Conglomerate 451 brings cyberpunk dungeon crawling to early access next week

Dungeon-crawling hackathon Conglomerate 451 will be hitting Steam early access next week, opening its maglev doors to a world of grimy concrete and pink neon. Players will be able to hack themselves and the world around them in an attempt to overcome the baddies without sustaining ongoing injuries or agent death, the latter of which will necessitate wheeling out a fresh clone who might have the same face but won’t remember any of the upgrades they received before death. A fitting way of dealing with new recruits, considering the genre. Here’s a trailer showing off some of the fighting and biomodding.

Do you ever just hear trailer music that really reminds you that E3 is less than a month away? This isn’t an insult, it’s catchy, it just also feels like a warm-up for the arcane ritual that is hearing this sort of thing seventeen separate times while watching press conferences bleary-eyed at 2am.

Back when it was announced, Alice O described it as “a bit Grimrock-meets-XCOM-in-cyberpunk-cosplay” to which I can only add, yes, that. There's grid-based fighty bits and strategy-o-planning sections, the latter of course being when you get to jam bits of computer and the like into your squad to make them better.

(0)451 is a number that appears in lots and lots of games (especially immersive sims) as a nod to a door code in Deus Ex. That was originally thought to be its own nod to Ray Bradbury’s dystopic novel Fahrenheit 451, named for the temperature books burn at. Apparently that’s actually neither the reason it was used in Deus Ex nor the actual flashpoint of paper. But hey, it’s stuck well enough. Maybe all those layers of misinformation are actually more appropriate to a cyberpunk setting anyway, being that all the information must surely be on microchips and the webnet rather than in old-timey books.

Conglomerate 451 will be hitting Steam Early Access on Thursday, May 23rd, with the full launch planned for some time later in the year.