Cities of Text
Harebrained Schemes's Shadowrun games are mostly language: the smell of a room, pulp death poetics, fat gobs of dialogue. The words are the city you walk through.
In Harebrained Schemes’s Shadowrun revival series, the landscape is mostly text. Its hand-drawn backdrops are handsome but static, and its chunky character models don’t do much besides run, fire guns, and shoot purple beams of magic from their fingers. What’s being traversed, as your avatar traipses through dystopian cyberpunk reimaginings of Seattle, Berlin, and Hong Kong, is a city’s worth of language. You walk into a room and are met with an account of its smell and the curious crunching sound emanating from the floor above. Death is an occasion for pulp poetics: mists of blood, pain-spasms, viscera-strewn walls. Conversations function as both plot-delineating sprawl and character exposition. Little goes unexplained; it’s rare not to know precisely what sort of face someone is making as they speak.
I skim some of this stuff. I like D.H. Lawrence a lot but it turns out even I have an adverb threshold, and the level of detail present in the game’s writing can blow well past my desire for edification. The prose style is florid and grisly dungeon master-ese, and while that has its charms—Shadowrun’s writers, bless them, delight in describing shit—it becomes dense, meaningless word-bramble at certain points. There are times when the smell of a room doesn’t matter.
