Fractured Core

My first thought when I saw the setting wasn't about the combat or the pixel art - it was a quiet, hopeful surprise. Cyberpunk almost always defaults to neon Tokyo or some American megacity standing in for Night City. Fractured Core plants its flag in futuristic Germany and later Italy, and that single decision gives it an identity most genre peers can't claim. Lead designer Timoteus Ivan Suprapto said he and the team felt those other locations had been used too much, so they looked at a highly developed nation rarely touched by the genre. The result is a world of gleaming, walkable city plazas and sustainable urban infrastructure that quietly hides biotech experimentation, corporate assassination programs, and private military rule - a contradiction that the environmental design seems genuinely interested in exploring. You play Michael Jones, a prodigy freshly signed to Athena PMC as a Raven operative and squad leader. The missions are messy by design: high-value extractions, infiltration jobs, cleanup of bioweapon experiments that went sideways. Your three-person squad takes on all of it through classic turn-based combat that the team spent six years iterating on. Each operative levels up through battle, unlocking stat upgrades and abilities that range from multi-hit weapon techniques to aggro-drawing taunts. The real texture comes from the layered gear system: weapons, armor, accessories, and chip mods all stack together, and the psionic side of things opens up six elemental affinities - Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, Light, and Dark - that interact with enemy builds in ways that reward paying attention. Notably, enemies operate on the same character system as your own squad, which means encounters feel fair and readable rather than arbitrary. If you have ever played Shadowrun Returns and enjoyed that cadence of prep, execute, and adapt, you will recognize the rhythm here. Beyond the battlefield, Fractured Core builds in a social layer. Between missions you can explore the cities, build relationships with fellow Athena operatives and staff, and interact with a cast that runs from your commanding officer Vega to more unusual characters scattered through Athena's armored skyscraper. How much this social fabric connects back to tactical outcomes is still something the community is working out with only a small number of reviews in, but the presence of it matters. It signals that Engram Interactive wanted a game that breathed between the fights, not just one that cycled you from menu to map to mission. Where does it fall short? The review pool is thin at launch - a mostly positive early signal but not enough data to call it conclusively. The anime sensibility in the character design may land awkwardly for players hoping for pure gritty corp-noir. And anyone expecting a massive open world will want to recalibrate: this is a structured, mission-based JRPG built by a small Indonesian studio under a dozen people across six years of development. The handcrafted pixel animation shows, the world-building has clear ambition, but it carries the weight of a small team doing something earnest and specific rather than something blockbuster and broad. For the turn-based JRPG player who has quietly wanted a cyberpunk take that wasn't visually exhausted before they even booted it up, Fractured Core feels like the kind of small Steam page worth sitting with.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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