Cyber City 2157: The Visual Novel

I went into this one already half-charmed by the concept: a perpetually sunlit city, a nameless man who builds synthetic human replicas called Molds, dreams that bleed into the workday. That setup carries real weight, and for the first twenty minutes or so there is a quiet, disorienting pull to the whole thing. The visual style leans hard into old-monitor simulation, all blurry low-res renders that feel genuinely closer to a Commodore 64 artifact than to pixel art as we currently understand the term. Whether that reads as atmosphere or as technical limitation depends entirely on your tolerance for deliberate ugliness in service of mood. I found it oddly hypnotic in short doses, like watching static that occasionally resolves into something meaningful. The structure gives you branching choices that send you through parks, cemeteries, dream sequences, and suburban corridors that all carry the same muted, hour-before-dawn energy. The protagonist is two brothers reborn into one body, a premise that could have been the spine of something genuinely unsettling, and the synth-heavy soundtrack does its best to hold that premise up. Critics have consistently praised the music, and they are right: it has a cold, cinematic weight that the writing never quite earns. The story hints at a spaceship incident, a suspicious Mold request, a figure called Buddha showing up in dream-space offering exits from death. These threads accumulate but do not resolve. Several endings exist, and more than a few of them appear to tease a second chapter before dumping you back at the main menu. Whether you read that as postmodern intent or as an unfinished product is genuinely the entire critical question here. The honest problem is the English localization, which is rough enough to cause real comprehension failures, not just occasional laughs. The game was written in Russian first and translated under conditions that produced phrases that simply stop making grammatical sense mid-paragraph. If you are a patient reader willing to reread scenes and piece together probable meanings, there is a coherent strange story underneath. If you need clean prose to stay engaged, this will push you out within the first hour. Player reception on Steam sits at mixed across a thin review pool, and the broader critical write-ups range from cautiously intrigued to openly frustrated. What keeps me from writing it off entirely is that the game knows what it wants to feel like even when it cannot quite say it. The cassette-tape loading screens, the animated backgrounds, the dual-voice narration that occasionally lands a genuinely odd image, these are the marks of someone with a real creative vision working at the edge of their technical and linguistic reach. That gap between ambition and execution is either poignant or exhausting depending on the day you arrive.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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