At first blush, No Law might look like it’s on the scale of another popular gritty sci-fi cyberpunk first-person role-playing game. But the upcoming single-player FPS, revealed at The Game Awards on Thursday, comes from a small studio: Neon Giant, the Swedish developer behind The Ascent. About 24 developers at Neon Giant are making the open-world game.
No Law‘s take on the cyberpunk genre — they call it “cyber-noire” — leans more toward immersive sim and story-based, according to its creators. Players will take on the role of a man named Grey Harker, an ex-military veteran who tries to leave his old life behind for a more peaceful existence. When that plan fails, Harker turns to his black ops training and cybernetic tech to seek retribution in the city of Port Desire, a port city with no law. (OK, maybe a handful of laws; murder is still considered bad there.)
Neon Giant describes the game’s setting as “a world built on neon sleaze instead of regulation.” The developer stresses the game’s reactivity to player choice, impactful decisions that can be made by players, and multiple ways to solve problems. Whether choosing stealth or guns-blazing combat, players’ choices will have ripple effects on Harker’s story.
“No Law represents the next step for us as a studio,” said Claës af Burén, managing director at Neon Giant, in a news release. “With The Ascent, we built a strong foundation for how we approach worldbuilding, systems, and storytelling. This new project takes everything we’ve learned and applies it to a completely different kind of experience — one that’s bigger, more reactive, and more personal than anything we’ve done before.”
Neon Giant promises that No Law will offer a rich story, one that players can enjoy multiple times as they make different choices and uncover alternate paths to Harker’s goal. And in speaking to No Law creative directors Arcade Berg and Tor Frick, they acknowledged comparisons to games that offer similar player choices and similar vibes, namely the original Deus Ex and CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077.
“We definitely wanted to make something unique in that space,” Berg said. “We’re huge fans of Deus Ex in the studio, especially the original. We are huge fans of the [immersive sim] genre, but we want to make something new and unique in that space. That’s where the nonlinear narrative and the world responding to your actions come in.”
“The fans of those games should be able to enjoy our game immensely. Absolutely,” Frick said. “That’s one of the groups of people we want to play this game, but we’re also trying to go broader. […] If you want to come in as more of a linear single-player shooter fan, you can definitely play through the main narrative in that sense. But if you want to play it more with the devices, more with the abilities, more with stealth or tactical [choices], you will get that experience. And we’re doing the same thing with the narrative in the sense that some people just don’t want to be bogged down with too much story.”
But beyond the obvious inspirations, No Law‘s creative directors have another unexpected influence on their take on the cyberpunk genre.
“We don’t want to make something grim dark,” Berg said. “Yeah, it’s a grim world, but it’s a fun place to create violence as a spectacle. We lean more on the ‘comfort food’ feeling that you have from movies like RoboCup, Running Man, Judge Dredd. But at the same time, we want to have a pretty broad range. We don’t want to just do ‘cyberpunk neon.’ We also want more human elements. So we often reference Studio Ghibli because we just want that lush, calm, human feeling because we want those extremes to coexist in the game.”
No Law will take players to Port Desire sometime in the future. The game is in development for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X, but does not have an announced release date.
