plugged in
It’s a very straightforward looks & controls remake, like the demos indicated. And the style looks very appealing, runs well, everything needed.
There’s a short quick introduction, necessitated because games can’t ship a paragraph of manual text anymore. The hacker at home, the hacker getting raided, the hacker flipping off the cops… It falls a bit flat. On the surface it lacks confidence - in trying to sketch out the hacker’s home they have to sketch out the hacker as a person and it naturally goes to a few cheap jokes, some retro paraphernalia. It’s not a statement of a strange and claustrophobically dense world of panel gribble like starting on the station.
It uses a handful of signifiers to put the hacker in punk aesthetics and the neo-noir situation of a Gibson protagonist. All accurate to the pastiche the original wanted, yes, but a faithful graphical remake, with its obligatory low-poly game consoles…it’s fundamentally an indulgent experience. It’s nostalgia and it’s comfort. Oh! It’s my old friend Evil Power Ranger Robot, how have you been? Talk sweet to me again, SHODAN.
I’ve been nursing these feelings for a decade as Arkane’s Looking Glass fanproject has really taken off. I crawl over every available topology in these immersive sims, practicing the same heuristics each time and encyclopedically exhausting every level design possibility. It’s essentially mindless for me now, the same facade of thinking people held for SNES JRPGs, some of the easiest games ever made. 0451 is a ritual salve.
I’m getting a lot out of flicking the light switch off and watching the hyper-saturated monitors blink in the dark