Most of your time in Shadowrun is spent playing it strictly as a point-and-click adventure, running messy errands for your Triad boss, a badass old buzzard named Kindly Cheng. Asking me to be your right hand man? Oh, no, ma’am, I’ve played Streets of Rage. The focus in Shadowrun Hong Kong is exactly where it belongs, and that’s on the storytelling. But Shadowrun has far too weighty a pedigree to make it that simple. For occasionally long swaths of the game, that’s exactly what it is. In another universe, this could very easily be the futuristic brother of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, yet another tale of a low-level underling killing their way into the mantle of boss in the name of revenge, just with the twist of being able to create your own character out of the multiple fantasy races and RPG classes offered at the outset. So begins the tale of how you became a Shadowrunner, a member of the vast, unstoppable network of scrappy cybercriminal underdogs fighting the questionably good fight against the cabal of mega corporations running the world’s lower classes even deeper into the dirt. And by “arrest,” of course, they mean “brutally murder on sight.” Just when you thought it was safe to walk down a back alley alone again. Not even five minutes after stepping onto Chinese soil, you find out your foster father is missing, presumed dead, and there’s an APB out to arrest you, your brother, and anyone seen with you that evening. The plotting is a little uninspiring: You’re an ex-con, recently released, now trying to make an honest living in Seattle, when you get a call from your estranged foster father to return to China. Narrative, character development, and world-building are king here.

The change-up is welcome, in part because not much else about Shadowrun has changed since 2013’s well-received Shadowrun Returns. The series has done a fantastic job exploring both of these aspects through several games now, but with Shadowrun: Hong Kong, the series adopts an Eastern flavor, incorporating a classic facet of the cyberpunk genre for the first time in its nearly 30 year tenure. Shadowrun, as a universe, is already a great marriage of two very separate, very Western fantasy scenarios one part D&D-inspired elves-and-dwarves witchcraft and wizardry, one part William Gibson-brand gritty, street-level cyberpunk.

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