Cloudpunk review – delivers the goods - MW

   The town of Nivalis immediately became beautiful and awkwardly familiar. With hovering cars and pink katakana signs, sparkling rain and homeless people, it has a cliché that calls for cliché lyrics: However, familiarity with the aesthetics does not relieve the intense pull from the world of cloudpunk gaming .

This is partly because it is a world built from small pixel building blocks, giving the city and the individual counties a feeling of out of reach basement project. As you walk through its glowing door frames, you slip into, out, through, and under local traffic, the cluttered house blocks below seem to be begging to reveal their secrets. The noise when you realize for the first time that you can park your car and put them together with real excitement. But Cloudpunk also removes its category constraints because of its role: you play, not a monotonous pirate trying to overthrow a megacorp, or as a sheriff trying to retrieve his badge. him, but the humble hero of the day: the delivery man.

One of the attractions of the video game media is always the possibility of tasting, experimenting, experimenting, places or roles that are too dangerous, distant or wonderful for reality. But just as games allow us to become runners, fighter pilots and marines, there is another way to play with work-based games. Like Paperboy, Farming Simulator and the previous Tokyo Bus Guide, Cloudpunk is an example of what some researchers have called play playbour: video games trying to convert the rhythm of work into the essence of play, to transfer the workstation. to the transmitter as is.

So you're Rania, a young immigrant from the city, about to start the first night of a new job at Cloudpunk, a legitimate delivery company. Jobs are passed through a dispatcher and a radio communicator. Usually you send the contact details where you need to pick up an item, and then the contact details of where to send the item. Speed ​​and alertness are the keys. As your dispatcher explains, there are only two rules you should follow: never miss delivery; Never ask for what's in the package.





However, sometimes curiosity will help you become better. You might hear marked packaging on the back seat, requiring you to make a quick and ethical decision about whether or not to deliver the goods, or to toss the box into the oven instead. burn the city garbage. Other options show a potentially jam-free sequence: you have to give the mechanic the mechanic to the old runner so he can put himself in danger with a final race, or quietly lose items in Transit to force retreat? The company is provided, not only by your base operator, but also as an AI companion on your ship (in the case of Rania, the digital version of an old companion dog's conversation) that tells you when you need to go to the nearest garage to refuel or repair your vehicle.

The true origin of the game The strong attraction of the game is the pleasure of being integrated into and out of human life; Spectacular benefits - like a taxi driver - meet and observe new people without having to engage in the messy nature of their lives. And, more broadly, Nivalis is a fun place to explore, both going up into the city with a trail of light below and on the ground, sliding into small corners and alleys. The single job tug is present; It is a game to stay awake late at night, recalling that, in each city, there are always thousands of stories that intersect, drivers often playing an important role.

Choose in a retro style: if you like Cloudpunk, you will love

Crazy Taxi
(Hitmaker; Sega; various platforms)
The idea for Crazy Taxi - a game launched in 1999 in which players pick up and deliver passengers to their destinations in as short a time as possible - came to designer Kenji Kanno while stuck in traffic. He longed to cross the central reservation and take off in the opposite direction. Disregard for the highway code is a hallmark of a game in which your score is measured in the dollars and cents of an aggregate fare. Kanno once admitted that half of his team was “strongly against” taxi-driving as subject matter, believing it wasn’t suitably exciting. In reality, the task of solving spatial puzzles against strict time limits for small-change rewards has a keen sense of the video game about it, and the late-90s scumbag guitar soundtrack has become, today, magnificently kitsch.