Form and Void and Meddler
Cyberpunk is often a particularly nasty genre. It’s an evolution ofnoir, which is why you see conventions of noir regularly appear in cyberpunk stories. The morally ambiguous main character, the even more ambiguous romantic interest, the nigh-insurmountable conspiracy — all tropes found in both cyberpunk and noir. Whereas noir usually comes with a fedora and a smart suit, cyberpunk comes with a sick node in the back of your skull that lets you surf the internet with your eyes, man.
That same confluence of genre conventions returns for Void and Meddler, a point-and-click game that has the proper amount of grime. The teaser trailer (which we’ve embedded below) hits a lot of my notes, right down to some kind of Future Drug™ and Future Sushi™. It reminds me of Kentucky Route Zerofiltered through Blade Runner.
It’s also giving me a bit of a Read Only Memoriesvibe. The Future Drug™ has a mixed gender symbol that you can see in some of the screenshots. The game also takes place in a city “where genders and species melt into each other,” which sounds a lot like Read Only Memories‘ choose-your-own-gender system. As is a regular thing for adventure games nowadays,Void and Meddlerwill offer plenty of player choice that will affect their story and the world around them.
The first episode of three is set to release on October 29, 2015. You can pre-order the full season for $12, if that’s something you’re into!