Top 10 Cyberpunk Games to Dive into in 2024

A Japanese woman drinking the Spicy Algorithm flavour of Mountain Dew on a hologram billboard turns to smile before unexpectedly glitching out and being replaced by anti-corporate agitprop. A drone blares, “A new life awaits you in the off-world crypto mines,” repeatedly while a hardboiled detective in the street below sighs over the latest Funko Pop Killer victim, a corpse with a horribly deformed head.

A sci-fi subgenre that originated in and was heavily influenced by the 1980s, cyberpunk has recently begun to feel distressingly timely once more. With its neon lights and nighttime smooth streets, it has both a look and an ethos. Cyberpunk is a response against science fiction that is more interested in glitzy spaceships than common people, and it focuses on urban nightmares set in the not-too-distant future when low-rent antiheroes utilise technology for their own purposes and struggle to establish themselves in the shadows.

Cyberpunk 2077 served as the mascot for the recent surge in popularity for the genre in video games, at least prior to the game’s lacklustre debut. Cyberpunk 2077 ended up being a narratively unambitious game that was hindered by a race-against-time plot that conflicted with its open world design, even if one ignored the flaws.

Fortunately for us, there are both contemporary and historical alternatives that examine what cyberpunk has been and what it might signify for our time. There are a ton of fantastic cyberpunk games out there, ranging from the classics of the 1990s and early 2000s to the revivalism of the late 2010s onward—and the few that kept hope alive during the terrible decades in between. The best of them are shown here.

• Blade Runner

In this creative point-and-click adventure, Ray McCoy pursues a group of renegade replicants through the soggy streets of Los Angeles. Even though Blade Runner frequently parodies the film it is based on, that is part of its charm. The opportunity to peruse a stunning replica of Ridley Scott’s significant work while listening to Vangelis is what makes it valuable. It’s wonderful to simply step outside onto your balcony and take in views of Los Angeles while the music soars. Unfortunately, the “enhanced edition” that was issued in 2022 was a bit of a mess.

• Neuromancer

This adventure-RPG based on William Gibson’s Neuromancer deviates from its source material, unlike Blade Runner. While the locales and descriptions in its Chiba City are similar to those in the novel, it also features a lot of Interplay’s peculiarities. There is also a body shop where you may sell your tongue or even your spleen for cash, as well as the House of Pong, where Pong Monks have spent decades contemplating the secrets of the One True Computer Game. 

You’ll need money since you’re a hacker who is so broke that you pawned your computer. After rebuilding yourself through the acquisition of juarez and skill chips, you finally enter cyberspace where you must contend with AIs that can be overcome using your Logic, Philosophy, Phenomenology, and Sophistry talents. Interplay’s concept of cyberspace was equally absurd as its Chiba City.

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• Syndicate Wars

Syndicate Wars is a tactical RTS game set in a grim dystopia governed by nefarious corporations, and it’s probably the greatest in Bullfrog’s darkly humorous Syndicate series. As a EuroCorp Executive with a team of cyborg agents and a budget of 50,000 EuroCorp credits, it is your responsibility to prevent the public from rising up in opposition to the virus that threatens the totalitarian status quo. Maybe you’ll support the Church of the New Epoch instead? In either case, you’ll eventually need to use mind control and miniguns.

• System Shock 2

A horror, first-person shooter, and role-playing game mix set aboard a damaged spacecraft that went on to serve as the model for the much more popular but not nearly as inventive BioShock series. The evil AI foe Shodan is undoubtedly System Shock 2’s most well-known feature. Cyberpunk frequently has rogue artificial intelligences, and one of the best PC examples of this is Shodan. In addition, it involves a harrowing ascension through a deserted space station, which is both simple to get lost in and difficult to forget.

• Deus Ex

The world’s future is threatened by a plot that augmented government super-agent JC Denton gets caught up in, so he decides to expose those behind it. You have the option to play the subsequent missions in Deus Ex as a series of stealth sandboxes, an RPG, or a shooter. 

Deus Ex, one of the earliest immersive simulation games, can be clumsy not because it is old but because at the time it was created the genre was still developing. The Give Me Deus Ex mod, sometimes known as GMDX, aids in removing some of those sharp edges. The Deus Ex 2 Visible Upgrade update also benefits its direct sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War.

• Dog of Dracula 2: Cyber Monogatari

You were a “casper” once upon a time, a beautician for the dead. That’s how, back in the dark ages when sauce was forbidden and you two collaborated to save the president, you became friends with a vampire dog named Dog of Dracula who required some major grooming. You’re just another unhappy otaku in Nuevo Tokyo in the cybertimes, though, and your dog is now half robot. What a letdown.

An extremely low-budget visual novel is Dog of Dracula 2. Although its spoof of cyberpunk’s hard-boiled edge is so razor-sharp you could shave a spitz with it, I’m not sure even the street would find a use for it.

• Gunpoint

You play both the traditional cyberpunk archetypes in Gunpoint: a hacker spy who breaches corporate security and a noir detective who solves a mystery. Being accused of a crime you didn’t commit leads you to commit numerous further crimes as you try to identify the genuine perpetrator. You accomplish this by breaking into 2D structures and using a tool that allows you to rewire electronics so that a motion sensor overloads a power outlet or a lightswitch opens a door. 

With your Bullfrog Hypertrousers, you might be able to brute-force each level’s hermetically sealed puzzle. Almost usually, you can jump through a window, land on a security guard, and then beat them into the following week. Both those ridiculous moments and the text-based narrative in which you play both sides of a corporate duel that you are rarely required to take seriously demonstrate Gunpoint’s sense of humour.

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• Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Director’s Cut

Dragonfall is an incongruous fusion of cyberpunk and high fantasy—a flavour combination that works remarkably well—just like the previous Shadowrun games, which are based on a tabletop RPG initially released in 1989. With its depiction of Berlin in the year 2054, particularly the Kreuzbasar hub area, this tech-noir RPG offers a fascinating urban setting to explore, satisfyingly tactical turn-based combat, and a variety of various ways to play, whether you want to be an elite ork hacker or an elven street warrior.

• Invisible, Inc

Turn-based strategies are combined with stealth in Invisible, Inc. It has enough faith in the effectiveness of its design to lay out all the facts about the problem in front of you and allow you to come up with a solution. You have ideal vision of the sight lines and hiding places between your team of corp-robbing hackers and espionage specialists and the next data cache or cache of, well, cash when you’re peering down at them from above.Invisible, Inc. allows you to live out the heist fantasy of assembling a team of professionals with all the necessary tools and of having a plan that comes together—or falls apart then gets rebuilt on the spot—by providing you with that much knowledge. In either case, it is as satisfying to deal another blow to the corps before disappearing into the datastream. 

• Deus Ex: Human Revolution

The first Deus Ex evokes a lot of nostalgia, so Eidos Montréal had a big act to follow. The studio’s interpretation of Deus Ex crammed its city hubs with quests and world-building, a conspiracy-filled plot, potent augmentations (like the ability to punch through walls and turn invisible), and that uncommon thing—a hacking minigame that wasn’t bad. Although Deus Ex: Human Revolution ended up creating a shadow that its own sequel, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, couldn’t quite fill, it managed to carve out a place for itself in the shadow of the original.