Beyond Sunset, a neon-drenched cyberpunk boomer shooter, just slashed out of Early Access and into full release on Steam today.
You play as Lucy—an enhanced street samurai jolted awake from cryostasis, brain fog thick with lost memories. Instantly, the body remembers what the mind doesn’t. Lightning reflexes. Blade discipline. Superhuman agility. Before long, a mysterious woman named Yuri steps in. She dangles the promise of your memories—but only if you put those talents to work cleaning up plague-stricken, crime-rotted Sunset City.
This isn’t some modern hybrid that forgot its roots. It’s built on GZDoom, tuned for speed, and it wants you to feel like you’ve plugged your beige tower back into 1996.
That means tight corridors, chunky pixel art, and exploration that can easily leave you lost if you don’t keep hitting <Tab> for the map. No automap hover, no GPS hand-holding. And if you think the hook is the gunplay, you’re only half right.
The real star is the katana. You can carve up goons face-to-face—or time it just right and ricochet enemy bullets straight back into their throats. It makes the blade feel like both melee and ranged weapon in one stroke.
The arsenal isn’t limited though: the full release boasts five weapons, 29 enemies, four bosses, and 39 upgrades spread across five episodes. Movement has that Doom Eternal-meets-Deus Ex thing going on—dash, slide, leap—while still running on a foundation of retro simplicity.
Controls are WASD plus mouselook (praise be, no tank steering), but you’ll still stumble on clunky bits like save/load mapped to function keys. No gamepad support yet, so Deck players will be fiddling with Proton workarounds—but yes, it’s rated Playable on Steam Deck.
Visually, the devs aimed squarely at an SVGA-era Quake look without the GPU polish—pure software-render chunky pixels—and then poured neon across it. Blues, reds, purples—it’s Sunset City as an acid-burned fever dream.
The soundtrack by Karl Vincent sells it even harder: a wall of synths and fat beats, officially released on Bandcamp through Retrowave Touch. Add in clean, tasty sound effects, and the audio nails the retro-future energy.
Specs? Bare minimum. A 2.4 GHz dual-core CPU, 2 GB RAM, and 400 MB of space is all you need, plus an OpenGL 3.3+ GPU. Translation: this thing runs on a potato. Both Windows and Mac builds are native, Linux players lean on Proton—and it works fine.
The reception’s already good: 167 reviews with 83% positive on Steam as of launch.
Price is just C$9.74 / US$9.99 with a 25% launch discount. For a full five-episode campaign, it’s a bargain.
Developed by Metacorp/Vaporware and published by Movie Games S.A., this is their debut—and it doesn’t feel like a rookie effort.
Beyond Sunset knows exactly what it is: a boomer shooter with a katana gimmick, a synthwave pulse, and the neon-splattered swagger of a game that crawled out of 1995 and learned a few new tricks.
@atomicpoet @videogames it hardly seems surprising that violence is becoming normalised when things like this are sold as entertainment. No matter how “harmless” they are generally, what about those extremely vulnerable to suggestion, for example?
@holdenweb @videogames I’ve been playing shooters all my life, yet I’m anti-gun. So what does that tell you?
@atomicpoet @videogames that the majority can remain unaffected. I’m not concerned about them.
@holdenweb@freeradical.zone @videogames@piefed.social Decades of research say the same thing: video games do not cause gun violence. The APA itself states there’s no causal link:
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/03/violent-video-games-behavior
What does drive gun violence? Access to guns. A landmark meta-analysis shows firearm availability doubles the risk of homicide:
https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M13-1301
So worry less about pixelated weapons. The danger isn’t on a screen—it’s in the real-world guns we’ve chosen to surround ourselves with.
@atomicpoet @videogames I don’t worry much about pixellated weapons, but still think (my opinion being worth no more than anyone else’s in this matter) that the psychology of these games is unhealthy.
@holdenweb@freeradical.zone @videogames@piefed.social When I play FPS games, I don’t think “I want to murder someone.” I think “I’m playing something creative and meaningful.”
That isn’t unique to me. Millions of people play shooters every day without it ever translating into real-world violence. If games were truly the cause, we’d see epidemic levels of violence everywhere they’re popular—yet countries with high gaming rates often have lower gun violence than the U.S.
It’s also no different than playing Clue, where you literally act out a murder mystery. Further, FPS games are less grisly than slasher movies like Saw or Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both of which portray violence with far more graphic realism.
And even if we wanted to, we can’t sit around monitoring everyone’s psychology to see who’s playing what or feeling what. That’s neither realistic nor effective.
What we can do is focus on what the evidence actually shows drives gun violence: easy access to real firearms. Research is consistent and unambiguous—gun availability correlates directly with gun deaths.
So pixelated guns? They’re a scapegoat. Actual guns are the problem.
