TV – The Ghost in the Shell Episode 2
This week, the 2nd episode of the new animated Ghost in the Shell series released on Prime Video. The new animated series is produced by Science SARU, based on Masamune Shirow’s 1989 manga series. Episode 2 had its North American premiere at Anime Expo, whilst we here in the UK have already had an opportunity to watch it at a special cinema event.
Whilst the first episode wasted no time in thrusting us into the action, episode two was a lot slower. We joined the team at a low moment, thinking their unit was being shut down, and that they had failed. However Chief Aramaki turned up to reveal the news that he had been working behind the scenes, and in fact the unit would go ahead, fully funded, under a new guise. Hence we finally saw the formation of what will be Public Security Sector 9, with an internal mandate to tackle crime head on.
Whilst Batou and Aramaki were investigating a shady exiled colonel, Major Kusanagi was enjoying some, ahem, downtime. This further established that this Major is VERY different to the cold, robotic Major of the 1995 movie. Where that Major would have been meditating on the nature of her ghost, and what it is to be human, this Major was enjoying pleasures of the flesh, and we later see more of her playful side, as well as her tormenting of the unit’s rookie, Togusa.
The team were tasked with backtracking a virus that has been implanted in the cyberbrain of the Foreign Minister’s interpreter. As the episode drew to its conclusion, the team were closing in on the garbage man accessing the interpreter’s cyberbrain, who believes he is actually ‘spying’ on his wife. Fans of both the original Manga and the 1995 movie will recognise this as the beginnings of the Puppet Master plotline.
The issue with such short episodes was clear here, as there was not enough time to explore any of the plot elements in any real depth. The plot was furthered, but with so many different elements at play, on the political side, and the investigation into the hacker, there was only a little additional time left for some character development for Motoko. The animation continues to be beautiful, and the music used in the episode was delightfully eclectic. How much you are enjoying the series so far will depend very much on whether you like the whacky, breezy side of anime, or you prefer the meditative, philosophical take of the 90’s adaptation.
What did you think of episode two? Are you enjoying the tone, or do you prefer the darker, contemplative tone of the 1995 movie? Let us know in the comments.
You can watch the new Ghost in the Shell series on Prime Video with a valid subscription, and episodes will be released every Tuesday. You can enjoy the show’s opening sequence below –
Boardgame – Kill Chain
If you’re interested in hacking, coming soon to Kickstarter is a cyberpunk deck building game that pits you as a cyberhacker, competing against your rivals. Kill Chain is a new deck building and tactical engine building game by Fallen Dominion Studios, publishers of Fallen Land, a post-apocalyptic boardgame of deck building and epic strategy.
Kill Chain is a game for 1 to 5 players, offering competitive, solo, and co-op modes. You choose one of the playable syndicates, each with unique strengths and resources, along with different styles of play. Each round, you must build up your deck, upgrade your network, and take job actions in order to add to your resources. You won’t just be focusing on your own game, however, as in order to succeed in Kill Chain, you must negotiate with other players, and you can choose whether to bluff to get ahead, or sabotage your rivals, as you all race to become the ruling syndicate.
Once you have built your rig, it’s time to deploy your threats, targeting the large corporations, and use KILL CHAINS to achieve your goals. Kill Chain is multifaceted; it isn’t enough to just put together the best upgrades. Becoming the best will require a combination of skills, cunning, and the ability to deceive your opponents, hiding your true intentions until the last moment. Kill Chain is a deck building game with meaningful interaction, not just an on-the-rails engine building game.
Kill Chain is a game that is easy to pick up and play, but complex enough to allow numerous different winning strategies to be discovered, and used to conquer your rivals. It comes with four dual-layered boards, beautifully designed acrylic playing pieces, and over 100 playing cards. There are also three planned expansions, so even once you think you’ve mastered the game, there will be more options to add to it.
Kill Chain is truly a game for cyberpunk fans, taking its inspiration from a variety of cyberpunk and dystopian books and movies. Select some rivals… er, friends, and become the corporation battling, cyberpunk hacker you were destined to be.
Fallen Dominion Studios plan to launch the Kickstarter for Kill Chain on September 1st, and you can see more of the game, and sign up for updates at their website below.
Rewind – Inception
Looking at a very different kind of ‘hacking’, with the release of Christoper Nolan’s The Odyssey we thought it would be a good time to take a look, 26 years since its release, at Nolan’s most cyberpunk movie, Inception.
Inception follows a group of high-tech criminals led by Leonardo Di’Caprio’s Cobb, who specialise in stealing information, directly from the subconscious mind of the target by way of dream invasion. When a successful businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe) tasks Cobb with the rather more difficult job of inserting an idea into a business rival’s mind, he is at first reluctant. However, Cobb is unable to go back home to his kids in the US, as he is suspected of the murder of his wife, and so when Saito claims he can make the allegations go away, Cobb pulls his team together, and they plan an elaborate heist. Can Cobb pull off the seemingly impossible task of inception, and go back home to his family?
Inception never gets mentioned when people talk about the best cyberpunk movies. This is perhaps a little strange, as it contains a number of cyberpunk tropes. Cobb’s team infiltrate their marks by effectively ‘jacking in’ to their mind. They are a team of criminals, using stolen, co-opted military tech, on the run from both the law and a shady corporate group. Saito is a corporate boss himself, and uses his money and influence to coax Cobb into working for him. The ultimate aim of the job is to get the heir to a rival megacorp to disassemble it into smaller companies. In this world, it’s clear that corporate espionage is a common occurrence, as their mark has specifically had training to resist dream incursion.
Perhaps the reason Inception isn’t really thought of as cyberpunk is because that wasn’t what director Christopher Nolan had in mind whilst making the movie. Rather than a cyberpunk thriller, he was instead exploring the more metaphysical nature of dreams, how we experience them, and the anomalies we notice when we half remember them. He was also indulging a fascination with the concept of time. The many layers of the dream see time passing at a different rate, and Nolan has covered ideas of linearity, relativity, and time working in other different ways in diverse projects like Memento, Interstellar, and particularly Tenet. As well as all this, it is also Christopher Nolan’s metaphor for the process of filmmaking. It’s no coincidence that DiCaprio’s Cobb character is styled to look like Nolan himself, this is clearly his most personal movie.
There are, however, definite cyberpunk influences at play, and particularly the influence of a cyberpunk classic, The Matrix, on Nolan’s movie. They both feature ‘sleeping’ human beings experiencing a virtual world of sorts, where the rules are somewhat malleable. Where Neo asks for ‘Guns. Lots of Guns’, Tom Hardy’s Eames urges Joseph Gordon Levitt’s Arthur not to be afraid to dream a little bigger, before producing a grenade launcher seemingly pulled from nowhere. Where in The Matrix, the agents jumped between the bodies of the Matrix’s inhabitants, Cobb and his team instead fight against the target’s projections. Nolan also emulated the Wachowskis by using innovative filmmaking techniques to wow the audience, and produce unique visuals that are still a marvel to watch today. The zero gravity hotel sequence with Arthur leading the projects a merry chase still looks amazing.
Inception is a great, if somewhat flawed movie. So many of the scenes and dialogue are aimed at exposition, explaining the rules, laying out exactly what is going to happen and why. Probably 50% of Elliot Page’s dialogue as Ariadne was written with a question mark at the end, as the character serves as our proxy into the world. The action scenes at the climax of the movie are stunning, but they are necessarily broken up by the intercut scenes between Cobb and his deceased wife Mal, both by way of flashback, and his interaction with her presence as a projection of his own grief and guilt. These scenes provide the emotional heart of the movie, and are successful in doing so, but at the cost of chopping up the climax of the movie.
The cast, though, are perfect, and every performance is great. The benefit of having a genuinely brilliant actor like DiCaprio is clear from first scene to end. The emotion Cobb feels is evident on his face at all times, and as Cobb becomes increasingly desperate, pushing the mission on despite the dangers he brings to it, you can see him almost completely unravelling, lashing out at Arthur, trying to blame mistakes on others.
There are a thousand theories about the movie, what it means, and ‘that’ ending. There are also a thousand complaints about the rules of the world, whether the movie actually follows them all, if they are administered consistently. For years afterwards you’d hear debates about where, when, and how the ‘kicks’ should have worked in the different layers. With any movie that has this level of ambition, though, it’s going to be difficult to please everyone, and the script really couldn’t afford even more exposition and explanation. Most elaborate science fiction movies have some flaws in their plot and/or world physics. The bottom line is if a movie is entertaining enough, you won’t be moved to search for holes. If you don’t enjoy Inception, it isn’t because the physics didn’t make sense, it’s a fault of the filmmaking. It either works for you or it doesn’t. In the same way, whether Inception is ‘technically’ cyberpunk is down to your own ‘rules’ of what categorises the genre.
Videogame – Celestial Return
Also dealing with navigating a reality-crumbling city, story-driven cyberpunk RPG Celestial Return was released this week, for PC on Steam. Anyone following the development of this game has been waiting anxiously for it to finally become available, after it was originally announced for a May release.
From the publisher –
A dying city. A string of suicides. A detective with nothing left to lose.
Netherveil City eats the weak. Its streets bleed neon, its corpses crawl back to life, and its secrets? They’ll gnaw through your sanity. Step into the worn boots of Detective Howard. Armed with a rusted badge, a sentient rose that won’t shut up, and a pocketful of stolen dice.
Explore the city. Interrogate the dead. Expose the c*rpos.
Investigate. Make choices. Loot the dice. Roll the dice.
And survive. (Optional.)
In Celestial Return, you play as Detective Howard, as he hits the suitably neon-drenched streets of Netherveil City. The corpses of Netherveil are coming back to life, and you investigate a string of suicides that might be related to corporate machinations, and a cosmic power. You’ll collect and use dice, the currency of this game, whilst you navigate its branching narrative.
Celestial Return was fully funded on Kickstarter in late 2025, and having spent a lot of time working on bug fixes and satisfying themselves the game was finally ready, developer Metaphor Games and publisher Shoreline Games have now made it available. They are also working on bringing it to consoles soon.
There are several videos available for the game on YouTube and Steam, but here is the original announcement trailer
Comic – Rust City
Sticking with Kickstarter, a campaign for Rust City Vol 4, the latest issue of Annett Oefner’s cyberpunk dystopian comic about memory, control, manipulation and rebellion, is currently funding on the crowd-funding platform. It is live now, and will run until 9th August. Previous Volumes 1-3 have been previously funded through Kickstarter, and you can back now to get Volume 4. There are several tiers with additional bonuses, or if you haven’t picked up the previous issues yet, there is a tier offering all 4 volumes.
From the publisher –
Welcome to Rust City—a brutal cyber-dystopian comic set in the towering mega-city of the Sky Empire, where control is absolute and mercy is extinct. Armed drones patrol the skies, surveillance tightens like a noose, and rebellion festers in the neon-lit shadows of forgotten industrial ruins. At the heart of it all is Drake, a lost soul from District 3, battling amnesia—until his past comes knocking, and the Empire starts to crack. While the brutal Sky Empire keeps its concrete districts under brutal force, a rebellion is rising in the neon-lit underground beneath the city. Drake slowly recovers the memories of his forgotten past and finds himself caught between both sides—a shadow society and the great Empire—as he uncovers a truth that could bring the system to its knees.
Spanning four volumes and more than 450 pages, Rust City is a descent into the darkest corners of the human mind. Through morally grey characters, it explores oppression, manipulation, and rebellion in a world where truth is manufactured and freedom comes at a price. It invites readers to think beyond the page—and to confront a single question: What would you sacrifice to be free?
The art for Rust City is unique and beautiful. The different locations have distinct visual styles, with colour palettes that set the mood for the specific environments, including some great background detail. Rust City is set in a richly drawn dystopian world, where a brutal, totalitarian regime tightly controls the populace. As all great stories must, Rust City has a strikingly designed villain, and a sympathetic hero that’s easy to root for, along with a host of other compelling characters.
Annett Oefner, a full-time comic artist from Germany, is the writer and artist behind Rust City, along with Midnight Rush Volume 1. You can see more from Annett on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/annett_oefner
You can read more about Rust City, and the different tiers available, on Kickstarter –
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/annett/rust-city-volume-1-4
Book – No Future Tonight
This past week, Phil Stitelmann’s cyberpunk novella, No Future Tonight: A Cyberpunk Story of Rage Against the System, was released, which also deals with young protagonists falling foul of heavy-handed authority. Set in his Digital Gods and Fallen Angels universe, it tells the story of two gang members who cross the wrong people, and have to fight to live through the consequences.
From the publisher –
Neo Los Angeles: the city that takes everything and gives nothing back .
When cybernetic illness, gang violence and betrayal shatter their fragile lives, two young street lovers must fight through one brutal night to survive in a city that devours the weak.
A standalone cyberpunk novella set in the world of Digital Gods and Fallen Angels, No Future Tonight asks a simple question: what happens when people born without power try to escape a system designed to crush them?
Kaia and Jaxn are young lovers, and members of a gang in the shadows of Neo Los Angeles. Jaxn has health problems, and when he runs out of meds, the two of them vow to do whatever it takes to get the necessary medication.
It turns out an acquaintance can hook them up, but the payoff won’t be easy. They are tasked with retrieving medical shots, originally stolen from the military, from very much the wrong part of town. What follows is a string of bad luck, encounters with malevolent forces, and as Jaxn’s condition quickly deteriorates, a race against time to access the life saving medical supplies.
Stitelmann wastes no time in introducing the reader into his universe. Neo Los Angeles is, on the face of it, a technologically advanced, growing city. Our protagonists, however, live life well on the fringes of that. Life in the shadier parts of the city is a lot harder, and with his description and narration, the author makes this very clear. As Kaia and Jaxn’s night takes a turn for the worse during an encounter with some of the worst of the worst, Stitelmann lays out exactly what the heroes have to be afraid of, pulling no punches in the process. He isn’t afraid to paint with a dark brush, giving the terrifying reality of the characters’ situation an authentic, visceral feel.
The actions of the characters are believable, and you really sense their desperation as their situation continues to deteriorate. The world and characters feel real, because it isn’t just about heroic characters against black and white villains. The police are uncompromising in their treatment of the street kids, but are also pragmatic in their approach. Where they could sit back on their laurels, and book the two youths on a string of offences, they do accept the offer of a bigger fish. The police detective in the story isn’t just a dick for the sake of being a dick, it’s made clear he does have a sense of civic responsibility, and mobilizes to take down a bigger threat. That does not, however, mean he won’t do what is necessary to achieve his objectives.
No Future Tonight is a mantra throughout the book, a shorthand for the hopeless situation the protagonists find themselves in, and apt description for the dangerous underworld at large. As an introduction into the world and setting, No Future Tonight is more than successful, both brutal and thrilling, long enough to tell a full story, but with enough left on the table to leave you wanting more. It’s easy to see how many tales there are to tell on the streets, both main and back, in the city of Neu Los Angeles, and No Future Tonight is just a small part of Phil’s cyberpunk universe, Digital Gods and Fallen Angels.
No Future Tonight is available on Amazon Kindle. You can find out more about the Digital Gods and Fallen Angels universe, and where to buy the books, at www.digital-gods-and-fallen-angels.com/
Videogame – Precinct IX
If police misuse of power makes your blood boil, Zataforge Studio’s upcoming turn-based, cyberpunk police management game, which is scheduled to be released for PC on Steam in 2027, will allow you to choose a very different approach.
From the publisher –
Command the cybernetic officers of Precinct IX as they handle the unstable cases of a future city. Dispatch, investigation, interrogation, and turn-based battles are woven together, while every officer has her own abilities, past, and secrets she refuses to say out loud. As trust deepens, you will enter their personal stories and gradually uncover the rotten truth beneath the city.
This looks like a fun management game. You run the precinct from top to bottom, meaning you are responsible for equipment, upgrades, and personnel, all the while keeping an eye on your budget. You set the roster for your officers, and choose who to dispatch to calls based on the nature of the disturbance. Meanwhile, you will also need to deal with people walking in off the street, including some of the shadier denizens of Precinct IX. The layout in the game is very clean, and makes it look very easy to navigate and understand, and the art is beautiful, with a cool anime look.. We’ll look out for more updates as they come.
You can wishlist on Steam here – https://store.steampowered.com/app/3278790/Precinct_IX/
And the release trailer can be watched below –
Book – Hard Carry
If you prefer your cyberpunk to tell stories based purely in the shadows instead, Hard Carry, the latest novel from author J.S. Holloway, is now available for pre-order. Hard Carry, like Holloway’s previous The Veil novel trilogy, is a gritty, hard boiled cyberpunk novel. The author has a keen interest in how humans live alongside technology, and how that will evolve, and this latest novel continues to explore that subject.
From the publisher –
The job looked simple: take the data, make the drop, collect the money, and be back in time to get the girl.
But when the clinic gets hit, the broker dies, and the route burns behind him, Felix has one night to cross Neu Berlin’s underbelly before the package leaks and cooks his brain from the inside. Hunted by a corporate recovery team, revolutionaries, and the Mob, can Felix survive this hard carry, or will he end up as just another body on the streets of a City that doesn’t care?
Neu Berlin is the city they promised would save the future. But only one thing is certain: you fight back, or you leave in a body bag.
Hard Carry is fast-paced, gritty and fun Cyberpunk that hits the “punk” hard and never lets up.
Felix is a human courier, using the most secure data storage method available – his own body, by way of a courier implant in his arm. The problem with this, though, is storage space isn’t infinite, and when someone is intent on stealing your cargo, it’s your own personal well-being at risk – there’s no option to cut and run. So when the situation goes immediately south, Felix is forced to endure an odyssey, of sorts, as he navigates the shady streets, canal paths, and underground trails around Neu Berlin.
In the process, Felix encounters friends who might be foe, and foe who might be friends. When you’re a courier working for the undesirables in a big city like Neu Berlin, you’re forced to negotiate with some powerful and unpleasant characters. The data in his courier implant begins to take its toll on him, and as time threatens to run out, he has big decisions to make. Who can he trust? Who DARE he trust?
Hard Carry’s first scene is an intense race against time, and from that point on the novel never lets up. Hard Carry is a relatively short novel, which allows Holloway to turn the screws tight on his protagonist, and keep the story moving along at a clip. Hard Carry is quick and dirty, cyberpunk the hard way, just how we like it. The plot forces Felix to be constantly on the run, moving ever forward. Any time he thinks he might find some respite, his grim situation comes crashing back in on him, literally.
This is the very definition of a bad night. Not only does our hero have to make his way to the arranged drop point, he has to dodge bullets, placate some powerful people, and as the story progresses, get to grips with an increasingly complicated situation. Each event is more brutal than the last, and political intrigue is introduced, a broader conspiracy comes to light, all building to a fitting climax.
Felix is not your over-the-top ass kicking hero. He’s an average, by criminal underworld standards, working man. He’s a flawed hero, with a complex past, relationships that fall far below functional, and an increasingly difficult physical impairment to deal with in the form of the overloaded implant.
Alongside the blistering pace of the story, one of the book’s great strengths is in J.S. Holloway’s visceral description of the world. You can see it, you can feel it, you can smell it. The locations are obviously very clear and real in the author’s head, and he has a talent, and a real turn of phrase, for putting that vision down on the page so the reader can share it.
There are more books to come in the setting of Neu Berlin, starting with the next novel, Hard Traffic, and there are plenty enough threads woven through Hard Carry to be pulled in subsequent books.
J.S Holloway’s previous cyberpunk novels include The Veil Trilogy of Neon Veil, the Ascendant, and Analogue Dreams.
Hard Carry is due for release on 31st July, and is currently available to pre-order, at his website, www.jsholloway.com
PODCAST – HOST IN THE SHELL EPISODE 60 Cyberpunk Villains
The latest episode of Hosts in the Shell is available now. This week, hosts Jon Richter and Matt Adcock are joined by Tim Standish to discuss the greatest cyberpunk villains of all time.
The Hosts in the Shell podcast is a cyberpunk podcast where Jon and Matt discuss the genre’s greatest work, often alongside a notable guest, and they have over 50 episodes available. You can find the Hosts in the Shell podcast at the link below, and all good podcast platforms.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1930485
As well as being podcasters, Jon and Matt are also authors with cyberpunk related titles amongst their novels.
You can find out more about Jon’s work here –
You can find out more about Matt’s work here – www.completedarknessnovel.com/
CYBERSTOPIA
For more of the latest news on cyberpunk and dystopia media, stay tuned to Cyberstopia here on Substack, and across social media. If you have a Cyberstopian project or release, or there’s something you think we should be covering, please let us know here in the comments, on your social media platform of choice, or at our website www.cyberstopia.com
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