Reikon Games co-founders Jakub Stylinski and Magdalena Tomkowicz and creative director Benedykt Szneider were kind enough to chat with Unwinnable about RUINER. If, back in 1984, cyberpunk was about the future, then RUINER is the present. Despite the futuristic trappings, the game doesn’t feel like it is about what is to come. You can see it in the game’s trailer. RUINER isn’t cyberpunk, not really, though the same foundation is there. RUINER feasted on cyberpunk’s corpse, digested it, turned it into something familiar but new.
That, for people who grew up after William Gibson coined the phrase in 1984, cyberpunk in many ways represents the past, a kind of retro-futurism that got as much wrong with its predictions about the future as it got right. That it is a word for generic near-future settings. They dislike the word, I think, because I am using it as a catch-all, that people have a checklist of associations with cyberpunk – gritty, dystopia, hackers, weird haircuts, uncomfortable looking vinyl clothes – none of which mean anything on their own and that near-meaninglessness makes the genre easy to dismiss. Many of RUINER’s themes – suspicion of mega-corporations selling entertainment with the intent to pacify, digital slavery, the dangers of virtual reality – are fixtures of the genre. RUINER’s look is in the ballpark, too: the neon, the trash-filled streets, the subtle influence of futuristic anime styles. It isn’t that the term isn’t appropriate. Every time I say the word “cyberpunk,” I can feel them bristle.
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