Calling this game "cyberpunk" is misunderstanding the genre.

Cyberpunk is an anticipation genre: powerful, dehumanizing megacorporations overshadowing a weakened state, hyper-dense cities where violence is omnipresent, and technologies, sometimes already emerging in our present, pushed to the brink with total disregard for ethics. It’s near-future extrapolation. It’s corporate-dominated hyper-capitalism with neon.

Yes, there is a shared theme: the dehumanizing use of technology. That’s where the superficial comparison comes from.

But Hail to the Rainbow is something else.

It is a retrofuturist Soviet techno-dystopia with an accusatory tone which makes it carry punk DNA. The anger is not directed at corporations though, but at the state; at an authoritarian system that didn’t just weaponize technology, but instrumentalized human souls themselves. It literally places consciousness into machines, assigning them to perform even the most basic cleaning tasks.

Even the title sounds like a propaganda slogan. “Hail to the Rainbow.” Praise the promised future. Praise the ideal. Praise the system. The irony is hard to miss. The “rainbow” feels less like hope and more like a state-mandated illusion.

It took me about five hours to fully appreciate what the game was doing. I almost dropped it. But once it clicked, I played it every day for three days straight until I finished it.

Only the dead have seen the end of the war.