Persona and Shin Megami Tensei composer Shoji Meguro is making a turn-based sci-fi RPG about private military companies gunning through the ashes of a nuclear war. He’s working with Ilya Kuvshinov, the illustrator who created character designs for Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2045, and Lotus Juice, a rapper who has contributed sick beats to any number of Personae. So if nothing else Guns Undarkness is probably going to look and sound quite fancy.
But how does it play? Meguro has made his name as a musician: I have no idea how well that expertise translates to designing combat systems. It’s something to think about while you watch and listen to the below trailer for the game’s first demo, out on 24th February.
Published by Kodansha, Guns Undarkness is set in 2045 and is a story about a social divide and, oh hey woah! They are certainly invoking some… rich material with this one. As summarised on Steam, the game takes place following a near-future period “of abeyance that allowed technology to flourish, but deepened the social divide between the rich and the poor, the Haves and the Have Nots”. Please tell me those aren’t the literal faction names.
Apparently, a bunch of “primitivist” poor people got together to pull off a “Great Reset” in the shape of a worldwide nuclear war. Now, it’s up to your rookie soldier “to discover the truth behind love in a world wracked by devastation and whether humanity is capable of being revolutionized.”
For context, the “Great Reset” in reality was an initiative launched by the World Economic Forum to kindle economic growth (or at least, further enrich the plutocrats) following the Covid 19 pandemic lockdowns. It’s also the name of a bunch of conspiracy theories which hold that corporations are trying to brainwash people with vaccines so as to destroy the very concept of property. So there is… ample topicality to unpack here, given some pretty delicate writing, and the Steam page blurb is anything but. It cites Metal Gear Solid as an inspiration, which worries me further – I’m not sure any other video game writer has Kojima’s ability to somehow clown his way through a bunch of realworld parallels without setting anything on fire.
Still, let’s shelve those concerns for the moment, and talk about the game’s combat. You control a squad of four, including your protagonist, who venture out to mission maps from a submarine base. Battles are initiated during exploration by sneakily stacking people up at cover points and taking a pop at the foe – kind of like synchronising killshots in Rainbow Six, except that it’s the prelude to a turn-based brawl.
There are two broad kinds of action – regular attacks, which don’t consume points, and skills, which are more powerful but do consume points. If you’re in cover, however, you can fire off skills for free. If you’re out of cover and you attack an enemy’s weakpoint with a regular attack, “you’ll be able to duck into cover”. So a free move, then?
There are also buffs and debuffs applied by guns, which level up separately to characters. Oh, and there’s a Persona-style reputation system with characters improving their capabilities when fighting alongside their best mates. It seems like they have the makings of an enjoyably synergistickal framework, here. With any luck the game will be all about those synergies and not some kind of veiled/accidental piece of anti-vaxxer propaganda.
Guns Undarkness is out sometime this year.