Replaced, a new 2D action-platformer from Belarus-based Sad Cat Studios, is now available on PC and Xbox, and it lands with the look of a pulpy sci-fi thriller before it has much else to prove. The game follows Warren, a lanky scientist working on a powerful AI for Phoenix Corporation, until a lab accident fuses the software to his fleshy body and sends him fleeing a collapsing facility.
That opening stretch is built on motion and pursuit. Warren vaults over obstacles, clambers up pipes and dodges hoverships with shoot-to-kill orders, but a review said the first 45 minutes of Replaced leaned into action-platformer conventions so heavily that it seemed to have no ideas of its own. The game is set in an alternate 1980s United States after a post-nuclear event, and its cyberpunk palette — softly diffusing sepia and warm primary colours — gives the world an immediate identity even when the action itself feels familiar.
The run only gets stranger as Warren later turns up in a refugee encampment inside a disused train station, a bustly shelter for displaced misfits with hearts of gold. He eventually wears a Deckard-esque trenchcoat and switches to a truncheon and handgun, and the execution finishing moves lean hard into violence, including one that has him firing a pistol at point-blank range. The review framed the whole thing as a cyberpunk work that echoes Blade Runner and Neuromancer, but one whose visual detail can sometimes make interaction harder to read.
That friction is what gives Replaced its edge. Across its 10-hour run time, the game mostly replicates cyberpunk motifs without adding much of its own, according to the review, though one memorable stretch stands out when Warren sneaks back into the heavily guarded facility where the adventure began and a gigantic wall looms in the background like a supersized, militarised fortification. In the end, the game is less a reinvention than a polished echo: striking to look at, heavy on atmosphere and built from ideas players have seen before.