Video Game / Cloudpunk

"Got another delivery for you, kid..."

Cloudpunk is a 2020 Cyberpunk open-world role-playing game developed by Ion Lands and published by Maple Whispering Limited for PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Playstation.

You play as Rania, a newcomer to the city of Nivalis. Nivalis is a pretty typical cyberpunk Mega City: rain, neon, ads, massive class divide, etc. Rania has just gotten a job working for Cloudpunk, a "semi-legal" delivery service. In your trusty HOVA, you have only two rules to follow: Make the delivery, and don't open the package. Everything else, as your Mission Control ("Control") tells you, is just a guideline.

The game takes place over a single night (although, typical for open-world games, there are only a few sections in which time is important). As the night goes on, you become drawn into a series of events that will have a big impact on Nivalis itself...

A sequel-sized DLC called City of Ghosts was released on June 25th, 2021.

Ion Lands followed with a first-person management sim called Nivalis for 2024.

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This game contains examples of:

Main Game

• Accent Upon The Wrong Syllable: Rania pronounces her name "RAN-ee-uh" (first part sounding like "can"), but other characters pronounce it "rah-NEE-UH" (first part sounding like "khan").
• Ambiguous Time Period: The timeline is never clearly specified, though from the clues offered it is likely at least a few centuries in the future, if not millennia. For instance - Tokyo is barely remembered and several characters give out ludicrous time frames like thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years. This may however be an exaggeration or like in Transmetropolitan the collective perception of time got distorted at some point.
  • A historian hints at an event or a person called the Erasera as the key cause of this - they scramble and obfuscate prior history in order to safeguard the future and have done so on a number of occasions.
• Apocalypse How: An unspecified cataclysm far back in the Earth's history (from the view of the present at least) involving something with the Sun caused at least a societal disruption and forced most humans to migrate to Nivalis and other (possible) megalopoli.
• Bittersweet Ending: Rania and Jay-K make a decision to either euthanize Cora or transfer her daughter to another city. Either way, it results in an end to the disasters and accidents happening around the city. Ben, revealed to be an AI, is deleted by Cloudpunk due to his role in Pashta's rescue. Ben leaked Reoh's location to the Corps, though, and the Dirty Cop is arrested. Rania also finds out that all of her debts and fines have been cleared. Jay-K also gives Camus a new dog frame.
• Blatant Lies: Rania is frequently asked by the authorities if she's a member of the illegal delivery service and, of course, just says no.
  "Cloudpunk? Never heard of it."
• Bomb-Throwing Anarchists: Averted by BlockFourOh, an anarchist android street gang. Instead of throwing bombs, they do urban renewal, installing parks, growing trees and making playgrounds for children out of empty and disused corporate property. Naturally, in a hyper-capitalistic Nivalis this makes them one of the most dangerous criminals around. Though, as City of Ghosts reveals, they are not opposed to shanking corpos who wander onto their territory.
• City of Adventure: Nivalis is full of eccentric characters, dangerous people, and packages that may or may not explode.
• The Comically Serious: Rania behaves like this when she converses with the wackier, quirkier inhabitants of Nivalis.
• Colonized Solar System: Extraterrestrial colonies are mentioned, in particular ones on Phobos, Luna and Saturn, implying that humanity at least made it beyond Jupiter if not farther. Travel times are also relatively fast, with a trip to the Moon/Luna lasting a mere 4 hours.
• Crapsack World: As time passes, it soon becomes apparent that Nivalis, and the greater game world is this. The city's infrastructure is crumbling into the sea, hyper-gentrification is commonplace, and android discrimination is rampant, among many other major social issues.
• Cue the Sun: The ending takes place at dawn and establishes a hopeful future for the main characters.
• Cyberpunk Is Techno: Cloudpunk's techno soundtrack complements the futuristic expansiveness of Nivalis.
• Cyberpunk with a Chance of Rain: There are only a few times during the night when it isn't raining, and the rest of the time Rania is walking or driving amidst a steady downpour.
• Deadpan Snarker: Rania is one of the most biting wits in the entire game, probably because it's the only thing keeping her sane.
• Disaster Dominoes: Essentially the plot of the game. The city's infrastructure is falling apart and begins to accelerate in its total collapse throughout the evening. It starts bad at the start of the night with increasing accidents and even a whole neighborhood falling into the ocean. This is due to Cora slowly coming into her full power.
• Disproportionate Retribution: While driving, you may occasionally hear announcements that listening to unlicensed jazz is punishable by death.
• Driven to Suicide: The Ascension is a giant escalator... that goes to nowhere. It drops you into the sea. When Rania asks why people would ever go on it, Control replies:
  You lived outside Nivalis, right? So you have memories of the sky. And I've never seen it. I can live with that. But imagine you'd seen the sky just once. What would you do to see it again?
• Eco-Terrorist: The street gang Block-FourOh is this, as they plant trees and gardens in CorpSec territory and receive a bad reputation because of it.
• Evil Debt Collector: Rania was driven out of her old home by "debt corps."
• Extinct in the Future: You can come across a man with a falcon perched on his shoulder who offers you to take a picture with it, and calls it a chimera. When Rania calls him out, he claims that people are happier believing that it is a new species of animal, and not one that no longer exists.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • The Eastern people that Rania comes from get a lot of this from the people of Nivalis. They're treated as savages despite just being farmers.
  • Androids and other AI are treated as second-class citizens despite the fact they recently gained full rights as people under the law.
• Fetch Quest: Most of the quests consist of picking up a person or thing and delivering it to another location.
• Flying Car: They're called HOVAs, and they're the normal mode of transportation due to Nivalis' highly vertical composition.
• Genius Loci: What CORA is eventually revealed to be. Her growing beyond her programming is what's causing the city to fall apart.
• Grumpy Old Man: Control, although he warms up to you fairly quickly.
• Heroes Love Dogs: Cora's best friend is her dog AI, Camus, who used to be a dog but is now a dog taxi.
• High Turnover Rate: Control says that most Cloudpunk drivers don't make it past their first night.
• Hollywood Atheist: Rania doesn't seem to possess a religion.
  Camus: "What's the difference between a cult and a religion?"
  Rania: "The entrance fee."
• Informed Attribute: Early on, Control tells you that Nivalis' traffic is incredibly dangerous, with frequent crashes and driver fatalities. However, the traffic experienced in-game is actually very light and calm, with little risk of crashing unless you yourself drive poorly.
• Insane Troll Logic: A CEO announced he will show solidarity with the starving unemployed masses by... slashing wages within his company so their employees will also be starving! Yay?
• An Interior Designer Is You: You can buy furniture for your apartment. Rarely for this trope, Rania herself expresses a desire to do so.
• Job-Stealing Robot: One mission involves a famous singer whose managers have secretly replaced her with a robot copy. You can either help her expose the situation to the public, whereupon she will be thrown in prison by corrupt police, or help her leave the city for a new life.
• Land of One City: The implied cataclysm apparently forced most humanity to move to Nivalis. There are other cities mentioned, but very vaguely.
• Last Lousy Point: There's an achievement for finding every location in Nivalis. What makes this hair-pulling is that none of them are marked and the game doesn't record where you've been.
• Literal-Minded: Camus, though he slowly begins overcoming it during the course of the night.
• Lost Technology: According to an engineer in The Marrow, the city infrastructure itself is no longer fully understood. He claims that the engineers are working off of superstition.
• Machine Monotone: The androids and A.I.s speak like this. Less noticeable in the androids, likely because they interact more with humans and thus make more effort to have emotion in their voices.
• Mega-Corp: Par for the course, the Earth is ruled by a consortium of megacorporations out of which Corvus, SU Aerospace and Thorax seem the most prominent of. The corps are so powerful that they basically are the law and are enforcing it through the Corp Sec pseudo-police.
• Mystery Cult: One side-quest takes you to the doorway of a strange cult-like organization that rejects anyone who doesn't possess a certain blood type. A former member who received an O- blood transfusion after an accident is trying to return his belongings to them.
• Naïve Newcomer: Rania. Although not naive in the general sense, she is unfamiliar with Nivalis and city life.
• Neon City: Nivalis, down to a tee.
• Neural Implanting: Commonplace in Nivalis, they can be infected by viruses. They can also be used to change someone's personality, as evidenced if you meet Susie.
• No-Damage Run: A variant. There's an achievement for going the whole game without once repairing your car.
• Nonhuman Sidekick: Rania's cyborg dog Camus. She sold his body to get money to move to Nivalis, and aims to buy him a new one.
• Only Sane Woman: Rania comes across as this, being one of the few people in Nivalis who understands how weird and terrible the place is.
• Poke the Poodle: There's an android gang that does urban renewal like making parks and playgrounds. This actually gets them in more trouble than murder would because corporate property is so precious.
• Private Eye Monologue: Huxley's entire speech pattern is this, even when conversing with other people. He reveals that he slipped into this dialogue when going undercover many years ago, and wasn't able to get back out.
• Robosexual:
  • The Butlers are an android husband and human wife.
  • The trope is also inverted by a human passenger you can pick up in Oldtown: His job is being a prostitute who sells himself into sexual 'slavery' to emancipated androids, who get their kicks from 'topping' their old oppressors.
• Robot Dog: Camus's original body was this, and he gets into a conversation about Rania on whether or not he is still a dog now that he is installed in a HOVA.
• Sadistic Choice: At one point you have to choose three passengers to rescue in an area that has suffered a gas leak. Cloudpunk wants you to rescue the richest of them and leave the poorest behind, but even if you want to choose the 'best people', there's more than three worthy candidates.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Senseof Scale: The most *resonable* timeframe given is by one city engineer who makes a comment how his colleagues are trying to communicate with silent city A.I.s for a thousand years, implying it to be the 31.st century. Other characters mention dates like thousands, hundred thousand and a million years, though it may be hyperbole.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: Huxley possesses one of these, which Reoh eventually hacks into when Rania and co. make away with his daughter.
• Shout-Out:
  • When you get a package addressed to Anderson Financial's Mr. Anderson, your dog Camus reads the name out in the same way Hugo Weaving does in The Matrix.
  • There is a location near your apartment named Kobayashi HQ, punning on Star Trek: The Original Series Kobayashi Maru.
  • There is a recurrent character named Octavius Butler, a reference to Octavia Butler the science fiction author.
• Skyscraper City: Nivalis is a city built by artificial intelligence that extends from the ocean-level to above the clouds.
• Sliding Scale of Video Game World Size and Scale: Realistic scale, most of world in background. Nivalis is large, and you fly all over it, but you can only explore certain sections on foot.
• The Stoic: Rania doesn't really emote very much even when confronted with murderers and criminals.
• Take Your Time: More egregious than usual because you're playing a delivery driver, i.e. a job in which speed is important. There are, however, a few segments in which time is of the essence.
• Title Drop: Cloudpunk is the name of the delivery company you work for. At the end of the introduction, when you're heading off to deliver your first package:
  Control: Oh, and kid? Welcome to Cloudpunk. [music starts up]
• Two Halves Make a Plot: CORA reveals to Rania that she has been speaking with a CEO named Jay-K, her "other half", and that together they must decide what happens to the future of Nivalis.
• Underground City: The Ventz are situated underneath the city, where a few people eke out a living as moisture farmers and cultivating algae to eat. It is regularly affected by freezing waves called The Chill, which can kill someone in an instant.
• Unwilling Roboticization: Control, aka Ben, reveals in the closing minutes of the story that he was resurrected as an automata following the car accident that killed him and his family because he needed to pay off a debt. Rania's actions trigger events which allow him to finally find peace after death.
• Villainous Gentrification: There's apparently a process called "hyper-gentrification" in which the rent prices are raised massively on an entire neighbourhood, forcing all the residents out in the same day to make room for richer ones.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Control, your dispatcher who assigns missions. And Camus, your cyborg dog, who is currently in your HOVA via Brain Uploading due to lack of a physical body.
• We Will Use WikiWords in the Future: LifeCorp, CorpSec, etc.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Androids were slaves in the past, and although now officially equal to humans, still face discrimination.
• Wretched Hive: Various poor parts of the city. The Marrow in particular.
• You Got Murder: One delivery plays out like this. You have the option to dump the package in a trash chute instead.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: While Nivalis is set on Earth in the far future, the exact location is ambiguous. Though given that Rani is from a place called Eastern Peninsula where Arabic seems to be spoken and another outlander is from the steppes, it is possible that the city is somewhere in or near Eurasia.

^note But wouldn't that just cause an explosion in the garbage system?

City of Ghosts

• Ancient Conspiracy: The Corus are a secret society dedicating to Status Quo Is God, keeping Nivalis wretched and downtrodden while they financially benefit from it. They possess an Algorithm that grants them predictive power over the economy, and they seek to dissect CORA's child when she is created to fill in the gaps in it.
• And Your Little Dog, Too!: Corzona killed the dog of a delivery driver that screwed up. Rania is suitably horrified.
• Aristocrats Are Evil: At one point, Rania's HOVA is taken over by a bunch of bored rich moon people who demand she drive their programs around the city.
• The Beautiful Elite: The people of the Spire as usual.
• Big Bad Ensemble: A trio of them — the Ancient Conspiracy who want Rania due to her connection to CORA, the Debt Corps assassin Archo who wants her dead, and Koga, who is trying to blackmail her into joining his corporation and whose boss is a member of the Corus. By the end of the game, the Corus fail in obtaining CORA's daughter and three of their members suffer a Brown Note, Archo dies in a HOVA crash while chasing down Rania and Koga is dealt with by BlockFourOh after being lured into a trap by Hayse.
• Big Damn Heroes: Hayse ends up being this for Rania.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Several passengers and customers are revealed to be deeply unpleasant people, much more so than in the core game. Koga really takes the cake, being a Corporate Samurai and a brutal man underneath his kindly exterior.
• Bittersweet Ending: Rania and Camus survive the night, two of the Big Bad Ensemble are defeated, and the Corus are foiled by Orma. Camus is also prepared to share all the secrets of the universe, and Hayse has the names of all the other Corus members. However, Hayse or Morpho is dead. Depending on your ending, Rania either stays in Nivalis (a city she hates), leaves for an uncertain future somewhere else, or is subject to a Brain Uploading and joins Orma in Nivalis' systems.
• Bounty Hunter: A assassin droid named Archo is after Rania for hers.
• Brown Note: A cognitive virus called Pallid 4.0 that hacks the human brain through visual input (basically a series of blinking lights) is introduced, with Rania becoming an infectee due to handling a trapped package. Orma uses a similar medium to overload the brains of three Corus members in the climax.
• The Cameo: Several of your old passengers or encounters from the original game make cameos in the expansion pack, and two of them are revealed to be members of the Corus.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: In addition to Rania, you play Hayse, who is a drunken Antihero and petty criminal. Rania is Cloudpunk's newest driver in the original game, while Hayse (if he survives) reveals he was the first by the end of City of Ghosts.
• Cool Old Guy:
  • Koga has been a delivery guy for a long time. He's a cool cat too. Too bad he's a recruiter for a Megacorp delivery service that kills dogs.
  • Hayse is one of these himself, even if he's more just middle aged.
• Darker and Edgier: About halfway through the game, Rania is almost murdered by a Debt collection android. There is also actual danger to her life and limb. Some of the riders are also actively violent and evil versus merely greedy or stupid. Rania is also suffering depression from how horrible and corrupt Nivalis is, which is finally wearing her down.
• Dirty Coward: Hayse, who spends much of the expansion pack showing Morpho in front of his problems and hiding behind him. It may be subverted near the end: Hayse will either attempt a Taking You with Me with Archo or will escape the HOVA beforehand to get away from her, leaving Morpho to fall into her clutches. In the latter case he will be deeply ashamed and play up his own cowardice to Rania.
• Expy: Hayse is one for the Dude from The Big Lebowski. He even looks like Jeff Bridges.
• Foil: The new Control is a spunky middle aged woman rather than the wise old male one. She's also alive and not an AI ghost.
• Happy Ending Override: Rania is disappointed to note that the city is still a dystopian hellhole after fixing CORA. It's just less of a dystopian hellhole.
  Control: "Since we started talking, there's been seventeen major accidents."
  Rania: "Shit."
  Control: "But that's way down!"
• Heroic Sacrifice: Either Morpho or Hayse die trying to kill Archo near the end of the game, depending on whom you gave the cure to first.
• It's Personal: Hayse is good at leaving people with grudges against him; Morpho at one point comments that of the fifteen death threats Hayse has received during the night twelve appeared genuine, and Jane sells him out to Koga to save Rania's hide without much sign of guilt. Of particular note is Koga, who wants Hayse dead for sleeping with his wife.
• Lipstick Lesbian: Ava Jate is one of The Beautiful Elite who wants to take Rania on a date. Rania declines.
• Literal-Minded: Morpho gives Camus a run for his money in this regard.
• Loophole Abuse: Cloudpunk is a legal company but what they do is illegal, as such the drivers take all the risk but they can sport their sign. This is a Retcon to explain why Cloudpunk has a big neon sign despite being an illegal company in the first game.
• Hero of Another Story: Phaze Runner is apparently this or maybe he's just a complete lunatic.
• Mission-Pack Sequel: Roughly seven hours of additional content, it is about the size of the previous game but uses the same map.
• Moving-Away Ending: A potential outcome of the game, if you sent Orma out of Nivalis in the original game, is for her to extend an offer for Rania to join her there. Accepting leads Rania to leave Nivalis with Camus and Pashta.
• Not Quite the Right Thing: Rania bringing a package of evidence to a woman planning to take down the mob is good, right? Well she just uses it to blackmail her way into a position. But at least you got paid.
• Organ Theft: How debt corps deal with debtors who can't pay their bills. Like Rania.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: Rania and Control have a much more antagonist, albeit somewhat friendly rivalry, relationship in terms of how they talk to one another.
• Southern Belle: Control has a pronounced Southern accent.
• Take That!:
  • There's an extended subplot that is one long one of these to the RUINER, which is a Darker and Edgier Cyberpunk game. "Phaze Runner" basically speaking in stock edgelord action movie dialogue and peppers his lines with slang from Cyberpunk. It's surprisingly brutal.
  • The game attacks 'alternative facts' and the idea of subjective truth. You can't make the world a better place unless you know the truth.
• Tired of Running: Both Hayse and Rania will do this near the end of the game against Koga. Hayse turns out to be bluffing, and leads Koga into a trap instead.
• Title Drop: By CORA, who describes Nivalis as a "city of ghosts" in the climax.
• Villains Out Shopping: While not quite a villain, Ava Jate literally hires Rania to do her shopping for expensive gifts and the latter is terrified of getting it wrong.
• Wretched Hive: More emphasis is placed on how many of the people of Nivalis are actually evil rather than just stupid or apathetic. Rania comes to truly hate the city rather than simply tolerate its eccentricities.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Janet Mortaim has this philosophy. Rania thinks it's insane.

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