Does Overwatch, the Blizzard game, count as cyberpunk, or does cyberpunk require a darker aesthetic?

I only know cyberpunk through CDPR’s Cyberpunk 2077 game, and I guess also through the Blade Runner movies. So, I don’t really know much about it from literature or tabletop games.

That said, Overwatch has a lot of the same themes, but with a brighter “Sunday morning cartoon/anime” aesthetic.

So yeah, thoughts?

  • complacent_jerboa@lemmy.world
    6·
    10 months ago

    Overwatch has a lot of the same sci-fi elements, but I don’t think cyberpunk would be an accurate way to describe it. In a way, it’s a patchwork of a bunch of different stuff; for example, you might say Sombra is cyberpunk. But I don’t think it generalizes well.

    One of the main things in cyberpunk (and in a lot of punk genres) is economic inequality and the flaws of capitalism. In Overwatch, large corporations are part of the setting (and so is poverty, I would guess), but that’s all they are — background set pieces.