The Cyberpunk genre is crowded as all hell as of now, and every few months, there’s another neon city selling you freedom, violence, and another very moody synth playlist. So when Neon Giant (The Ascent) rolled out NO LAW at the Game Awards, it could’ve been just another forgettable blur of neon, noir, and holograms. The trailer for NO LAW told us otherwise pretty quickly.
The sleek sci-fi utopia we usually see was replaced by Port Desire, a cliff-carved port city that looks humid, cramped, dirty, and genuinely unappealing in all the right ways. Every shot in the trailer screams desperation, and we love to see our video game dystopias like that. Even your playable character, Grey Harker, signifies that bleak world.
Grey Harker is an ex-military burnout trying to live a quiet life with his plants (no kidding), until the past does what the past does in cyberpunk/noir titles: it comes back to kick your butt, because you thought you could leave it unattended for a while. Newsflash, you couldn’t, otherwise NO LAW wouldn’t have a gritty plot now, would it?
From then on out, it looks like it’s all revenge, black-ops gadgets, and a whole lot of unresolved issues poured straight into a slick and grimy first-person shooter RPG. Damn. So let’s dig into what the NOW LAW trailer actually shows, and how this new iteration of the Cyberpunk dystopia positions itself in the ever-growing pile of neon.
NO LAW Trailer Breakdown
It seems to us, that Port Desire isn’t just a mere backdrop for the story to evolve or the characters to inhabit, it’s more a character in itself. The sweeping shots of this city carved into the cliffs above a rough sea, layered with skybridges, rooftop gardens, and alleys bathed in sickly neon – it all feels very much lived in and the design pitch is crystal this time around.
Every inch of the place is meant to be alive and reactive, waiting for the player to be shaped by his or her decisions – without waiting for the player to come along. This trailer showed us a single, tightly packed city, not a huge continent with map markers to tick off; at least we hope that this isn’t what it will amount to.
And no wonder, if you played The Ascent, you can already see the studio’s fingerprints. They learned how to do environmental storytelling in a cramped cyberpunk arcology; now they’re basically saying “what if we put you on the street level this time?” Instead of a distant isometric camera, No Law’s trailer puts the grime right in your face – flickering signs, condensation on windows, sleazy bars that feel one argument away from a shooting.
Sure, cynics might say that it’s all just the next UE5 wall that’s being pulled over our eyes, but we’re cautiously optimistic that this cyber noir will deliver on that front without Unreal Engines usual hiccups.
Grey Harker Is A Plant Dad Turned Problem – With a Gun
Of course what would a gritty cyberpunk story be, without a stoic and equally grimy looking protagonist? The NO LAW trailer revealed Grey Harker, stalking through clubs, riding elevators, checking gear – you know, the stuff a cyberpunk protagonist does in his free time. The setup felt decidedly more grounded than your usual mysterious mercenary, and for some reason Harker feels very…human. We like it.
What stands out in the trailer for us is the tone of his narration. It’s not tortured-poet grim, more battered and sardonic. You hear someone who’s seen too much and doesn’t expect a happy ending, which fits Neon Giant’s “cyber-noire” label nicely, and we can’t wait what dreadful backstory this character has – this is a good sign, we’re already quite intrigued, in case you couldn’t tell.
We have to admit though, mechanically speaking, Harker is basically a walking excuse for toys. The devs talk about advanced military upgrades, custom hardware, and vertical movement tricks; the footage flashes between tight corridor gunfights, rooftop traversal, and quieter moments in backroom dens. Combat looks punchy and loud rather than ultra-tactical – the team openly says they like violence as spectacle, you know the kind that makes you stick your lips out not just violence for pure misery’s sake.
The NO LAW Trailer Stands Out In a Very Crowded Genre
As much as we love games like Deus Ex and, yes, Cyberpunk 2077, the story of being the most important person in a broken city gets a little old by now – and NO LAW seems to address this issue by making Grey Harker dangerous, sure – but Port Desire doesn’t look like it’s waiting to be saved by Harker, or you for that matter. It looks more like it’s just trying to keep the lights on while people like you (arguably) make everything a lot, lot worse. Good angle.
The trailer’s mix of shady bars, vertical skyline, and character-driven narration by Harker himself, suggests something closer to a cyber-noir revenge story, rather than some power fantasy RPG. The environmental storytelling feels intimate, and we know Neon Giant loves that kind of stuff, as well as the fact that they just know their shooting mechanics. NO LAW feels like a replayable crime novel, rather than just being Cyberpunk 2077 with a smaller scope.
Now, let’s get to the nitty-gritty: No release window, no raw gameplay, just a mood piece and some rather carefully chosen quotes. That’s not much, but for now it’s just enough to put NO LAW on our Steam Wishlist. True, Port Desire doesn’t belong to anyone, as the trailer says – but as of now, it’s absolutely a place we want to experience, preferably with a very upgraded gun in our hands.
