Forclosed is a cyberpunk third person shooter with some puzzles around in it. You play as a security guard named Kapnos, and this will be the only time I use a character’s name because they all feel like they start with K so I stopped even trying. Well he’s living in a dystopian futuristic society. In this world when you’re born you’re giving cybernetics to connect your brain to the web, to well everything really. Weapons are locked to people’s minds, food in your very fridge costs money to take out of the fridge, access to places in the city are based on your position which is again stored in the mind. People’s very identities and humanity are all attached to these IDs. Well because everyone has these cybernetics in their heads from day one, they’re all also in massive debt, so extreme that most people can’t get out of it, ever. Instead their ID is owned by the state or by big corporations, and if the corporation goes down, well… so do you. It’s to such a point that they can revoke your identity meaning that your cybernetic implant overheats when you try to go places they don’t want you to, you can’t access your bank accounts, your weapons, hell you even lose status as a human being during this time. And this is exactly what happens to him, his business is suddenly in the shitter and he needs to get to the court house before four in order to find new employment and all the while his identity is on hold, IE he’s no longer human, he doesn’t exist.

The moment he leaves his home in order to get to the courthouse he immediately starts getting shot at and someone calls his implant, his old boss, telling him that everyone he worked with is now dead and she wants to keep him alive and wants him to help her figure out how to get her company back. So off you go like a good little puppy after all you need the company to be hers so you belong to the company again so you can get your identity back. However you quickly learn that there’s a conspiracy where you’ve been turned into a guinea pig without consent by your boss, and that people want you or at least your corpse for what you have been given by your boss with her experiments on you. It all goes into a giant conspiracy where you are just the smallest little cog in this giant conspiracy of a machine, and you aren’t even seen as valuable.

The game’s story is meh, it’s not that amazing, what the game is really about is the action. In the game you’re given access to special superhuman abilities that you can use with a gun that runs off the same abilities. You unlock mind powers, things like creating a mental shield to protect you from bullets to picking people up and throwing their asses. The gun also gets upgrades things like doing more damage, faster fire rate, damage to shields, etc. But the gun doesn’t level up itself, it gets three slots for upgrades so you can pick and choose what you want equipped to it. Your mind powers are upgraded similarly, you can choose up to four abilities to have active at any given time. You can change these on the fly if you want however the world still moves while you’re in the menu so you can get shot to shit while moving abilities around. To unlock abilities you have to level up, to level up you can kill enemies and hack devices. In order to level up to max by the end of the game, it kind of requires you to kill everyone and hack everything for the most part.

There are some stealth sections in the game too where you can’t be seen and you can insta-kill enemies if you get close to them without them knowing it, there’s also turrets in some levels and if you get behind them you can turn them off by hacking them as well. The stealth is pretty good for a game that isn’t a stealth game. Compared to a proper stealth game the stealth in this sucks, but compared to non-stealth games it’s fine. I do like the stealth kills, instead of walking behind them and like shooting them or stabbing them, you instead can kill them from a short distance, you overheat their cybernetic implant causing it to effectively destroy their brain, and it’s fantastic. As long as they don’t see you and your somewhat close to them, you can do it.

The voice acting is… okay, it’s not great but it’s not the worst work I’ve seen. The graphics are decent though, it’s set up like a comic book with a neon flair, I really dig it, though I think it could used some more cell shading to make it look a bit more like a comic book. I don’t remember the music though, so there’s not much to say there.

Now as stated the story and voice acting are both kinda meh, but those aren’t the only issues. The game gives you access to pick from a lot of abilities right from the get go, you can pick them in any order you want. The problem with this is, there’s a few that you kind of really need right from the start, but you don’t know it until it’s too late. One of the first abilities you want is the ability to deal with enemies’ shields, because you quickly hit a point where you have to deal with them. If you don’t have that ability then it’s hard to deal with shielded enemies because you can’t deal with them through conventional means. It’s kind of pointless to give us the ability to pick whatever we want then have enemies we can’t deal with because we didn’t pick a very specific ability first, it’s just annoying.

Overall, this game is more gameplay than story, which is good considering the story is meh. It’s a pretty quick game you can beat it in like three hours. It’s just something that’s so quick and easy to beat that there’s no real reason not to at least try it. It’s a nice simple little game, though hopefully the company makes a their next game with a better story because they created an interesting story concept they went nowhere with it really.

Foreclosed was developed by Antab Studio.

Point of Sale: X1/Ser, PS4/5, Steam, Switch.

Price: $17 on Steam, $20 on everything else.


A review copy of the game was provided by the publisher, Merge Games.

darkmikasonfire awards Foreclosed the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval.