Replaced review – nostalgic cyberpunk tribute has few ideas of its own

For all of cyberpunk’s cautionary tales of shady corporations and transhumanist folly, it is the genre’s arresting imagery that looms largest in the pop culture imagination. Petroleum flares light up the perpetually rainy Los Angeles of Blade Runner; in the novel Neuromancer, the sky is the “colour of television, tuned to a dead channel”.

Replaced, a new 2D action-platformer from Belarus-based outfit Sad Cat Studios, leans into the steel and sprawl that the genre is famed for. The game also offers a wrinkle to cyberpunk’s longstanding, somewhat overfamiliar visual palette: it floods the screen with softly diffusing sepia and warm primary colours, particularly in the densely populated residential areas you’re able to explore. The mood is comforting rather than ominous, cosy rather than clinical, as if this dystopian sci-fi has been touched by an unlikely hand – that of cottagecore godfather Thomas Kinkade.

These soft, nostalgic visuals breathe life into a simple, sentimental story. You control a lanky, athletic scientist named Warren working on a powerful AI for the Phoenix Corporation. But something goes amiss in his lab, and so the software melds with Warren’s fleshy body. Panicked, this new man-machine entity gallops through the collapsing facility, vaulting over obstacles, clambering up pipes and evading hoverships with shoot-to-kill orders in nearby woods.

In the first 45 minutes, Replaced plays the action-platformer hits to such an obsequious degree that I wondered if it had a single idea of its own. But, eventually, you arrive at a refugee encampment situated within a disused train station. This place bustles with activity – home to many displaced misfits with hearts of gold. The game slows down, letting you roam freely rather than jostling you ever forwards (or sidewards). You see how these people live in abject poverty in post-nuclear, alternate 1980s US. Lights twinkle in the tents that shelter them from acid rain; if they are lucky, it is pillowy snowfall that falls from this atmospheric sky.

A shame, then, that the irradiated wilds you venture back into often feel so generic. Warren, now adorned in a Deckard-esque trenchcoat, wields a truncheon and handgun, bludgeoning Mad Max-esque goons into oblivion (the execution finishing moves, which see our protagonist firing a pistol at point-blank range, are incredibly cool and a little bit grim). Through alleyways adorned with graffiti and rusting industrial spaces, Warren shimmies across railings and clambers on crates so he might reach higher ledges. Sometimes, the game’s beauty gets in the way of its function: scenes are stuffed with so much detail that it can be difficult to tell what you can interact with.

Replaced’s most memorable stretch sees Warren sneaking back into the heavily guarded facility where the adventure began. You crouch amid tall, swaying grass and boggy marsh while being stalked by futuristic choppers that can end your life with a single, booming bullet. A gigantic wall looms in the background, rendered as an imposing black silhouette. For much of its 10-hour run time, Replaced seems content with replicating cyberpunk leitmotifs in pretty pixel-art fashion without adding much of its own. But this supersized, militarised fortification sees the game extend its purview, powerfully evoking the Mexico-US border wall and the West Bank barrier.

Here, the game confidently steps beyond an otherwise sugary take on nastier pulp fiction. Each starkly rendered fatality is charged with the understanding that a deadly cyberpunk future has already arrived.

• Replaced is out now; £16.99/$19.99