Ghost Running on a cyberpunk treadmill
In the closing shot of 1995’s Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii), Major stands overlooking a city in their new child body. Their previous shell has been destroyed, and with it some portion of themselves. They are now a new entity composed of several “selfs” embodying one body, free of the structural military body which one controlled them.
Cyberpunk has always been about bodies. The most enduring images of the genre are those of Ghost in the Shell and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), both concerned with the relationship between human flesh and machine steel, and the politics of labor therein. Ghost interrogates consciousness, what defines the “us” of ourselves, and the way corporations and militaries wield our identity against us. Blade Runner questions capitalism’s enslavement of bodies and the engineering of new classes of people to further expansionist goals. It confronts us with the increasingly false dichotomy between man and machine, and our reliance on technologies rapidly escaping our comprehension.
Like all genre work, the initial philosophical and transhumanist interests of cyberpunk have broadly been discarded. In their place are loose aesthetic signifiers – neon lights, ambiguous East Asian imagery, skyscraper fog machines. As a pastiche of near-future anxieties this style conveys nothing but a misdirected inhumanity. We are uncomfortable, but for the same reason we feel scared walking down dark alleys – some imagined and blurry horror. We connect these scenes back to their original works and a tenuous comparison is made, but what was once unusual and inspired is now rote and monotonous. In that stagnation is lost not only the possibility of these original works, but also what has gone unexplored: the nature of gender in a digital world, why every cyberpunk future is tinged with latent xenophobia, the centering of cops in stories about the exploitation of the lower class. Our cultural fixation on noir murder mysteries has spiraled into a humorless recycling of the same stories dressed in increasingly expensive clothes.
Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red, 2021) is the most crystalized manifestation of cyberpunk’s ongoing divorce from meaning – a game of as immense scale as it is devoid of inspiration, to say nothing of the labor exploitation bringing it to life. It’s recent excitement at the ability to customize your character’s teeth (in a first person shooter) while the team is crunching to finish the game would be richly ironic if not for the actual abuse taking place. As it continues to be delayed into oblivion more and more games are popping up to be trawled in Cyberpunk’s wake, and among them Ghostrunner (One More Level, 2020) has bubbled up as an unlikely hit.
Within the visor of an ex-private-cop-turned-cyber ninja – the titular Ghost Runner – the player wall-runs, grapples, and slides through industrial obstacle courses, slowing down only to slice their katana through a mercenary or solve of cybervoid maze puzzle. It is as upsettingly fast as could be expected, a first-person regurgitation of The Matrix’s (the Wachowskis, 1999) acrobatics complete with slow-motion bullet trails. As the player ascends a central tower a digitized version of its architect monologues conspiratorially about society’s downfall, insisting that installing them in place of the current dictator will ensure humanity’s future.
Parkour/freerunning makes a lot of sense within cyberpunk. As a sport, freerunning is intimately reliant on our body and its relationship to (typically) an artificial space. It is no accident that much of cyberpunk’s canon features superhuman movement. The physical freedom cybernetic bodies allow is contrasted with the rigidity of the society which creates them. The plot lies in this tension between bodily autonomy and corporate control.
Ghostrunner is not concerned with digital bodies. The ghost runner is a power outlet looking for a cord. Movement is weightless, detached from the environment. The player floats with a too-perfect ease as if never actually connecting with the ground, sliding off the environment and stopping on a dime. There is nothing approaching the terrifying physicality of Mirror’s Edge (DICE, 2008), or the jerky animatronics of Cloudbuilt (Coilworks, 2014). Ghostrunner matches the imagery of those games but with none of the impact.
The voice inside the player’s head speaks of the magnificence of their mechanical body and of the tower itself, but it’s an unconvincing mirage hung over warehouse halls. Any sense of upward mobility is lost to elevator load screens, and the rooms presented are strung together like train car colosseums. There is often some puzzle to moving through these spaces, but with movement this plain it is a chore to cross a simple gap. I am not reinterpreting the environment as a tool to move through, I’m deciphering a script that expects me to run one way. That the difficulty spikes early on only entrenches every frustration at enemies that weren’t seen and walls that didn’t register.
In a last act diatribe, the ghost runner begins to question who and what they are, arriving at the conclusion that the digitization of humanity can only lead to corruption. We kill the dictator and we kill the architect, thus allowing humanity to rebuild and do away with their city’s messy progenitors. It is a flat conclusion to ideas only addressed in half breathes as the game realized it had yet to explore any aspect of its over-produced world. The focus is shifted onto humans we never see and an activist character who previously only existed as a moral compass for the protagonist. There is no exploration of what it means to live on in this grimdark world, the implications of the ghost runner killing their creator (and in the process possibly themselves), or how the absence of these authority figures will shift the power dynamic. We are spectating on a lightshow gesturing at humanity’s goodness while a cyber ninja stabs people, as if particle effects and a happy ending are innately compelling.
Ghostrunner may as well have fallen backwards into cyberpunk for want of a theme. It can wrench nothing from this stone that has not already been ground up by other derivative works, and squanders its movement on inconsistent combat and weightless platforming. It is perhaps the perfect game to prelude Cyberpunk 2077, both clinging to imagery they don’t understand, hoping for depth by association. The body being interrogated is my own, wasting away in the hue of my television as I gift my time to the many invisible hands crafting these digital voids. At least Ghostruner has the mercy to keep it brief.
Ghostrunner was reviewed on PC using a copy provided by the developer.
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