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The Shadow Over Cyberspace
Jan. 25th, 2025 03:16 amI just finished this game a bit ago. Steam says it took me 15.7 hours (over the course of maybe a week or so, real time, off and on) to complete it, i.e. see all the endings[1] and get all achievements (which all seem to come from just playing the game naturally and making the different choices to see all the endings, which is possible in a single playthrough, because I did it). It is a free game, and it's another one of those free games that has no business being a free game, in my opinion, kind of like Heroine's Quest, the original version of Doki Doki Literature Club, or some of the other free games I've mentioned in my "game recommendations" tag that I don't necessarily feel like hunting up now. And I've already paid the $10 USD to buy the "Shareware Donation" DLC, which does nothing but put a sticker on the title screen. I did it because I feel like the game was worth that much. I've also added the other games by the creators of this game to my Steam wishlist (though I have to say that I'm not currently willing to spend the $50+ USD required to buy them).
So... without spoiling much that isn't already spoiled on the store page of the game itself... The Shadow Over Cyberspace is basically a game that combines the Y2K scare (remember that shit?) with Lovecraftian cosmic horror. You start as a character (default name, which I went with instead of the usual "Kane Magus" I ordinarily use, is Randolph Carter) who almost immediately gets fucked up by cosmic horror shit. His (or her/their, if you change the default) goal is to find a way to undo this. To that end, he starts researching stuff and, soon, begins to make contact with The Old Ones.
And even taking all of that into account, things are not what they seem at first. Even for a story kind of based on Lovecraft stuff, it's a mind fuck, with several reveals and mild twists along the way.
(Note: If you don't care about all the spoiler stuff clumsily hidden behind cuts below, just click the headline and open the post directly, and all of that will simply go away. Or... if you do care about spoilers and somehow found this post via other means than your reader page or my main page or whatever, then... sorry? Dreamwidth doesn't have a dedicated spoiler tag, as far as I know, and I didn't feel like kludging up a pseudo-spoiler thing, aside from using the cut tag.)
The only mildly spoiler-ish thing I will say about the story is this. ( Putting it behind a cut as a sort of makeshift spoiler tag )
(EDIT) Oh, and forgot to mention, while this game is set in 1999, it was released on January 10, 2025, and the game absolutely makes veiled references to current events and social issues from the past 25 years. Let's just say... the game's "politics" (as expressed by most of the characters in the game) pretty much align with my own, and leave it at that. If anyone reading this happens to be a RWNJ, I'd strongly advise you to avoid this game, as it will probably give you a case of buttrage. (And I'd also strongly advise you to go eat shit, but that's neither here nor there.) Just saying. ¬_¬ And ( spoiler ) (/EDIT)
Ultimately, the game is a Ren'Py visual novel, and it plays pretty much as you would expect, if you've played one of those before, with some added UI effects for clicking on things like doors, computers, refrigerators, TVs, the moon, etc. Everything that is clickable is regularly highlighted, so there's no pixel hunting. And the in-game conversations are just straight up visual novel gameplay. You get little notifications that tell you if a given option was liked or disliked or an act of defiance (the latter of which is not necessarily a bad thing, as it can still lead to a "liked" response). Some of the dialogue choices (indicated by sPoOkY tExT) will indicate that you are falling to either "Chaos" or "Order" and losing "Humanity" as a result. While I did pick a couple of these at the start, which got my "Chaos" rating up to 10% (90% Humanity), I mostly avoided them after that, and because I apparently did good self-care (i.e. regularly clicking on the fridge and bathroom and pile of magazines and doing a lot of the "game hacking" mini-game, which is literally just Minesweeper), I had 0% Chaos/0% Order/100% Humanity by the end. Supposedly, swerving one way or the other or trying to keep them all in balance could change how the game progresses, maybe, I don't know, but I was still able to get the ( spoiler ) achievement (probably thanks to a fair bit of save-scumming to redo any actively "disliked" or any not actively "liked" choices), even without any of that. And even with 100% Humanity, you can still ( spoiler )
So yeah, I definitely recommend this one, especially if you like Lovecraft-ish cosmic horror stuff. All you'll spend is the time to play it, unless you do like I did and buy the "donation" DLC thing.
[1] - Well, no, I guess technically I haven't seen all the endings, because I went with the ( spoiler ), though I did go back and also see the ( spoiler ). I haven't seen ( spoiler ) yet. The ( spoiler ) gives you at least a hint of what those would have been, anyway.
So... without spoiling much that isn't already spoiled on the store page of the game itself... The Shadow Over Cyberspace is basically a game that combines the Y2K scare (remember that shit?) with Lovecraftian cosmic horror. You start as a character (default name, which I went with instead of the usual "Kane Magus" I ordinarily use, is Randolph Carter) who almost immediately gets fucked up by cosmic horror shit. His (or her/their, if you change the default) goal is to find a way to undo this. To that end, he starts researching stuff and, soon, begins to make contact with The Old Ones.
And even taking all of that into account, things are not what they seem at first. Even for a story kind of based on Lovecraft stuff, it's a mind fuck, with several reveals and mild twists along the way.
(Note: If you don't care about all the spoiler stuff clumsily hidden behind cuts below, just click the headline and open the post directly, and all of that will simply go away. Or... if you do care about spoilers and somehow found this post via other means than your reader page or my main page or whatever, then... sorry? Dreamwidth doesn't have a dedicated spoiler tag, as far as I know, and I didn't feel like kludging up a pseudo-spoiler thing, aside from using the cut tag.)
The only mildly spoiler-ish thing I will say about the story is this. ( Putting it behind a cut as a sort of makeshift spoiler tag )
(EDIT) Oh, and forgot to mention, while this game is set in 1999, it was released on January 10, 2025, and the game absolutely makes veiled references to current events and social issues from the past 25 years. Let's just say... the game's "politics" (as expressed by most of the characters in the game) pretty much align with my own, and leave it at that. If anyone reading this happens to be a RWNJ, I'd strongly advise you to avoid this game, as it will probably give you a case of buttrage. (And I'd also strongly advise you to go eat shit, but that's neither here nor there.) Just saying. ¬_¬ And ( spoiler ) (/EDIT)
Ultimately, the game is a Ren'Py visual novel, and it plays pretty much as you would expect, if you've played one of those before, with some added UI effects for clicking on things like doors, computers, refrigerators, TVs, the moon, etc. Everything that is clickable is regularly highlighted, so there's no pixel hunting. And the in-game conversations are just straight up visual novel gameplay. You get little notifications that tell you if a given option was liked or disliked or an act of defiance (the latter of which is not necessarily a bad thing, as it can still lead to a "liked" response). Some of the dialogue choices (indicated by sPoOkY tExT) will indicate that you are falling to either "Chaos" or "Order" and losing "Humanity" as a result. While I did pick a couple of these at the start, which got my "Chaos" rating up to 10% (90% Humanity), I mostly avoided them after that, and because I apparently did good self-care (i.e. regularly clicking on the fridge and bathroom and pile of magazines and doing a lot of the "game hacking" mini-game, which is literally just Minesweeper), I had 0% Chaos/0% Order/100% Humanity by the end. Supposedly, swerving one way or the other or trying to keep them all in balance could change how the game progresses, maybe, I don't know, but I was still able to get the ( spoiler ) achievement (probably thanks to a fair bit of save-scumming to redo any actively "disliked" or any not actively "liked" choices), even without any of that. And even with 100% Humanity, you can still ( spoiler )
So yeah, I definitely recommend this one, especially if you like Lovecraft-ish cosmic horror stuff. All you'll spend is the time to play it, unless you do like I did and buy the "donation" DLC thing.
[1] - Well, no, I guess technically I haven't seen all the endings, because I went with the ( spoiler ), though I did go back and also see the ( spoiler ). I haven't seen ( spoiler ) yet. The ( spoiler ) gives you at least a hint of what those would have been, anyway.
