Beyond Sunset, a neon-drenched cyberpunk boomer shooter, just slashed out of Early Access and into full release on Steam today.
You play as Lucy—an enhanced street samurai jolted awake from cryostasis, brain fog thick with lost memories. Instantly, the body remembers what the mind doesn’t. Lightning reflexes. Blade discipline. Superhuman agility. Before long, a mysterious woman named Yuri steps in. She dangles the promise of your memories—but only if you put those talents to work cleaning up plague-stricken, crime-rotted Sunset City.
This isn’t some modern hybrid that forgot its roots. It’s built on GZDoom, tuned for speed, and it wants you to feel like you’ve plugged your beige tower back into 1996.
That means tight corridors, chunky pixel art, and exploration that can easily leave you lost if you don’t keep hitting <Tab> for the map. No automap hover, no GPS hand-holding. And if you think the hook is the gunplay, you’re only half right.
The real star is the katana. You can carve up goons face-to-face—or time it just right and ricochet enemy bullets straight back into their throats. It makes the blade feel like both melee and ranged weapon in one stroke.
The arsenal isn’t limited though: the full release boasts five weapons, 29 enemies, four bosses, and 39 upgrades spread across five episodes. Movement has that Doom Eternal-meets-Deus Ex thing going on—dash, slide, leap—while still running on a foundation of retro simplicity.
Controls are WASD plus mouselook (praise be, no tank steering), but you’ll still stumble on clunky bits like save/load mapped to function keys. No gamepad support yet, so Deck players will be fiddling with Proton workarounds—but yes, it’s rated Playable on Steam Deck.
Visually, the devs aimed squarely at an SVGA-era Quake look without the GPU polish—pure software-render chunky pixels—and then poured neon across it. Blues, reds, purples—it’s Sunset City as an acid-burned fever dream.
The soundtrack by Karl Vincent sells it even harder: a wall of synths and fat beats, officially released on Bandcamp through Retrowave Touch. Add in clean, tasty sound effects, and the audio nails the retro-future energy.
Specs? Bare minimum. A 2.4 GHz dual-core CPU, 2 GB RAM, and 400 MB of space is all you need, plus an OpenGL 3.3+ GPU. Translation: this thing runs on a potato. Both Windows and Mac builds are native, Linux players lean on Proton—and it works fine.
The reception’s already good: 167 reviews with 83% positive on Steam as of launch.
Price is just C$9.74 / US$9.99 with a 25% launch discount. For a full five-episode campaign, it’s a bargain.
Developed by Metacorp/Vaporware and published by Movie Games S.A., this is their debut—and it doesn’t feel like a rookie effort.
Beyond Sunset knows exactly what it is: a boomer shooter with a katana gimmick, a synthwave pulse, and the neon-splattered swagger of a game that crawled out of 1995 and learned a few new tricks.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1665260/Beyond_Sunset/
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