How Watch Dogs Legion and Cyberpunk 2077 probe our dystopian fears

NERVOUSNESS about technology is a defining element of the modern world: we are surrounded by gadgets we can’t do without, but we also can’t help feeling that something isn’t quite right about them. TV series Black Mirror is famous for exploring this idea, but now video games are getting in on the action.

At E3, the annual video games trade show held in Los Angeles earlier this month, our tech neuroses were on full display in the up-coming titles that developers were touting.

One of the stand-outs for me was Watch Dogs Legion, set in a dystopian post-Brexit London. The Watch Dogs series casts players as members of anarchist hacking group DedSec, a thinly fictionalised version of Anonymous, equipped with souped-up smartphones capable of accessing nearly any electronic device.

The previous game, set in San Francisco, was an entertaining satire of Silicon Valley and video gaming culture, but this new title looks set to take a darker tone. In trailers for the game, the skies of future London are filled with killer surveillance drones, extremists have taken over and the DedSec resistance is fighting backing.

Unusually, there is no main character in the game. Instead, you can recruit anyone to your cause, from a gruff Cockney bruiser to an older woman with reduced mobility but expert hacking skills.

“In Cyberpunk 2077, a ‘humanity’ score goes down with each of the cybernetic implants you acquire”

Further into the future is Cyberpunk 2077 a world of neon screens, cybernetic implants and a virtual Keanu Reeves. The actor stars as a character called Johnny Silverhand, a kind of augmented reality ghost who appears only to the player. Like Watch Dogs Legion, the game also features hacking, using what is essentially a weaponised USB cable in the shape of a “nanowire” tool that can access your enemies’ bionic arms and turn them against them. Oh, and it doubles as a whip.

I am interested to see how the game handles the ability to acquire your own cybernetic implants – a “humanity” score that goes down with each implant suggests the game is taking a stance against augmentation.

Less far-fetched is Telling Lies, an unusual game created by indie developer Sam Barlow, who created video clips using real actors. The conceit is that you are examining a hard drive stolen from the US National Security Agency, which contains secret recordings of people’s online conversations. You can search a database of the clips one word at a time: “love”, for example, brings up clips using that word.

Barlow’s previous game, Her Story, used a similar idea to tell a non-linear murder mystery using a database of police interview footage. There you can randomly guess words to search, but to really understand what is happening, you must pay attention and look for key phrases that crop up in multiple clips.

Piecing together the story was incredibly satisfying, and his new game looks like an even deeper version of the same idea so I’m really looking forward to it. As the trailer for the game puts it, the goal is to “explore a stolen database of private moments”. Very creepy, and very Black Mirror.