VirtuaVerse

What we have here with VirtuaVerse is one of those games that I have been meaning to get around to playing for ages. Well, I had to go out of town, and I took my switch with me, and it felt like the perfect time to check out this cyberpunk point-and-click adventure game. I kind of already knew what I was getting into, as this is a pretty popular game. However, I was still a little bit shocked by how good this turned out to be, especially with the story, which completely hooked me.

Let Me Set The Stage

I am a real sucker for a game with a cyberpunk setting, and VirtuaVerse has one of the coolest ones around. Turns out that people in this world have become completely dependent on technology. Not just with their cybernetic enhancements, as you would expect from a cyberpunk game, but with every aspect of their lives! One of which is the titular VirtuaVerse, which is an AI-created virtual world that is going to cause mankind to basically become subservient. In many ways, it could be the end of human independence!

Just Looking For His Girl!

Well, our main character in VirtuaVerse is a hacker called Nathan, and Nathan is trying to find his girl, and it is here that he finds out she is part of a hacker group called The Blade. Well, The Blade is trying to stand up against this AI world, and they do it in some cool ways, by using old tech that cannot be tracked or traced. No spoilers here, but the deeper into this world, we find out that there is more at play here than we thought. If you like sci-fi and cyberpunk, I am sure you will get into this, but while I liked it, I will say that it is pretty cliché for this kind of thing, but not necessarily in a bad way. It is just that it has pretty much all the tropes you would expect from a cyberpunk story.

Taking Me Back To My Amiga 500

If you loved the classic point and click games of the 90s, heck, if you are younger and love the fact that this genre has come back now! VirtuaVerse is a game that is well worth your time playing. This has some cool puzzles, character interactions, and great set pieces too! It is quite epic for a game of this style, and the whole virtual world thing is used in some very clever ways when it comes to solving the puzzles. I would not say that this does anything massively new for the genre. However, this does pretty much everything right, and I found that it was not too cryptic either. I always felt like I had a little nudge in the right direction when it came to where to go or how to solve a puzzle that I was clearly having a little bit of trouble with.

Pixel Punk Perfection

I get that it is hard for a game that does the whole pixel art thing to stand out from the crowd, but VirtuaVerse has some of the best-looking cyberpunk-style pixel art I have ever seen. It is not so much the characters, but the world, the real and the virtual world that the game has to offer. Everything here is so detailed, and I found myself taking each scene in and noticing all the little details. For a point and click adventure game, it is also really cinematic too, kind of like the way the classic Lucas Arts games of the 90s used to be. If anything, the visuals helped get me even more invested in what was going on here.

Pros:

• Nathan was a very interesting character to play as
• This cyberpunk world is awesome
• The pixel art is amazing!
• The puzzles were challenging, but not too frustrating

Cons:

• You do need to be into point-and-click games to appreciate this
• I am not sure there is a reason to play this more than once