Whilst stealth has often been a part of this, I believe that Disjunction is the first Cyberpunk game that I’ve played with such a heavy focus on the stealth aspect.
Whilst Disjunction is a solid game with a great, pixelated aesthetic and music, I couldn’t help but wish the focus was more on narrative as opposed to stage-by-stage sneakiness as I enjoyed the setting, audio and presentation so much.
Set in New York during 2048, Disjunction flits between three characters heavily involved in the story – with reasons ranging from political to personal – and have their arcs played out via a blend of narrative-driven hubs and separate stages interspersed with RPG-esque upgrade screens.
Whilst the RPG element is light, due to the twitchiness of some of the missions, that upgrade that allows you to swing your weapon 10% faster or reload your taser a fraction quicker can often be the difference between life and a swift, bullet-ridden death with an alarm blaring in the background louder than my summer wardrobe.
As mentioned above, the game is split into three recurring acts. Firstly, you’ll get the setup of the upcoming mission and some back story of the over-arching plot and your current character’s motives. Following this, you can spend any earned upgrade points and then you’ll move into the mission itself which takes up the bulks of the game.
Presented from a top-down viewpoint, you’ll spend a lot of your time sneaking around various facilities, taking out guards and droids and occasionally panicking. Whilst the option to go full-tilt with your shotgun and grenades does exist, the game is clearly weighted towards a more stealthy take on things.
Crouching allows you to see the vision-cones of your adversaries and you’ll run out of death-dealing weaponry pretty sharpish if you don’t bring at least some tact into play and clonk some folks on the head by learning enemy patterns and tossing a well-placed smoke bomb.
Whilst the different characters come across as markedly different in the more dialogue-driven scenes and have different abilities during the missions themselves, I did feel that the game got slightly repetitive after a while.
The same ‘sneak and clonk’ approach got me through a lot of scrapes and the aesthetic of the levels themselves didn’t stand out in my mind. The game also gets pretty tough and you’ll find yourself aching for a checkpoint after a few subsequent room clearances that get pretty dicey, so this isn’t a game you’ll be able to breeze through, there’s a definite challenge here.
With smooth gameplay and an ambient, minimalist soundtrack, Disjunction makes a great first impression but I do wish that there was perhaps a little more variety in gameplay. The lore in the game and dialogue is nicely written and hints at a much wider world. I was also a fan of how your actions and decisions alter the course of the story in subtle ways.
Right, I’m off to slip back into the shadows.
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