What’s Good About: Ghostrunner
Well, the new year is off to an interesting start and we aren’t even a week in. But I’m not here to talk about the dystopian nightmare that is the 21st Century, I’m here to talk about the Cyberpunk Dystopian as seen in Ghostrunner, a game I picked up from the Steam Holiday Sale and want to talk about because it came out a few weeks back and it’s January and there’s nothing new or exciting to talk about right now Games wise. Ghostrunner is a first-person platformer set in Dharma Tower where you play as a titular Ghostrunner named Jack; a sort of cyber ninja security officer type guy, and it’s your job to climb the tower to get to the top and kill the oppressive Keymaster Mara while assisted by the AI ghost in your head of the Tower’s Architect. The story isn’t the most engaging thing in the world, but it does its job of setting up the mechanics and the motivation to get through.
Speaking of mechanics, boy howdy there are a lot of interesting ones to keep track of. You start off with a foundation of running, jumping, dashing, and slashing. It starts off simple enough with level design and enemy placement, then it starts getting into some neat offshoots of these initial ideas and levels. It goes from “Can you Wall Run and jump into a slash/Dash and slash?” to move off the wall things like “can you vault off of a grappling point for momentum, use your dash’s mid air time dilation to reposition, and then finish the wall run, jump down and slice this enemy in half?” It’s this use of iterative design in both its combat in platforming that makes Ghostrunner feel super compelling to play through. This iterative design is best seen in the boss fights; while there are only a few of them, almost all of them are absolute bangers in terms of providing interesting challenges for you to think and jump your way through.
There’s also a surprising amount of variability in terms of the levels that are on display. While you are dealing with the tower’s security and inner workings, for the most part, You are going through and dealing with low-level criminals, security systems, other cyborgs, and even attack robots and the aforementioned bosses. These are combined with several of the abilities you get over the course of the game are all pieced together to make some of the best iterative designs on a game’s base premise since Batman Arkham Asylum. It’s that fucking good. And it had better be considering that the difficulty of this game is on par with some instant death style games I’ve played as well, most notably Hotline Miami and Super Meat Boy. This is actually alleviated with the game giving an option to instantly restart it when you die, which is much appreciated because I died a lot playing this. But eventually, I managed to get into a flow with this game where I can get through sections near flawlessly. I’ve even caught myself juking side to side when doing perilous jumps!
And then there’s the general aesthetic and sound of the game. While it does use the general trappings of a darker science fiction setting leaning on cyberpunk to define its visual language, Ghostrunner has no pretentious of trying to say or do anything deeper than “We’re going making a game that looks cool and is challenging as all get out”. And sometimes that’s okay and in some way kind of respectable because it means that it’s not pretending to be something that it isn’t. It still looks cool, and it uses that aesthetic to use signposting for where the player goes in some really cool and interesting ways. Also, the Soundtrack is the right kind of bumpin’ with great use and mix of Electronic and Synthwave to give us a Dark Future mood.
At the end of the day, Ghostrunner is a game that is the definition of lean: There’s not much there outside of what it came in to do, but it does that one specific thing very well and iterates on it in some incredibly cool ways. Also, the game supports DLSS And it Looks Amazing,
