Ghostrunner

What’s the Story?

When the game begins, calamity has already struck and residents (survivors might be a more appropriate term!) are in a carefully balanced battle against the authorities who seek to hoard and control the meagre resources that remain, without caring what happens to the people who are then deprived of said resources.

The basic premise of the game is that you need play through – using your impressive parkour skills and weapons training – humanity’s last city. It is massive, grimy, but striking in its neon-packed urban grittiness, and offers plenty of surfaces, holds, and escape-ways for the cunning traceur or traceuse (that means someone who does parkour).

Your ultimate aim to climb the Dharma Tower, and battle the current Keymaster, Mara, who is a terrible tyrant who is trying to cling to power at all costs. Of course, he has surrounded himself with the best defences available, and you must battle hard to progress. But do not fear, you are super-trained as the game goes on, with your level of training increasing with the difficulty of the villains you will be facing.

You are also not alone in your endeavours. Zoe – a brand new ally – and ‘the Architect’ are your helpers and team mates, giving you advice and missions to complete as you slash and hack your way into the heart of the tower.

Game Mechanics

Gameplay is fluid and fast moving, and if your character stops they will be caught, so it is best to keep on moving through the city, finding ways at speed from one city block to another.

Kills only take one hit, so there is no slow and painstaking blow after blow to try and bring down just one enemy, you can hit five or six in a row and see a very primitively satisfying body count – racking up a decent toll of villainous bodies is fine, right? They are the bad guys…

Weapons-wise, you have your muscles with an impressive level of athleticism, the force and your katana. Your speed too in a weapon in a way – it is certainly a defence as slowing down allows your enemies to catch up with you, something highly undesirable!

Fun Facts: Game vs IRL

• Monomolecular Blades: Your blade is monomolecular which means that it has been so thoroughly sharpened that it is a molecule wide on the sharp edge. This, it is said, means that the blade cuts at the molecular level, slicing between molecules instead of smashing into the material – something that would be that steel could be as easily sliced as paper. Near monomolecular blades exist currently, in glass and obsidian, more and more used in surgery, for making clean cuts that do not even need anaesthetic. They are as narrow as 3 nanometres at the sharp edge, while the biggest known molecule (admittedly a man-made one) is 10 nanometres across…
• Bullet Dodge: You can dodge bullets in the game. Sadly, this skill is not a real life one: if you were far away enough to have time to react, you wouldn’t see the bullet coming, and if you were close enough to see it, it would have hit you before your eyes could track the movement! But you can, if observant and intuitive, react before the bad guy shoots at you, giving a very creditable impression of dodging a bullet!
• Deflect Missiles: In the game you can bounce missiles back to their senders. This is actually possible in real life, if you can find something that will return the missile without being distorted itself, and if you can do the maths to work out the perfect angle at which to hold your shield or deflector