UPDATED REVIEW: it's not exactly a good game: it's amateurish in a lot of places, there's weak dialogue and poorly-clued puzzles (and I mean very poorly-clued, like ineptly so), it's a sci-fi game that wants to have big ideas but doesn't entirely know which ideas it should have so it just kinda gestures at two or three without making them coherent or meaningful; the idea of an idea; a big sign saying [insert mindblower here].

feels like a game made by a friend group for the hell of it, which is as inspiring and rough-hewn as you'd imagine. hard to dislike, but akin to hearing a conversation comprised of other people's in-jokes.

but I'll say what I liked: it is very, very nice to play a cyberpunk game where you play as a punk. cyberpunk 2077 starred a mercenary. technobabylon starred a trance addict (a citizen who spends all their time in cyberspace) and a couple of cops. gemini rue starred a cop. lacuna starred a cop. tex murphy's a private detective. blade runners are something between p.i. and cop. I could go on. but here? you play a genuine article cyberpunk: a hacker and old-tech enthusiast whose life-path is against the grain of modern society, rolling custom-rig tech and refusing modern implants because they give the corpos too much control. you spend the game buying black-market components in rainy back alleys, crashing concerts for the last band on earth that performs live, hanging in squats with AR graffiti artists, scavenging illegal magnetic technology from junkyards that span miles, befriending broken down androids in various states of disrepair. protagonist's disdain for mainstream technologism is simultaneously countercultural, mildly radical, and a hipsterly kind of trendy. you know: a punk. and cyber in that way the cyberpunk genre imagines what "punk" means in a technological future: where buzzy synths have replaced guitars as instrument for people without musical training, where body mods can ramp up to cyborgification, where being "off the grid" no longer refers to the electrical grid but the cloud, and where the overreaching technology of our present is coveted as relics from a time before things got even worse.

it's like if you took me and my dipshit technohead friends from 2004, and the black-booted belt-studded crusties who tried to sell us weed on haight street, and threw us into a cuisinart. I liked that element a lot.

it's not exactly a good game, but it's got a something-something that distinguishes it from anything similar.

OLD PRE-REVIEW: I'm not actually done with this yet but I already know it's 3 stars. something WILD would have to happen plot- or design-wise to get it higher than 3, but the soundtrack is too damn good to be lower than 3.