My latest big brain critic realisation is that dystopian sci-fi settings are a clever way to make basic (and possibly tedious) elements of interacting with your game, suddenly thematic. Hmmm, I ve been clicking on this menu for a while, You think. This isn t very interesting. And then the screen goes all crackly or whatever, and a disembodied voice materialises and says: The year is 2483, and all humans do is click on menus. Corporations did this.

And that s you, sucked into a charybdis-level whirlpool of immersion. Eyes glued to the screen as you watch a text crawl tell the terrifying story of corporate goons going around with big buckets of glue and sticking everyone s eyes to screens….forever. Cyberpunk, eh? Cyberpunk indeed, says Conglomerate 451. It sits somewhere between the Ultima Underworld homage of Legend of Grimrock, the debuff-firing turn based combat of Darkest Dungeon, and the base and squad management of Alien Defence Squad Trouser And Hairdo Customisation Adventure 2012, which I believe you proles call XCOM.

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Conglomerate. Even the word sounds sinister, like it might throw a burlap sack over your head and bungle you into the back of a blacked out minivan, then pop you in the temple with a silenced pistol and throw your corpse out in the street in front of your mother s house. Whether it s the militaristic association of the glottal cong , or the overcast bleakness of the central glom , from start to finish the whole deal exudes a menacing kind of energy. Of all the words that I know, which is literally dozens, conglomerate is the one that seems the most up to no good. If I had a son and I wanted him to grow up bad>, I would name him James Conglomerate and only let him watch business news.

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Dungeon-crawling hackathon Conglomerate 451 will be hitting Steam early access next week, opening its maglev doors to a world of grimy concrete and pink neon. Players will be able to hack themselves and the world around them in an attempt to overcome the baddies without sustaining ongoing injuries or agent death, the latter of which will necessitate wheeling out a fresh clone who might have the same face but won t remember any of the upgrades they received before death. A fitting way of dealing with new recruits, considering the genre. Here s a trailer showing off some of the fighting and biomodding.

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Fantasy folk and cyberpunks have much in common. They wear studded leather/pleather gloves, they can work wonders with the right incantation/code, they lust for gold coins/credit card numbers, they’re a grubby lot whose morals can be overwritten by the promise of a big haul, and they’re mega-horny. So how come fantasy nerks get to do all the dungeon-crawling? Italian studio RuneHeads say thee nay, making a first-person, turn-based, grid-wandering, roguelikelike dungeon-crawler that’s set not in a medieval fantasy world but a cyberpunk future with neon lights and PVC tity armour galore. Conglomerate 451 is its name and coming to early access soon is its game. For now, hark, a trailer.

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