Welcome to Nowak City
The monitor's bluish light washed the room in a thin, pale glow.
"Let's see... maybe I'll start this one a little differently."
It had been a while since I'd found a game actually worth my time. The title was Escape from Nowak—a cyberpunk open-world RPG from Niles Interactive, a studio out of a country famous for never feeding its guests.
The moment the latest cyberpunk craze took off, cookie-cutter games had sprouted like weeds, and this was the ambitious stew they'd thrown together and shipped: a little of everything, jammed into one pot.
"Realism? Please."
I snickered to myself. They'd puffed their chests about building a realistic setting and worldview, but the thing was a chimera that had copied anything with a chance of making money. Riding the trend for one big score, they'd packed in every other cyberpunk game, every otaku subculture gimmick they could find, and—still not satisfied—a dating sim on top of it all.
It's fun, though.
I had to give them the effort. The devs were otaku themselves, so they'd poured a ridiculous amount of care into it, and the combat, the volume, the graphics—none of it was anything to sneer at for the price. Which is how I'd spent two years scraping this game down to the marrow.
"Speaking of which, I haven't really touched the DLCs..."
I'd seen every ending in the base game ages ago. And true to a so-called realistic cyberpunk, not one of them was anything like normal. Somebody always died, or you ended up some corporation's dog—nothing but a sour aftertaste. No matter how far you pushed things with the heroines, it always closed on something bittersweet.
Cyberpunk or not, that's a bit much...
Somehow or other, I'd also managed to finish the new DLC that had just dropped: Biocorp.
"Runaway test subject... second playthrough."
I hit start and rolled the mouse wheel, and the character's origin came up—a hidden route that only opened on repeat playthroughs after the DLC. I'd been so busy chasing the newly added ending that I hadn't dug in deep, and that was the only regret. This time I meant to go back to the start and excavate it properly.
I suddenly remembered how loud the community had been before launch.
"A cyberpunk world, and they just dump monster tentacles and creatures into it..."
Honestly, at first I'd thought the studio had torched its own continuity and lost its mind. Bone blades, living weapons, and tentacles, in the age of drones and cyborgs? Then launch day came, they cracked the lid, and it turned out to be pretty worth playing—new enemies, newly unlocked items built around biotechnology, strange abilities that filled in the stats that had been lacking, and implants as peculiar as the title itself.
The community did a full one-eighty.
You could even push past simply slotting in bioware and run a truly extreme concept. The Runaway Test Subject route I was on for the second time, for instance.
"The penalties are pretty brutal, though..."
A build plastered with restrictions, in exchange for exclusive bioware and abilities. Even so, a concept like this only gets fun once those are stuck to it.
A thought struck like lightning.
"Should I go with a girl this time..."
Every press of the gender button made a woman with long, swaying hair appear and vanish again. The hesitation didn't last.
"This time, I'm doing it different."
I decided on a male character. I'd already picked women plenty of times and even cleared the same-sex romance route. No need to do it again.
I finished customizing the look and set a finger on the Enter key.
"Ugh... what time is it?"
Fatigue came rolling in, and I checked the clock. I'd burned a day off and pulled an all-nighter on the DLC. Outside the window, cool blue air was already pushing the night aside.
"Dawn already..."
I settled my weight into the backrest and lazily stretched both arms. Right in the middle of that stretch—
Crack!
And what, exactly, was the source of this ominous noise from behind me?
"Huh?"
The instant the give I'd felt in that old faux-leather backrest vanished—
"Ack!"
Crash!
The world flipped without mercy. The back of my neck slammed into something hard.
"Kkh—ghhk..."
I learned it today for the first time. Take a hard enough hit to the head, and you can't even get a scream out. My vision blurred in a heartbeat.
"Sh-shit..."
The backrest snaps and I die? Goddamn secondhand Timu gaming chair. I'd bought it because it was cheap, but I hadn't known it came with a hidden assassinate-the-owner feature. My eyelids went brutally heavy. In the darkening view, only the monitor's light stayed sharp.
ESCAPE FROM NOWAK
"...The chair... next time... I'll buy... an expensive one..."
The world switched off once. When I opened my eyes—
"Ah, fuck..."
A familiar sky. I lifted my head in the middle of a thick, sour reek of rot, and what met me was the scenery of some junkyard. Pillars of light stabbed up into the heavens as if mocking the dark—a skyline that felt, somehow, familiar.
"No way."
If I had to guess, I'd dropped straight into Nowak City.
Fucking secondhand chair. Never buying one again.
Wait. Is there even a next time?
I sighed and got to my feet.