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Rain of Reflections is a cyberpunk game where every choice is permanent

 

Announced at E3 by Swedish developer Lionbite Games, Rain of Reflections is a cyberpunk adventure with an morale-based strategic confrontations.

It increasingly seems that cyberpunk is making a strong comeback across media, and joining this campaign is Rain of Reflections, an adventure game with turn-based ‘strategic confrontations’ and a very heavy emphasis on narrative and choice-and-consequence. The game is also quite the looker, and has an almost-AAA finish despite coming from an independent developer.

The game’s debut trailer below shows its three protagonists: Wilona, Dwennon and Imra. Wilona is a scientist following in her father’s footsteps and involved in experimentation on human children; Dwennon is a private investigator with a shadowy past, because you can’t really have a cyberpunk or noir game without one of those floating around; and finally, Imra is a resistance fighter with an eyepatch. Does that make her a cyberpunk pirate? We’ll have to reach out to the devs for that burning question.

Rain of Reflections is all about narrative choices, and it emphasises that there is no retrying or undoing to be done. Every choice you make is permanent, and you will have to live with the consequences of your actions. The devs stress that they’re also ‘cutting out all the filler content and repetitive gameplay to focus on what’s relevant and engaging without ever wasting the player’s time’.

While there don’t seem to be any direct action mechanics in the game, there will be dialogues, exploration, puzzles and the aforementioned ‘strategic confrontations’ that are based on morale. Here’s how the devs describe it:

To make the more action-oriented confrontations a part of the narrative and not mere changes of pace, they are constructed around battle motivation – a literal “tug of war” – where we offer lots of ways to outsmart enemies without directly resorting to lethal violence.

This fits with the consequence-driven narrative, as we want the player to reflect on that taking a life – any life – is a tough choice that has consequences on the story going forward.

Rain of Reflections is being developed in the Unity engine at Stockholm, Sweden by Lionbite Games. This is their first game.

Rain of Reflections is scheduled to release sometime in 2018 for PC. Other platforms will be ‘carefully considered’ after the initial PC release.