This is CyBORG (2022), Stockholm Kartel’s cyberpunk remix of MÖRK BORG and goddamn.

When MÖRK BORG dropped, I was like, this is some super aggressive, brightly colored graphic design and illustration. Just totally eye-shocking. Nothing’s gonna top this. And yet. If you’re a fan of punk or metal or other musical styles interested in speed, you’ll be familiar with a curious phenomenon: what sounds blisteringly fast now, in a few years, will become strangely mid-tempo when compared to the new contemporary tremolo. Same thing here. Looking through CyBORG, Johan Nohr’s art and design for MÖRK BORG suddenly seems evenhanded and levelheaded. CyBORG, meanwhile, sees Nohr absolutely shred. The brights are brighter, the blacks blacker, the fucked uppedness more fuck-ed upp-ed. The introduction of urban design elements and glitchy visual references to the digital world add new levels of grime and grit to scrape through. Truly, I can think of no better visual encapsulation of cyberpunk’s rage as page after page of this book.

The game is, of course, a hack of MÖRK BORG, adhering to those light, D&D-ish systems to provide a fast and easy way to enact your wrath-filled cyberpunk fantasies. There are many tables. There are nanotechnologies and infestations and drugs to feed into your hacker/nanomancer/killer/gear head. There are many corporations to channel your rage at and the world here seems somewhat more firmly realized than in the dying realm of MB. The game is frantically anti-capitalist, which I enjoy enormously (also, I saw someone complaining that if the creators are so anti-capitalist, then why are they charging money for their book; to that ding-dong I say: hur-hur, get fucked, capitalism=/=commerce).

Anyway, I think there is lots of room for different sorts of cyberpunk themed games in this golden age of ours, but that said, I do think the sharp aesthetic plus the sleek and easy systems of CyBORG are going to take up a lot of market share.