making deliveries and solving mysteries like some sorta flying Deliveroo driver-turned-detective. Let's just hope you're getting a bonus for all this sleuthing.
Disembodied voices deliver a little more of Cloudpunk's mystery in today's launch trailer. Importantly, however, it also flaunts more stunning shots of Ion Lands' stunning voxel cityscape.
Cloudpunk's pitch is a solid one, extrapolating a game out of every shot of Harrison Ford moping in his flying car. As a legitimately-fuzzy delivery driver, leading lass Rania will be making deliveries all across the rain-swept urban labyrinth of Nivalis. In proper genre tradition, conspiracies are afoot, swiftly landing you in the middle of one very long night of crime, intrigue, robots and capitalism.
Now, I'm no the biggest fan of cyberpunk. But tell you what, my heart's all aflutter at Cloudpunk's mile-high residential monstrosities, piling layer after layer atop each other until the city's top dogs can spit directly in the face of god. Every so often, you'll get to step outside your vertigo-inducing cab ride to go explore the streets on foot. The camera zooms in on the city's impossible architecture, grounding it as a place where lives are lived by regular folk in an irregular place.
Vidbud Matthew took a look at Cloudpunk at EGX Berlin last year. Driving about in an urban storm looks even lovelier in motion. Mind, watching lo-fi flying cars dart about a city also gave me the weirdest whiplash in remembering American McGee Presents: Scraplands. Huh.
CD Projekt's hyperdetailed opus Cyberpunk 2077 might've been pushed out of April, but Cloudpunk's voxels are nothing to be scoffed at - delivering an impressively moody future on a decisively more heightened scale.
Cloudpunk is out now on Steam for £15.29/€17.99/$17.99. We've been doing a little sleuthing of our own, and should have a full Cloudpunk review up as soon as it's decrypted.